Fred Wilson made an insightful post today about how correspondence is making a comeback. His points about how writing itself is being rediscovered by a mass audience are well made, but I think there’s also something even more fundamental changing about the changing nature of communication - whether it be expressed via the written word, images, videos, or anything else.

In particular, beyond merely encouraging writing, social media and personal publishing have enabled and popularized an entirely new paradigm of communication: one-to-one-to-many communciation, or what might traditionally be understood as an ‘open letter.’

An open letter is “a letter intended for an individual, but that is nonetheless widely distributed intentionally” (Wikipedia). Some significant percentage of communication that, even in the very recent past, would have been reserved for one-to-one exchanges are now often occuring publicly, with dual intended audiences, for the world to see.

The result is that everyone can gain from what person A has to say to person B. And person C can interject and join what would otherwise be an 1-to-1 conversation, and make it a genuine group discussion.

The rise of blogs and social networking profiles have essentially given each of us a forum from which to send and receive open letters. And we now receiving them all the time: wall posts, blog comments, and twitter @replies. All of these forms of communication, by their very nature encourage us to share with the world our direct communications with another individual.

Sure, some of the exchanges are frivilous (birthday wishes on your facebook wall) and the social dynamic that underlies many of these exchanges have their own pecularity (why does someone write on my wall that it was nice seeing me last night?), but beyond the noise, vast amounts of useful information that would otherwise be hidden are being exposed.

Just this week, for instance, I left a blog comment seeking further explication about a blog post by Dennis Mortensen on social networking metrics. I wrote an ‘open letter’ to him, and he responded with an ‘open letter’ back. Everyone, forever, can benefit from our exchange. We’re only scratching the surface in the rise of open letter communications.