I've decided to resurrect my long-dormant blog. I can't promise too much, but I will do my best to add to the din of opinionated white guys on the internet.
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One of the books I have on my Amazon wish list is The Essential Groucho, a collection of the writings of Groucho Marx, including some of famous correspondence with T.S. Eliot. Marx was a famous letter-writer, and like Dickens, and Chekov and others, his letters have been collected into books for us to marvel at how wonderful correspondence was in the pre-internet days. And while I enjoy reading letters, I am not among the throngs of people crying for the death of the letter.
Letters were the primary form of communication for people who lived some distance apart to communicate. However, I doubt that many of the famous letter writing pairs, lets say Thomas Jefferson and John Adams at the end of their lives, would have preferred to write letters versus having a real-time conversation over the telephone, or a series of short emails or instant messages (or wall posts if we're really 21st century) in which they could reply at a more convenient and timely pace. Or would Chekov really had rather written to his wife who was acting 1400 miles away in St. Petersburg, or be able to video chat with her every night?
The reason letter writing died is not because we are lazy; it is because technology has trumped hand-writing letters. In a world where my 80 year old great-aunt has an email address and my 65 year old dad uses AIM at work, and where everyone I know has a cell phone, and where travel is far easier, faster, and cheaper than in years past, why would anyone write a letter today?
Sure, I love getting mail, and I love that feeling of seeing an actual piece of mail in my box as opposed to the mortgage bill or Duquesne looking for money - but i would gladly abandon that feeling altogether if it meant the regression of communication technology back even a decade.
That being said, fewer and fewer people can string together a few sentences nowadays, and maybe that is a reflection of a society in which proper letter writing isn't encouraged. However, proper writing instruction in schools could easily make up the difference in the lack of skill that young 'ins have lost because of letter writing.
But I'm not giving up email unless you pry the keyboard from my cold, dead fingers.
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Part of the reason i stopped blogging is because no one would ever respond to what i wrote. So respond!
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1 comment:
You know it was not so long ago that letter writing was thriving. In The Stand the "Claire" character is writing a letter to her friend in a time period that was the early 90s. It reminded me that my Mom used to write letters when I was young. I couldn't tell you the last time I wrote a letter.
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