Tracey Barnett: The word is that words could be on their way out

The camera opens on a woman relaxing in a bubble bath. Her partner is dressed and shaving at the mirror. They talk, they banter, the laughter builds and he rolls up his shirtsleeves to soap her back. Suddenly, playfully she pulls him into the suds and they kiss.

What happens next? Even your 13-year-old knows - and it's not what you think.

What happens next is the music builds and the screen fades to black, or we cut to the next scene. You never see the drenched guy getting out of the bath like a raisin with his wrecked watch, his wallet and keys clinging to his soaked trousers like some studly-do-right gone wrong.

Our visual vocabulary knows the score. It is as if someone has handed around a dictionary for a language that nobody needs translating. Fast editing means action, wobbly camerawork means gritty reality, a poignant death is shot in slow motion. We all get it.

We share this visual language worldwide. We are speaking in tongues that are foreign to almost nobody.

Some of us speak it better than others. If you are under 22, just stop reading now. Otherwise, hang on to your 3Rs because there is a cultural revolution going on and your kid is Che Guevara.

Let's start with the obvious. A confession -the Mini-Me in my life has been able to fix my computer problems better than I have since she was 8. No big deal. It is the way of the New World, right?

I'm not too bad myself. I can pay a bill, write something, or email a friend. I slog away in the linear reading-writing world of text.

But our children aren't experiencing this world the way we do, not even close.

Your progeny has probably designed a PowerPoint presentation for a school assignment instead of writing a paper. She has taken pictures on her cellphone and used them as visual messages to friends. She has probably spent 90 per cent of her entire academic career's homework research time on the internet, not at a library.

She might know the basics of PhotoShop and can make a movie, edit it, and add a soundtrack at home.

What your child excels at is a level of visual literacy that is unprecedented in our lifetime - or of any other generation before us.

Not only does your offspring probably understand more visually than you do right now, but by the time she grows up and finishes high school she will probably be able to visually create images, movies, websites, podcasts, videocasts - and other new media we haven't even thought of yet.

Yes, I get that technology is moving at warp speed. But here's the key to the exploding Old World order: my child not only understands visual media but can now create it.

This is seismic. You've heard it as "citizen media" - content that anyone can make and put out to the world in the click of a mouse.

In the future your precious darling might be an anthropologist who can film, edit, and score her research done in the jungles of Brazil. Or she might be a surgeon in the Coromandel whose procedures are put on to the internet so colleagues can watch her videocast and direct it worldwide in cyberspace.

But there is another tectonic-plate-sized shift rumbling: most of these new media won't be in written words.

Stanford mathematician Keith Devlin describes a study done among 10,000 community college students in California. When given a paragraph to read, only 35 per cent of women and a measly 17 per cent of men acquired the information efficiently through reading text.

Half a century since the launch of the television age and only a little over a decade into the burgeoning of the internet, and these students are now reading pictures, video, illustrations and diagrams best.

For these eye-revolutionaries living under your roof, text is just one measly dialect in their new communication arsenal.

Professor Devlin is gearing up for the death of the paragraph. I'm not ready to kiss written language goodbye. It is bound to always have a place - but it's certainly strange watching it getting shoved into a quieter corner.

When television first came on the scene, it took a while for theatre attendance to rebound, though it never returned to its previous levels.

Is this where we are today with the written word? Will visual literacy dominate our next epoch?

One thing is certain, bid goodbye to the Gutenberg century because the Berners-Lee era is flooding into your daily world, and guess what - you're swimming in it whether you like it or not.

A scary prospect? Nah. When I'm old and grey some obscure university will offer me a gig on the ancient art of text writing.

I'm a big believer in Harry Potter casting our future. When Harry picks up a newspaper not only can he read the text, but when he scans the accompanying photo, the picture comes alive and shows the moving image and sound of the moment.

This isn't just J.K. Rowling's magic. This is the reality of our future.

That's a world I'd like to see - right alongside all those visual revolutionaries who throw their iBooks into their backpacks and race off to primary school each morning.

I get the difference between visual and visionary. That's why, after they've gone, I glance at the once comforting sight of my shelves filled with books, just to make sure the screen doesn't slowly fade to black before I'm ready for the revolution.