This
is the third year that I’ve tracked my birthday greetings as they have
moved from private channels to public channels, primarily facebook. As
I noted previously, in 2007 and 2008;

Social networks have changed the dynamic – it isn’t
enough to wish someone a happy birthday, but it is also important to be
SEEN to wish someone a happy birthday. Equally, it is important to be
SEEN to have a lot of people wish you a happy birthday too!

This year the shift continued but was much less pronounced, as the graph below shows:

birthday stats

It’s somewhat notable that despite the huge increase of Twitter
usage there were no happy birthday tweets. The use case is off. The
tweeter would be sending a birthday greeting to the wrong audience – to
their followers, not to mine.

The other notable point is that there is an overall increase in the
number of birthday greetings over 2007. This is consistent with the
obvervation in a recent edition of the Economist’s Intelligent Life
magazine, that we are all writers now:

Go back 20, 30 years and you will find all of us doing
more talking than writing. We rued literacy levels and worried over
whether all this phone-yakking and television-watching spelled the end
of writing.

Few make that claim today. I would hazard that, with more than 200m
people on Facebook and even more with home internet access, we are all
writing more than we would have ten years ago. Those who would never
write letters (too slow and anachronistic) or postcards (too twee) now
send missives with abandon, from long thoughtful memos to brief and
clever quips about evening plans. And if we subscribe to the theory
that the most effective way to improve one’s writing is by
practicing—by writing more, and ideally for an audience—then our
writing skills must be getting better…

True, much of what is written online is quotidian, informational,
ephemeral. But writing has always been so: traditional newspapers line
bird-cages a day later; lab reports describe methodology in tedious
detail; the founding fathers wrote what they ate for lunch. And the
quality of many blogs is high, indistinguishable in eloquence and
intellect from many traditionally published works.

Our new forms of writing—blogs, Facebook, Twitter—all have
precedents, analogue analogues: a notebook, a postcard, a jotting on
the back of an envelope. They are exceedingly accessible. That it is
easier to cultivate a wide audience for tossed off thoughts has meant a
superfluity of mundane musings, to be sure. But it has also generated a
democracy of ideas and quite a few rising stars, whose work we might
never have been exposed to were we limited to conventional publishing
channels.

So thanks for the birthday wishes, and be thankful that we’re all writing more!

(For more from Jeremy, visit his blog)

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