For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life--I wrote this some years ago--that were worth the postage. The penny-post is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest. And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter,--we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. (61)We might go so far as to say that much of contemporary culture is driven by this gossip--and we shouldn't miss the fact that Facebook's home page is self-described as a "news feed."
Over the years that Facebook has been around, I've seen all manner of news in its "news feed." Some of it clearly gossip by any standard, but nearly all of it gossip by Thoreau's standard. In fact, I might go so far as to adapt what Henry says about the post-office and to say the same about social media--to speak critically, as he does, I never read more than a very few things on Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram, or Myspace (back in those days) that were what I would call "important communications."
This is not to say, though, that I think that Facebook's "news feed" is poorly named, since there's very little difference between what I find there and what I might find on the home page of nearly any major news corporation. Most of what we find today in the news (and I wonder if it has been different at any point in the last two centuries) is indeed a myriad instances and applications, either of things that we already know or (which is worse) of things that we don't need to know.
I've been talking with people lately about social media, about the value they see in it, about the risks one would run by abandoning the lot. And of course, the concern that most people have is that they will miss something of importance. But even if we concede that there are, occasionally, items of importance on Facebook et al., how frequently do they appear? How much gossip must we read before we find "important communications"? How many pictures of cats and status updates about what our acquaintances are eating for lunch or watching on television will we have to read before we discover something that makes it worth the time we spend? (And, we might also ask, if these things are truly important, will we not learn of them through other means?)
Henry is quite clear when it comes to spending:
the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. (19)Of course, I'm using this line out of context--Henry is writing about the cost of housing, but our economy today is different from that of his time. We don't pay to use Facebook (not directly, I mean), and the world is full of people who have at one point been irrationally angry about the prospect that Facebook might begin charging users for its services. At one point (this may still be true, but I'm not sure), Facebook went so far as to put a disclaimer on its sign-in page stating that it was and would always be free. But if we use Thoreau's definition of cost, social media is anything but free. How much life do we exchange to use it? How much of our time and attention does it take?
I would be far from kidding if I said that there are a great many people who pay a great deal for the use of supposedly free social media.
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