Many of the ways we use mobile and social media today have longstanding precedents in historical media like letters, diaries, scrapbooks, and home movies. What we think of as the "social media revolution" is part of a much longer story about the use of media for connecting people through the documenting and sharing of everyday life.
Placing mobile and social media into a longer historical context helps to reveal what is really new about these contemporary communication technologies, what future services might learn from historical communication practices, and what fundamental aspects of the human experience emerge through a variety of technological platforms.
