Social Media, is it simply old fashioned correspondence?

I recently began a wonderful book " The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society".
It has me musing over the past.

We often hear talk about the onslaught of social media- the texting, the private messages on FB , our status updates, group invites et al, as if this is somehow new and bad.
The degeneration of human to human contact, the faceless intimacies. " He broke up with me in a text"

The book I am currently reading....
 (  I still can NOT get on the reading books online, bandwagon. I like  to smell  the paper and feel the book in my hands. Books are friends to be revisited over and over not transiently fleeting across a screen to disappear into the air - but I digress ... :) )

The book I am currently reading has rekindled a nostalgia in me.
It occurs to me  we have been here before.

I shift my thoughts back in time to elegant monogrammed calling cards being delivered to its intended by black and white clad butlers with white linens hanging off one arm.

Daily notes exchanged between BFF in stark white envelopes atop silver plates and crisp folds holding  little snippets of a life.

 Gentlemen  declaring their undying love for their betrothed with delicately structured prose dancing across parchment.

Appointment cards marking the social status of a life, dance cards filled with potential partners.

A time when we spoke  through the written word more eloquently and with more candor than society allowed face to face.

I think on these things and I wonder if we have come a sort of full circle.

Is texting the new calling card?

Do our status updates compare to those  letters between friends we find so fascinating from Jane Austen's world?

Will the telephone be replaced by the texted/twittered/FB word and if so, what does that mean for our language in the future?

Will smilies take over from 'cordially yours' ?

Will texting become the new dance of the prose of intimacy?

I do not profess to understand all this and I can not even begin to imagine what comes next.
I do however think I will start paying closer attention to my texts and, iphone spelling allowing, re adopt the 'cordially yours' of yesteryear.

Cordially Yours;
Kimmee