Every morning, before I shower, before I dig into my emails, before I even put on pants, I sit down with a coffee and read the letters of Hunter S. Thompson. Being a student of Thompson’s writing and an admirer of his outlook on life, I find his personal letters (of which he published thousands) full of insight into his life and how he lived it. Through personal accounts of his struggle and journey to become a writer, I like to think I gain a better understanding of the sacrifice and the discipline it takes to produce work as talented and iconic as his. In circulation since 1998, the collection is amassed in two books with a third due in October. Thompson is far from a special case however—name any influential figure in history and, unless they have gone to great lengths to prevent it, their letters have been published for the world to read. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Hitler, Churchill, Plath, the list goes on. Recently, a letter verified as written by Charles Darwin while he was teaching in South Africa was sold for $3700. Clearly, I am not the only one who finds value in the correspondence of influential people.
There has been a great deal of attention focused on social media recently. Some of it is positive. Much of it negative, declaring it a navel-gazing pre-occupation of a self-indulgent generation.
For every person I introduce to Twitter I find myself explaining why it’s not as useless as 1000 embittered advertising professionals would lead you to believe. But with the majority of Twitter users tweeting inane lifestreaming updates and a critical mass of social media “experts” pushing the service on the unwilling, an argument in favour of social media is not always an easy one. I will, however, maintain my opinion that the social web is a big step forward for mankind. Why? Two reasons, the first being that I see social media as an important phase in the progression of personal correspondence.
Personal correspondence, I believe, is a valuable record of the times we live in. Critics will undoubtedly disagree with me, claiming social media’s petty updates don’t qualify as correspondence or that they have no place in history. However, I believe this shortsighted thinking lacks vision. Think about this—for every million humans sharing lifestreaming tidbits you label as insignificant, there is a future Mahatma Gandhi cracking eggs of wisdom that will change the world. And these statements of intellect and reason won’t be found on yellowed pieces of paper stuffed away in desk drawers. They’ll be found on the pages of Twitter and Facebook. They’ll be published on personal blogs and shared via bookmarking sites like Delicious. They’ll be edited into videos that go viral, spreading messages that are unfiltered by editors, publishers and corporate mandates. In the same way that the teachings of intellectuals are kept in vast libraries of rotting books, the world’s future knowledge will be contained on the servers of the internet’s largest social networks. The best part? This invaluable information will be searchable and accessible by anyone with access to a computer, which leads me to the second reason I believe this correspondence will prove to be a paradigm shift in human civilization—this dissemination of information will lead to a better human race.
Sounds dramatic, doesn’t it? Stay with me here. Twitter is not revolutionary. Nor is Facebook or any other social media platform. What’s interesting about the progression of this oh-so-young internet is how it is quickly carrying us into an age where information is easily obtained, discussed, debated, updated, corrected and published, not only by governing bodies or corporate interests but by individuals, people like you and me, except smarter, and more socially conscious, and more environmentally aware.
The spread of ideas, through the internet, or the printed word, or carrier pigeon, will prove to be mankind’s single biggest weapon against poverty, racism, violence and all the other ugly shit we deal with as a civilization.
And social media platforms like Twitter or FB, while only a simple collection of 0s and 1s, simply provide one more step towards getting us all to just talk communicate with each other and get along. And that, my friends, is the ultimate goal. Isn’t it? – Mike Berard
ADDED June 20th:
Below, TED presenter Clay Shirky agrees with me.