The tweet-life of social media

I've chosen a dodgy analogy here to give myself a nice title.

But  the recent blogdown in Christian has given me pause to ponder the growth and death cycles of social media.

It's worth a thought perhaps, if only to remind ourselves that a thousand webpages in God's site are as but a tweet that endures for an evening. As a wise man once said - how fragile we are, how fragile we are.

If we consider Paul's Letters - after 2,000 years they are read more than they have ever been - if only because there are now more Christians in the world than there have ever been. Albeit probably no more in Ephesus now than there were when Paul allegedly didn't write to it.

How long might Paul have expected his Letters to last? Maybe a couple of years as they were passed around Asia Minor, Greece, and those parts of Africa around Cyrene? Yet here they still are - in hundreds of languages and more translations produced every year.

When Thomas Hardy and Dickens wrote their monthly serials, did they think that 150 years later, every year there would be a fight over whether they should be on the GCSE syllabus? When Hardy was writing about those wonders of his modern age, the steam train and the electric telegraph - did he ever dream that through amazing enhancements in telegraphy and electronics, one day we would be able to read his complete works from a Kindle while sitting on a train waiting outside Euston Station due to a points failure in the Tring area?

Or take Private Eye. Initially printed on loo roll by a bunch of enthusiastic Oxford types - did they ever dream that one day people would advertise in the back pages of that Organ, for back issues of what is, after all, a topical magazine?

In a related field - the hundreds of thousands of newspaper editions fly by. Who can remember what Polly Toynbee was being self-righteous and naggy about last week, as opposed to this? Who remembers whether it was Dora from Dagenham or Kimberley from Keighley, who opined on Page 3 that the BBC received too big a licence income? What was that bloke - Rod somebody, is it - who resigned from the Today programme - you remember - what was he being drily whimsical about last Sunday? And who cares?

And so we come to our beloved Social Media. When the Universe dies, over trillions of years, not much will happen as it all trends away towards maximum entropy. Even the Black Holes will one day dry out. And so a retired blog sits there, accumulating pointless Alexa rankings and Google searches until it is as if it were no more. That would appear to be a three- or four-year process.

A blogpost - one that goes really viral - may take a week really to go round the world. But its peak readership probably numbers a few or ten thousand, and after a few weeks it is like the people of long ago, whom we remember no more.

A tweet is but for the moment. Except when someone - ironically - announces they want to blow up an airport, in which case the #hashtag can last a few weeks, until there's a footballer to name in the Next Great Twitter Campaign for freedom. Which will last a week.

So, Social Media-ites. Our chosen medium is not even medium-term. Perhaps we should rename it a "short" instead. And yet there is One who backs up all tweets, who indexes all blogs. Who hears all answer phone messages -and I don't mean Rupert Murdoch. And On That Day (tm) when our timelimes are read back we will know what was of value, and what was but dross. And in that day we will know as we are known. We will no longer see through a glass darkly. And we might even know who the Church Mouse is.