Love Letters to No one

Dear vast abyss known as the Internet,

How are you? It's been far too long since you've written.

I was watching a movie yesterday about a historical figure many of the details of which depended on the historical figure's letters she wrote to a friend. And for a second I lamented the fact that people don't write letters anymore (no thanks to the postal service) but then I realized that something had taken the place of letter writing: blogs. Are blogs the new letters? And if so, who are they addressed to? Have we become such a self-obsessed culture that instead of writing letters to real people, we simply write letters to...no one?

Perhaps, but much like the letters in the movie I watched, blogs play an interesting role in recording history. No longer can history be written solely from the perspective of one (Western) historian. Instead, the thousands of blogs (and perhaps Twitter tweets) from around the world comprise an interesting and multi-faceted view of the world we live in.

But there are so goddamn many of them, you say, how can blogs (1) be trusted, (2) be consolidated into one story? I suppose they can't and won't be. Maybe we're simply entering into an era of subjective history, where we each choose to believe what happened based on what other people tell us (not that that's so different from how it works now). Liberals can read the the Huffington Post, Conservatives can follow The Weekly Standard, while I'd probably choose something like McSweeney's.

And what of those individuals who write only for the sake of writing, those who know few if any actually read their blogs, who contribute very little to recorded history? Well, I guess we'll just wait and see. Maybe one day the internet will write back.