An introductory portion of my first linguistics class in university was an overview of the evolution of communication throughout history. One of my favourite things about linguistics was exploring these means’ of communication and how they differ throughout history and among groups. Nowadays, we take for granted our ability to express an idea or feeling without second thought and to be understood immediately, but we don't consider what we would do if every single person on the planet had invented their own way of communicating; if English wasn't spoken by 942 million people and language wasn't regulated by a series of rules.
In Prehistoric times, cavemen carved images in stone to convey messages to one another. There were no designated words to indicate any specific information, they simply had to draw pictures and hope others would understand them. The Ancient Egyptians were actually the first people to initiate the use of letters: small images slowly turned into letters, and eventually letters were strung together to make words. The letter 'A', for example, started out as a small drawing of a bull's head, which meant 'alpu'.
When I was a kid, I carried huge notebooks around with me to write stories and poems, or even just make lists, whenever I felt the urge to write. There was something I loved about the feeling of running my hand over the words as I poured my thoughts onto paper, crossed out words I didn't like, scribbled out entire paragraphs, and then looked proudly over the final product that all my trial and error led me to. Nowadays, everything is technological; I'm even typing this post on my laptop and it's not nearly as satisfying as it would be had I been writing this in my notebook.
We don't think about it, but language is still evolving: Iphones and Ipads are the (much more technologically advanced) "typewriters" of the 21st century, and 10-15 years ago we thought our laptops were so innovative because unlike the typewriter, they were portable! In my opinion, while our means’ of communication are progressing, language is slowly regressing- think of the emojis we use to express our emotions, and abbreviated words like ‘u’. Most of us still have trouble expressing ourselves, even though there are literally 50 different ways to say sad or happy, respectively. Still, for anyone who loves language, nothing compares to an expressive and colourfully-worded piece of writing, or the feeling of writing down a completely new idea on paper and seeing all the edits that contribute to the final product. (You have no idea how many synonyms and word combinations I went through before settling on "colourfully worded"... And neither do I!)
There's something very raw about writing on paper, where every mistake and unintentional tangent is recorded, where you can look back and actually see how you got from Point A to Point B. Language is so fleeting nowadays, and you don't have to go through half a notebook writing rough copy after rough copy before you get to your final draft. One can only hope that as our means' of communication progress, and as technology becomes more refined, we won’t lose our ability to express our most complex thoughts, altogether.