On Letters of Note: The Internet’s Idea of History
The book Letters of Note—a beautiful object, well-presented—is fun to read. How could it not be? It’s all of the wheat of historical research, none of the chaff. Star moments for me included Aldous Huxley’s widow’s account of his LSD-assisted death; Beethoven’s letter to his brothers, explaining how his deafness had affected his attitude toward other people; and Victorian missionary Lucy Thurston’s 1855 account of a mastectomy undergone without anesthesia. Reflecting the Web’s scattershot approach, the letters are all mixed up in the book, arranged in no discernable order, whether chronological or thematic. The reader will encounter them, as the browser has, in totally random fashion, disconnected from any timeline.
The letters contain the telltale marks of their internet origins. Internet history, including the Letter of Note, must conform to a set of rules determined by the hope of traveling across social media. Because sharing a document requires aligning your name and profile with the document’s content, items are most shareable when their meanings are directly legible in the space of a tweet or a Facebook post. This is a key structural limitation: Only those gems that can be well-headlined, with display text that conveys their essential meaning immediately, will travel.
Virginia Quarterly Review, Fall 2014