A thousand words in less than a second

It is simply amazing observe how miniaturization of personal technologies is reshaping their application.
A few days back I was talking to a young man – 25 (the one you see in picture here) and he had something amazing to say about how he uses his digital camera.
For him the pictures from his digital camera are shorthand for words. At work or while traveling, he captures thoughts through images that triggered those thoughts. That is how he makes a note of what he finds noteworthy! This is how he embeds meaning and experiences so that they can be extracted later.
To him the hassle of writing - be it keying into a computing device or scribbling on a piece of paper, is very inefficient and risky! It is inefficient because it is slow and suddenly the quality of your ideas forced to slow down to the quality of your writing skills. It is risky because slow documentation with words leads to loss of precious ideas or inspirations.

On could argue – that a picture has always been worth a thousand words but to me the digital miniature image capture devices like the phone or micro digital camera are together liberating pictures.
If I were to take this one example as any indication of how things might shape up in the future – I can foresee pictures ceasing to be just objects of engagement, instead they could also acquire greater meaning, wherein they could become a utility of sorts -the kind of pictures that are taken not to be preserved beyond the point that they have served their utility.

To me this new role for picture is once again pointing us towards inefficiency of the written word, in living up to its primary role of being a way to record.
If I am not getting carried away, I would say that to me, as I mentioned in my earlier post Undocumented Irrelevance of the Written Word, the future could witness, words acquiring a more classic and indulgent role than a utility or functional role. The evolution of language to keep pace with human and machine thought, could take us towards more towards graphical representation than verbal representation.