Hawley seems to be lamenting the ascendance of the visual over the verbal in new technologies, but not in the common Luddite knee-jerk fashion. Actually, his biggest complaint is with the homogeneity of the net as we know it. For an adult, blindness and deafness are about equally problematic. Anyone who has had the opportunity to teach a deaf child knows this. Hearing is the primary channel through which we receive language, and all of those incoming words downloaded into our brains carry a wealth of emotional and cognitive apparatus that structures and empowers our imagination.
Language is the mind's opposable thumb.
What nobody can predict, of course, is what new intelligences will spin out of this computer- driven, massively global engine of cause and effect. Or how these developments will influence the language we speak. We may be in for some real surprises. It's important to communicate. It's important to have a lingua franca.