People have always wanted to communicate, not to mention bloviate, and so the op-ed as an idea is perfectly safe. But the expression of that idea -- the mode of communication -- is subject to change. Big change. Yet if op-editors can keep up, they could find themselves with an even bigger role in the streaming future.

Marshall McLuhan was right four decades ago when he predicted that the "Gutenberg Era" -- the era of print -- was coming to an end. McLuhan did not live to see the World Wide Web, let alone video-on-demand, but he would have seen those inventions as the fulfillment of his forecast.

For most of human history, the dominant mode of communication was verbal -- or oratorical, or poetic, or musical. Writing was slow and hideously expensive, the light was terrible, and, besides, few people could read. So those with something to say, said it. Literally. They got up in front of an audience, be it the army or the mob or the Roman Senate, and let loose. Sometimes it worked: Cato the Elder signed off every speech with the words, Carthago delenda est -- "Carthage must be destroyed" -- and in those days before newspapers, Cato’s "editorial crusade" eventually won over Roman opinion.

As the world advanced and grew more complicated, printing and publishing became necessary. That is, there was more information to process, and not enough troubadours, minstrels, and demagogues to do the processing. So of course someone had to invent movable type, and book publishing, and the mass-circulation newspaper. But the demand for information still raced ahead of the supply of information -- especially visual information. Even as photography advanced, scribblers filled the info gap, providing detailed descriptions of places and events.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries will be remembered as the golden age of print; by then people had the leisure time, and the literacy, to sit around and read. Hegel said that reading the newspaper was the religion of the middle class. And folks devoured novels, too, to learn about the widening world around them. They might never get to Paris, but they could thrill to Hugo’s precise description of fifteenth-century Notre Dame. They might never get to the South Pacific, but they could read along with Melville’s lyrical apostrophes to ambergris.

It was great stuff, it was literature -- and yet, people preferred pictures. Each picture was worth the full thousand words. And moving pictures became worth even more. So newspapers yielded to TV, and the novel yielded to movies, as well as TV.

And now, the Internet. At first, the 'Net seemed to promise a return to the print paradigm, but the brief comeback of the written word, online, was simply the result of another techno-lag -- the mismatch between the rapidly increasing demand for information and the slower increase in the supply of visual media to convey that information. Typing was dandy, but now, finally and decisively, video is quicker.

So the next-gen "op-ed" will have to include a substantial visual component -- think Al Gore’s presentation on global warming in the film An Inconvenient Truth. And that was a retro-tech movie. On the hipper Web, people will want to wrestle with ideas, but in addition, they will want to see the wrestlers as well as interact with them.

In fact, we will go back to the future, back to the days when the speaker spoke to an audience, and the audience cheered or jeered, in real time. Obviously, those with good looks and silver tongues will have an advantage in this post-print-media environment. But at the same time, new tools -- graphics to provide more data and context, avatars to provide more visual interest -- will help level the argumentative playing field.

So not only will the op-ed survive, but potentially, op-editors will be more important than ever. That is, if they can not only move to the ‘Net, but also move up the value-added chain -- "producing" better arguments, using all available media tools. That’s true persuasion, same as it ever was.