Just a few hundred years ago oral communication was the reigning mode of communication. Reading and writing were skills that only a few people possessed. Mostly people with religious associations, priests and such.
The rise of printing technology made books the first, albeit a very crude, form of mass media. Suddenly, it became possible to effectively communicate with a large audience.
Information is power. Printing technology was the first revolution, a revolution that distributed power to those individuals that had the ability to read. No wonder the people in power tried to hold on to the right to control what is published. Many still try today.
If you think about writing, it is actually a very crude way to transfer ones thoughts or ideas to another person. First of all, getting ideas on paper is extremely difficult. The world is so rich in nuances that describing all of them, to accurately paint a picture for the reader, would take forever.
And then there is the recipient. The human brain is built to automatically fill in stuff that is missed by our senses. The same thing with reading. We fill in the blanks with things that we have experienced ourselves. If someone wrote about a red car, I would most probably picture it something like the car my mother had a few years ago. For anyone else, the car would be totally different.
Digital tools are changing all this. It is no longer necessary to communicate by writing about something. We can just as easily show what we are thinking about. Using a camera to capture images and video. Letting the receiver actually see what we are seeing.
Digital tools even allow us to combine content from different sources to get our message across. This is what the red car looks like. This is the song I was listening to. These are the shoes that I was wearing at the time.
Digital devices also allow us to use sound and icons to convey meaning. Reading and writing are no longer essential skills that one must learn to acquire and transmit information. That is a major shift in power.
It is a totally new form of communication. And at the same time it is the exactly the same as thousands of years ago. Show and tell. The only difference is, that it is not show and tell your tribe members in the cave. It is show and tell the world.