I’d get your face and mouth insured, if I were you; you’re going to be need them a lot. The increasing popularity of Skype, the easy-to-download software that allows you to see and speak to fellow Skype users around the world, signals a massive shift in our collective online behaviour.

Once this technology has been integrated with mobiles and iPhones, we’ll be using our face and mouth for everything, sales in make-up and Strepsils will go through the roof, and we’ll have at last have entered a bit of the future we all recognise from sci-fi movies - the one where talking heads pop up on our wristwatches saying: “Come over to my office in half-an-hour,” or on the central circle on your steering wheel saying: “Daddy, we’ve lost the dog. It fell into a cement-mixer.”

We may well be decades away from silver suits and personalised jet-packs, entire cities made of advertising hoardings, or small lozenges that, once digested, make you genuinely believe you’ve been to Turkey, but who cares? Person-to-person visual chatter is what we’ve all been waiting for.

This is probably a great thing but it does give me a few fears. For one, what will it look like if you have a small camera attached to your mobile into which you speak? You’ll be holding the phone up to your ear at the time, in order to hear the other end of the conversation, so what you’ll be sending your friend will be live footage of your mouth. Obviously, you can hold the camera-phone in front of you, but that won’t help if you’re on the move: all you’ll do is accidentally punch shoppers coming your way, though fortunately you’ll have a phone handy to call an ambulance.

My big worry about Skype, and it’s a really big worry, is that it may spell the end of the written word as we know it. Once it’s easier to shout ‘Hi, you might like to know there’s a doughnut in the bread-bin’ at someone rather than text it, what need will we have to write anything again?

One of the benefits of the e-revolution so far has been the rise of blogging, texting and email; despite the crowing of traditionalists who lamented the decline of letter-writing, the past 10 years has seen everyone write far more than they’ve ever done before. If you spend half your day answering emails, you spend half your day writing, even if it’s only to write: ‘See you tonight at the cock-fight. Is Dave coming too?’

But how many of us actually want to write, instead of just doing so because that’s the only mode of communication available? If offered the chance to say something rather than go to all the bother of writing, wouldn’t we do that instead? It’s quicker, and involves less brain power. Writing, and, indeed, reading, are never an easy option.

I’m the first to admit to cauterising some of my brain power over the past few years by watching long-running American dramas, but that’s why I now have no illusions that once I realise it’s easier to mumble something at a camera rather than tap it into a keyboard, the pressures of modern life will push me to adopt this as my communication of choice.

And yes, I do appreciate the irony that it’s taken of all things a writers’ strike in the US to halt the production of a lot of these series, but I don’t think we’ll all be picking up a copy of Our Mutual Friend to entertain ourselves while they settle the dispute; more likely we’ll happily tune into a reality show about picketing American writers.

You only have to look at what the average journalist now gets up to to appreciate how it’s not just print, but the written word, that’s losing its monopoly. Journos don’t just write for a newspaper; they’re being trained to contribute to pod and pod-casts on the newspaper’s website. They no longer leave the offices with a fag in their mouth, but with good quality microphones and light-weight video cameras harnessed on to them, making them patrol the streets looking like hi-tech buskers.

So, here’s the future we’re about to give ourselves: a world not of texts but of noise.

One where you switch on your computer in the morning and see a dozen faces on your screen all shouting messages from the night before. One of them will be someone trying to sell you Viagra. Yes, you will actually be able to see what Polly Toynbee, Simon Heffer and myself all look like first thing in the morning. And you’ll accept that’s progress.