The Way of the Dodo

Being the English major that I am, this article easily caught my eye. It would seem more interesting to a communications major or someone who studies calligraphy, orthography, typography or some other area to do with writing or the manual creation of letters, but as I like to write, I feel I have some stake in this possible dilemma.
This article by Anne Trubek points to the slow disappearance of handwriting as an applicable and necessary skill. I remember back in grade school when they vainly tried to teach us good penmanship skills, focusing more the structure of your lettering than the importance of your words. This had little effect on me, as I took my poor handwriting and wrote anyway, creating barely legible but readable stories as early as the first grade. I can still write in cursive if I need to, but see no real use for it when I can Ctrl+i and write in italics right here, if I want to emphasize something. So I can definitely see her point in proposing that these skills are no longer needed. But, as an art, should handwriting go the way of typewriters, papyrus scrolls and clay tablets?
Comics and graphic novels often rely heavily on text for meaning, (good) graffiti is all about textual representation, and kanji tattoos are still quite popular. The art of writing isn't quite dead, but maybe handwriting may be. Even newspapers are succumbing to the information age as everything goes online. It's much easier to search for information on Google than by digging through reams of microfiche (does anyone really do that anymore?). Nearly everyone in my generation is digital. I don't know a person below the age of fifty that doesn't have a blog, a web page, a myspace/facebook page or an email account.
Yet, when I do my real, intensive, meaningful writing, it's sitting in bed at three am with a notebook, scribbling phrases and general accusations with a pencil, making notes in the margins and editing with my eraser. I do feel some nostalgia for putting a pencil or pen to paper rather than typing on a cold, uncaring machine, making my eyes go blurry from staring at a monitor. But maybe I'm just the last of a dying breed of writer. Maybe everyone in twenty years will pour their souls out onto cyberspace, hammering away at keyboards in the middle of the night on word processors wondering if voice-recognition software and brain-analyzing scans that record their dreams will take the place of the keyboard.
So what of handwriting? Will our children or grandchildren learn to type instead of writing out the alphabet? Will they send their homework to a teacher through a wireless tablet instead of turning in sheets of scribbled answers? I surely don't know the answers, but we may see. As the anachronism of the daily paper slowly fades into history, maybe writing will follow it, or maybe not. Who knows?

*Note: I was going to use a classic Gary Larson Far Side comic on my page, but his lawyers have been tracking down every unauthorized usage of his comics and forcing capitulation or else.*