[devilant]

Paul is right. Writing is definitely the best way to convey and spread ideas. If you're a good enough writer, you can spark a reformation just by printing up a few copies of your 95 theses and passing them around. I think writing unfortunately took a back seat to speaking for the last 100 years thanks to radio and television, where a small number of charismatic speakers have been able to dominate the public discourse.

But that is changing again thanks to the internet. Take SOPA for example. SOPA was defeated not by an influential speaker making an impassioned anti-SOPA speech, but by blog posts and forum posts and reddit/hacker news posts on the internet. We're getting closer every day to the world of the novel Ender's Game, where Ender's brother and sister were able to influence international politics solely through their anonymous internet writings (something which I used to think was farfetched and ridiculous).