Nearly three years ago I wrote:
Prediction: within 3 years the stylus will be the killer feature of Android tablets.
Since then I've felt a little embarrassed remembering that post. Grand claims, ha ha!
With the recent announcement of Apple's "Pencil" I feel somewhat vindicated. I got the details wrong but I think broadly speaking that hand-drawing, sketches, doodles, will feature strongly in the future of human-to-human communication. Maybe even more strongly than typed messages for some people.
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I'm thinking about the 16% of people worldwide who can't read or write, but who are rapidly adopting hand held technologies where they can draw.
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I'm thinking about the tens of thousands of years of human beings using sticks as a technology for making marks upon a surface.
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I'm thinking about the popularity of emoji, the universality of pictographs, the cross-cultural and language-independent nature of the medium of drawn communication.
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I'm thinking about my kids and how the second thing they learn after talking is drawing.
Maybe one future is a world in which many of our planet's population do a significant fraction of our communication through the medium of doodles.