Andy Abramson commented last week that one of the side effects of the mobile era of Internet development is the proliferation of texting at the expense of voice communication.

It is true of course that the growth of small devices is making text messaging more common. I would add that the quality of writing (grammar, punctuation, and thoughtful elaboration) is simply horrible in this environment, and the reason is that it has just become too easy and too cheap. The marginal cost of text communication is essentially zero. It is frustrating when, because of the "friends" and contacts that we make, we can't help but read redundant, boring, sensationalist, silly, inaccurate and worthless blogs, micro-blogs, feeds, notifications, tweets, and other types of "messages" endlessly popping up on our devices (fixed and mobile).

On the other hand, other communication media are showing the same spam-like tendencies for essentially the same reason. More every day, people are being swamped with teasers to listen to worthless podcasts, to watch quirky videos, to join stupid conferences, and to download strange images or applications.

The current generation of communication devices supports multiple types of Internet communication (text, talk, video, and file sharing). The service contracts for these devices are increasingly "all you can eat". As a result, the marginal cost of all types of communication, not just text, is essentially zero. Because of this cheapness, we cannot expect standards to remain high. With greater volume come lesser quality.

The challenge of communication in the next generation is to find ways to be more selective. My suggestion is to rely increasingly on moderated multi-media conversation.

Aside: Skype public chats serve these objectives in the following ways:

• They are conversational.
• They are moderated.
• They are multi-media (the foundation is text but they present a springboard to voice and video conversation and conferencing).
• If they are published then you can throw URLs, images, and music/video clips into them. You can follow people of interest or topics of interest as participant or just as viewer. People can follow you and the topics that interest you without disturbing your flow of conversation.