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Is writing one of those "riding a bicycle" skills: Painful to learn, but once you get the hang of it you never forget how to do it even if you seldom do it?

Or is writing one of those "setting your digital watch" skills: You did it once by accident but that was last year and this is this year and damned if you know how to do it this year?

Writing indeed could be like a whole variety of other things we learn how to do, but some of us don't, as Eeyore said sadly, simply because there is a whole variety of other things we like to do. "Priorities", Eeyore might have muttered, had he known the word, which probably he did but was too depressed to think of it.

Back in the day when paper and writing instruments were all we had, writing in the sense of literary endeavor as opposed to penmanship was not for Everyman. It was, for the most part, one of the delights of the leisure class, who happened to have much of the education and most of the leisure. When Gutenberg developed moveable type, as everyone knows, the promulgation of literature to the masses became possible. And so it continued, with every new development of technology tending to lower the common denominator of who could be published and/or popularized.

As "recycled electrons" becomes the medium of choice, the blog and the wiki and all their variations are supplanting the book as the medium for delivery. The language is changing more rapidly; shrinking through the elision of vowels and by the return to phonetic spelling. Sink your Bluetooth into your Blackberry and you have instant earphonic communication. hu nedz vwlz?

So what is the future of writing? Who can say? If laws are written and promulgated in text message format, they will be impossible for the older generation to understand, but if they are not, they will be too archaic for the young. Will a work of literature have to be translated to l33t in order to be appreciated?

Another associated and equally disturbing trend is that which decrees that everything written, photographed, said or thought must be archived and preserved for future generations unknown. What distinguishes the archivist from the librarian in this regard is the subtle thought that the archivist strives to preserve everything because it is not possible for us in the present to know what will be important in the future. The librarian seeks to arrange everything currently available for the best possible retrieval, and recognizing that space is limited, seeks to keep the best of what is current at the expense of discarding the deadwood. I would hope that writers generally take the latter view.

Amazing strides are being made in the field of storage and retrieval of information. The next big thing is probably holographic storage although nanostorage solutions (manipulating storage at the subatomic level) are also field of intense interest. So perhaps storage capacity won't lag behind need as much as it does now.

In the technologically advanced countries we are largely unable to erase any trace of our personal histories because we have no idea where it is stored and in what format and who has access to it. And since mistakes are inevitable and all systems break down at some point, the record we leave behind may not even be wholly ours or may be only partially true, or could be altered to serve some undesired purpose.

So the question remains: how badly do we need to record everything about everything? If the population of the world in just forty years from now is 9 billion and climbing, will there be answers to the problems of supply that our progeny would otherwise not be aware of had we not kept all the archives of all the agricultural enterprises of our own day?

There certainly will be problems if we don't preserve the seeds from today and plant them tomorrow, since engineering of crops diminishes the diversity and thus disease resistance of our plants. Is the same true of our culture? Will the generations to come somehow be unable to cope because we failed to record everything we did? Smhw i dnt thk so.