A record of a society's mundane progress

In the November 2009 issue of Harper's Magazine, Richard Rodriguez has a piece on the "Twilight of the American Newspaper". In a rather pessimistic mood, he concludes by writing that "we already live in the America of USA Today, which appears, unsolicited, in a plastic chrysalis suspended from your doorknob at a Nebraska Holiday inn or a Maine Marriot". And, moreover, that "we will end up with one and a half cities in America---Washington, D.C., and American Idol. We will all live in Washington, D.C., where the conversation is a droning, never advancing, debate between "conservatives" and "liberals." We will not read about newlyweds. We will not read about the death of salesmen. We will not read about prize Holsteins or new novels." To Rodriguez, the "American newspaper" is gone, only to be replaced by a single-edition bulletin outlining the most recent news from Celebrity City.

So what is really a newspaper? Does it have to have news? Editorials? Classifieds? What characterizes the "American newspaper"? Rodriguez:

The day after I was born in San Francisco, my tiny existential fact was noted in several of the papers that were barked through the downtown streets. In truth, the noun "newspaper" is something of a misnomer. More than purveyors only of news, American newspapers were entrusted to be keepers of public record---papers were daily or weekly cumulative almanacs of tabular information. A newspaper's morgue was scrutable evidence of the existence of a city. Newspapers published obituaries and they published birth announcements. They published wedding announcements and bankruptcy notices. They published weather forecasts (even in San Francisco, where on most days the weather is optimistic and unremarkable - fog clearing by noon). They published the fire department's log and high school basketball scores. In a port city like San Francisco, there were listings of the arrivals and departures of ships.

Rodriguez finishes the passage eloquently, by writing: "None of this constituted news exactly; it was a record of a city's mundane progress." I cannot read this, however, without thinking about Facebook and Twitter. What are social networks, if not a «record of a society's mundane progress»?

The gloomy mood in Rodriguez' essay could just as well have been a hopeful and optimistic discussion of the replacement of some part of the newspaper by social media web sites. Today, social networks are about to be "entrusted to be keepers of public record"; they are "cumulative almanacs of tabular information". The databases of Facebook and Twitter are becoming "scrutable evidence of the existence of a [society]".

Even the narcissism is similar. Social media, and especially Twitter, has been accused of being a meat marked for social publicity and self-marketing. On newspapers in the 19th century, Rodriguez writes:

Men, usually men, who assumed the sole proprietorships of newspapers in the nineteenth century were the sort of men to be attracted by the way a newspaper could magnify an already fatted ego.

Even so, newspapers have become some of the most important elements of our democratic societies. What will the new social networks be like in ten or twenty years?