When I was younger, back when I was a teenager, I remember I used to write a lot of letters to my cousins in France and my friends all around the world. It was the most natural thing to just sit with a pen and paper for an hour writing a letter that would turn out 2 to 3 pages long.
Then came the internet and email, and suddenly I couldn’t even force myself to write one letter anymore. Either people upgraded their means of communication and started using email with me, or we’d be disconnected.
When I was in Jordan, my family would send me letters that I would read but rarely reply to just because I couldn’t bring myself to write one. This problem was only solved when my sister created an email address and became an intermediary.
But then that was too late, as instant messaging and real-time chats had come along, and I found email to be a rather slow and boring means of communication. That made me use email only when absolutely necessary.
The instant messaging market is still booming, but it’s no longer practical, with a huge list of contacts growing over the years. Catching up with my friends is now a tiresome act of switching between a bunch of windows and trying to keep up with a number of parallel and completely different conversations at the same time.
Now I have come to think that blogs are the best tool of communication, through which I can communicate with a big number of friends and people who share similar interests at once and get their feedback in an enriching and organized manner.
I wonder what’s the next step in the evolution of human communication…