I've recently subscribed via RSS to Letters of Note, a website that republishes famous and interesting letters from over the years. Today's was by Mark Twain, where he discussed his view on why print interviews are inherently worthless. It's a short read, so you should probably just go have a look for yourself here.
Got it read? Great. Let's carry on.
The funny thing about this letter is that I can recall expressing many of the same feelings about the internet. I can even remember the situation. I was driving Ryan to the airport in '98 or '99 or so, and we were discussing the existence of smileys. My point was that appending an appropriate smiley was simply an attempt to add, however primitively, some vestige of emotional content to what would otherwise be unexpressed.
It turns out that Mark Twain said it better one hundred and ten years earlier.
Though the recent proliferation of audio and video communication mitigates matters somewhat, the fact is that for the most part the internet is a written medium. Be it Facebook Wall, Tweets, forum posts, articles, or blogs, most of the information we get from people online is still text. And, as Twain said, whil text is awesome at expressing raw data, it falls down hard in conveying emotions in all bu the broadest of strokes.
So the next time you're about to blow your stack over an insulting forum reply or think someone's an idiot or evil because of something that's being quoted to you over the 'net, try to recall what old Sam Clemens warned you about a hundred and twenty five years ago.
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