"This document reproduces the elements of a visual presentation. It is incomplete without oral comments that accompany it." is an elegant disclaimer that I often encounter in my work, which chiefly involves making PowerPoint presentations that will be delivered by and to strangers across the seven seas.

What struck me as elegant about the phrasing of these words is the way they emphasize the inevitability of the spoken word. It is an admission of insufficiency from the very first slide of a communication tool, which, like all communication tools of today strives to do away with conversation altogether. It reinforces one of my fondest beliefs that in spite of all the twittering and instant messaging (which will always be an impostor, albeit n impostor humoured in our midst, but one who will never successfully impersonate face to face conversation), this creature inside us will put up a fight for life. It may have been weaned off a nourishing attention span and placed on a starvation diet of brief virtual exchanges, may have been made to train on the circuits of online dialogues under the merciless whip cracks of touch screen phones and mouse clicks, yet it will be alive enough to hunger for that occasional Vitamin pill of good conversation.

I wish we had better things ( a weed, like other weeds of inanity sprung from modern soils, refuses to be exterminated from my vocabulary) to say to each other. things that wouldn't be flushed clean from our minds in the daily deluges of web pages we subject our minds to, things that would sprout to life and flower in the silences of our nights and awaken us with the floral smells of truth the morning.

I don't know if people will be so conversation-impaired in the future as to sit across each other laptop in hand, listening to the voices of each other's keyboards. Perhaps we, as a species, have said all that there is to say. Our collective military history, our record of repetitive political rhetoric, that drying dying stream of literature, and the fact that we are running out of ideas for reality television shows are all testament to that. There is nothing more to say after all. And our whole-hearted embrace of these newly fashioned idioms of social networking and online communication takes us away, if only for a moment from the uncomfortable realization that these are only self-taught lip reading lessons for the blinded.