I used to have a professor that claimed interpersonal communication fails 95% of the time. I now know he was using hyperbole to make a point - but it's still very often and only going to get worse from here.
The problem is we are all AWFUL are reading tone in text communication - and it's impossible to get better at it as the author points out with his example. We can only get better at communicating our intent correctly, not at interpreting the intent. This is also true of other communication though. We are very bad at reading body language, facial expressions, and all sorts of other non verbal cues. I suspect this is why the internet habit of using smilies and 'lol's began so early in the advent of the internet. A population of people who historically had more trouble than others with an already very difficult problem found an easy way to solve it in their new medium.
I think escalation in medium works most of the time is because we have more practice delivering our intent verbally . Going forward, however, I don't see any reason that might not change as younger generations get more experience with text based communication than verbal communication.