The days of plain text are numbered. It won't be much longer before email and other textual environments follow the lead of the Web with support for italics, underlining, bold, and other tonal options. Good riddance, most will say. But not I.
True, ASCII is humbling and exasperating - it's like trying to squeeze our pulpy, broadband fruitshake thoughts through a coffee straw. Without tonal cues, a piece of harmless sarcasm can turn into a two-week flame war. So we are forced to resort to clunky emoticons.
And yet, ASCII is our United Nations, working against the overwhelming trend of cultural fragmentation. Its simplicity holds us together and forces us to make a savage peace. With ASCII, we drop many of the nuanced signals from our ethnic, cultural, and professional tribes. We're forced to clarify our meaning so that anyone in any tribe can understand what we really mean.
- David Shenk (dshenk@aol.com) is writing a book on information glut. "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." - Thomas Pynchon
