Let’s face it, the days of privacy are just about over. And who do we have to blame for their dismissal? Ourselves. First, we found each other on Myspace, connected on BeBo, facebooked long lost friends and tweeted daily activities. Now everyone’s buzzing with google. And in the future? Who knows. As they say, the possibilities are endless.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love social media just as much as the next guy. As you can see to your right, I’m a frequent tweeter tweet-head twitterer twip twit user of twitter. I have those updates posting to my facebook account, and now they also display to the few people I might’ve missed on Google Buzz. If you want to know what I like to read, you can check out my shared items on Google Reader, or the list of books I’m reading and have read on Shelfari. Maybe you want to hire me? You can see my professional information on LinkedIn. I also blog semi-regularly if you’re interested in my thoughts. Occasionally I even talk to people in real life!

What I’m getting at is the openness we now have with each other in the social media context.  A week ago, after an emotional Wednesday night service with the youth group at my church, the youth pastor and I were talking about how open the teenagers are now versus when I was in the youth group (only about 7 years ago). He said “I think part of it is they are so open about their life now on Facebook and everything else that nothing is sacred anymore.” That statement didn’t have a big impact on me at first, but it’s been on my mind ever since.

I’ve been thinking about how much communication has changed. I’ve been thinking about letters. Once, that was the medium of choice. For instance, a large portion of the new testament in the Holy Bible were letters written by Paul. Or, to give a more modern day example, reclusive author J.D. Salinger’s letters to a friend were just unsealed and are being prepared for public viewing by anxious fans. Many other authors of classic fame were letter writers.

But what about our letters today? We’re trimming communication as much as possible. Even e-mails are too long. We send texts or tweets containing broken English that we’ve all taught ourselves to understand. “Lol, wut?” is now an acceptable statement. Even my Mom sends me texts now, replacing words like ‘you’ with the quicker, easier ‘u’ equivalent.

This rapid development has me thinking about the future. Twenty years from now, are we still going to be teaching children to write with a pen? Or will we replace the ‘dotted-center-line’ tablets with big lettered keyboards? Are fifth graders going to be turning in book reports, or will they be e-mailing the teacher a link to their vlog discussing it on youtube?

More importantly, what about the writers of the future? Will they have letters that survive ten, twenty or hundreds of years like their predecessors? Will they contain any insights to their lives that weren’t immediately available from their blogs? Or will the great essays from the writers of the next century be written in 140 characters or less?