Saying VS. Writing: What You Mean?

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day and got on the subject of the oral tradition.  Well, it started off as a conversation about Greek history and we got lost somewhere.  Anyway, we agreed that communicating through a written language is exceedingly more difficult than through speech. 

This made me think of the comedian Arj Barker.  I recently watched his stand-up special, and he has a bit about text messaging.  I recommend checking it out, but what he suggests is that since the largest problem with text communication is the inability to conceptualize context (interpret underlying meaning such as sarcasm) we should have different fonts like 'sarcastica' and 'good times new roman'.  An interesting idea...

We often discuss how the English language is constantly changing in spoken form yet I know I don't spend much time thinking about it is changing compositionally.  It seems to me that writing more often makes it more difficult for me to convey what I mean to say.  I don't believe writing is more difficult because it is more governed.  I think it is more difficult because of the lack of inflection, accurate portrayal of pause, and where one may dialectually skip words or mash them and a listener will fill in the blanks when writing one is not afforded such an oppotunity.