G*Nice: Penning my thoughts? Not possible

As I find myself writing another column I have come to realise that I am not in fact writing at all. I am, like everyone, typing. I can't remember the last time I put pen to paper. The one thing I do remember about the last time is that my handwriting was so shocking that it was almost illegible… even to me!

My writing was so bad that those who saw it presumed I must be a doctor because as we all know, whenever we get a prescription from the clinic the only people who can read it are the pharmacists who must be part-time code-crackers! Not wishing to show my age, but I am an individual who can remember the importance of handwriting at school; it was deemed important enough that extra credit was awarded to those who mastered it. From what I understand from my mates in the UK with kids at school, now all classes and assignments are conducted via laptops. This probably means that the generation will never have the pressure to practise and perfect handwriting as part of their studies - and let's face it that is the biggest indulgence in handwriting that many of us had. In the modern world, we no longer have to write cheques apart from our rent, which is three or four per year, the rest is all done with cash, credit or online. This could be a major evolutionary shift for us.

I know for sure that I have lost the ability to think and generate ideas if I attempt to work on paper. I can't really explain it, but it feels like my brain is better connected to my fingers when tapping away on a keyboard than trying to push a pen around paper making shapes that can be recognised as letters and words. This is a strange realisation but it is a reality.

So if I am aware that I have undergone a fundamental change to my processes, I can only imagine what it must be like for a generation that has only known computers. I guess a bigger impact must be the ability to spell correctly as so many of the digital devices that are now the air that we breathe, provide the auto-correct facility.

The icing on the cake is the power of the mobile phone and that so much of our written conversation is now done through SMS where there is a whole dictionary of abbreviations and a culture of phonetic spelling. I am left wondering what impact this will have on us as we progress onwards through the years and trust me, things they are a changing. As our skills become less focused on writing, we will evolve into different forms of beings. I really can't imagine where we will be in ten years but for sure what will be left for prosperity for future generations will be a digital archive of who we are now.

Tip-tappingly Yours