The topic has been raised in the past, but I wanted to share an article, it's in French though ;) so I'll just share the juicy details here.

The title says "SMS generation threatening Chinese ideograms"

As you can guess, it's taking shots at how technology, mainly Chinese input on computer and mobile devices has made it so convenient for Chinese people to write Chinese, that many of them are having trouble handwriting Chinese.

They are dubbed generation 提笔忘字 tibiwangzi.

Onto numbers:
- based on a survey of 2072 people, 83% claim facing problems memorizing characters
- a national survey finds that 60% of professors are not happy with their students' loss of writing ability.

The Ministry of Education is already on it, and has started taking actions about the issue. A conference about it has even been held last year. They are trying to push students to handwrite homework for example.

Could this be "good news" for Skritter?
Are we wasting our time studying the Writing mode in Skritter? ;) j/k

The article is available here: http://www.rue89.com/2010/07/23/chine-la-generation-tibiwangzi-oublie-lalphabet-traditionnel-159658

But you can also google tibiwangzi, there's already plenty of talks about it.

same topic...
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-china-characters-20100712,0,6032882.story

the founding fathers (of skritter) need to jump on this

I see a lot of this in China. Sit in an area crowded with young people. Look for some with pens in their hands and wait. If they instantly reach for their cell phone and don't put it to their ear to talk, then there is a good chance they are looking up how to write a character they have forgotten. If they then put down the phone and start writing odds are you guessed properly.

A classmate of mine and I were sitting in a Starbucks talking once and he went to give me the name of a TV show.... we ended up doing the same thing since he needed to borrow my cell phone. He had forgotten how to write a character. We proceeded to laugh about how we had now truly gone native, bad habits and all.

@wb thanks for the LA times link, it's like the exact same article, but with more details.

@west316 I should be visiting China soon, visa allowing of course, it'll be interesting to observe this phenomenon live.