Opinion : Tweets from Walden Pond

Anyone who lives in this world where the number of phones in America (cell phones and land lines outnumbers actual Americans by a 5:3 ratio can understand Nate's statement.

"Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other."

Add to that the number of people with nothing to say but still insist on saying it via TV talk and reality shows, Facebook, Twitter and countless other modern menaces, and you can more fully appreciate what Nate means by "cheap."

Nate did not rail against the technology -- he recognized it as necessary for improving life for all. But he hated the fact that the way society was changing was leading people to communicate more without having anything of value to communicate.

Funny thing is, Nate -- Nathaniel Hawthorne -- wrote those words in his chapter called "Solitude" in his book, "On Walden Pond," in 1854, two decades before Alexander Graham Bell whispered the first words into a telephone.

This is how Hawthornecontinued his complaint about society's cheap communication:

"We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war. We meet at the post-office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications. Consider the girls in a factory- never alone, hardly in their dreams. It would be better if there were but one inhabitant to a square mile, as where I live. The value of a man is not in his skin, that we should touch him."

I wonder what Hawthornewould have had to say about this era, when just about everyone has a phone in a purse or pocket, if not already attached to his or hear head.

The title of this article was an attempt to be facetious. I do not believe Walden would be bombarding us with consistent updates, like modern celebrities do.

If he were alive and if he had a twitter account, I believe all he would type into his phone (assuming he had any signal at all at Walden Pond), and his followers would see the following message: "WPond1854 Nathaniel Hawthorne. Stop writing. Go live so that B4 your next tweet, you have something that is seriously worth sharing."

And the date at the end of the message would not be measured in how many hours ago he sent it, but how many weeks or months.