I glanced up on one of my office walls the other day and saw an award I won for “Best Entry in Articles” at a writer’s conference on March 7, 2004. I thought back to the article I wrote that prompted the award. It was a basic list article about why a writer should consider starting a blog. Many of the people on staff at the conference had never even heard of a blog. That was just five and a half years ago. Now, nearly every writer, and everybody else, has one.
Keeping that in mind, I’m still reading “The Diary of Anne Frank” and I’m amazed at how similar the human experience is for a teenage Jewish girl in hiding in the 1940s to the human experience for us in 2009. She wanted the acceptance of her parents. She wanted to grow in her knowledge. She wanted to be entertained, saying at one point, “Ordinary people simply don’t know what books mean to us, shut up here. Reading, learning, and the radio are our amusements.” She felt insecure. She felt guilty for having a warm bed while other Jews were in captivity. She longed for the future while at the same time not knowing if she would have one.
Twitter, Facebook, blogs, cell phones and the like are just new ways of expressing the same longings, desires, expectations, and hopes that humans have always had. Some of us will always be more comfortable with a pen and a notebook because that’s what we used during our formative years to express ourselves. Some of us will stick with blogs or something else for the same reason. And in the future, whatever new ways of communicating come along, the next generation will latch onto them. It seems to me that it’s more important for each of us to continue to talk about the human experience in our own way than it is to be concerned about the medium of communication. After all, Anne Frank’s words were created with a pen and notebook and we’re still reading it nearly 70 years later.
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