Ancient letters and modern social media

By Emily Pillinger

Earlier this year the new Digital Futures Institute at King’s invited people to submit videos reflecting on how we live well with technology.

I had been thinking a lot about letter-writing, ever since we held our Making Music out of Myth school workshop in James Corke-Webster’s Letters of Refuge exhibition at King’s last spring. James and I, along with Cheryl and Jeanne, are now preparing to rejoin the charity Art Refuge in Folkestone for a day of letter-writing and talking about ancient and modern displacement with migrants in the UK asylum system.

Between these two events I decided to translate a poem by the Roman poet Ovid: his imagined letter from Penelope (Heroides 1). And this semester I am teaching a module at King’s called ‘Latin Literary Letters’ with some fantastic MA students from King’s and UCL.   

All in all, it’s involved a lot of reflection on how the ancient technologies of writing, papyrus-making, shipping, and road-building, are in some ways simply ancient precursors of our modern digital technologies: our mobile devices, our email programmes, and our social media. If Ovid created a Penelope who was so desperate to contact Odysseus that she gave a letter to every passing traveller in case they might bump into her husband, so we too send out emails, messages, and social media posts - and even sometimes our own snail mail, hoping for human connection across time and space.

So I made a video about it, and put it on YouTube!