Facebook is touting video as the next big thing for their platform. However, Tim Carmody points to a number of benefits of the written word.

Text is surprisingly resilient. It's cheap, it's flexible, it's discreet. Human brains process it absurdly well considering there's nothing really built-in for it. Plenty of people can deal with text better than they can spoken language, whether as a matter of preference or necessity. And it's endlessly computable -- you can search it, code it. You can use text to make it do other things.

— Facebook is wrong, text is deathless by Tim Carmody for Kottke.org