Literature will only become obsolete if we let it! Try to read to children and they can't sit still, but try and animate the story in some way, they will listen. Everybody needs to read more! Start from an early age and literature will never be obsolete.

Literature isn't a static core of classic titles, but changes with fashion just as everything else does. When the Romantics were writing, the novel was a new and disreputable form that was seen as a contributor to the degeneration of society. A couple of hundred years - and many thousand books - later, and reading classic novels is seen as a staple part of the study of literature.

At the moment people might worry that much current writing is frivolous and meaningless, but in the future perhaps we'll see the value in things like blog posts and internet debates, that archive opinion and allow everyone a voice. Perhaps we'll find that the general population have become more skilled at rhetoric, or perhaps people will be interested in charting the rapid change in language as it adapts to typed communication.

Even now, the most striking thing about this online writing is the sheer volume of it. People are writing, and other people are reading it. The written word isn't dying - it's thriving in a different place.