The death of letter writing

Every once in a while I'll hear a friend, family member, or colleague bring up the fact that letter writing, a once beautiful communication platform, has since been slain and replaced by email and instant messaging. I myself remember hand writing letters to my best out-of-town friends when I was a kid, mostly those who had moved away from Cooperstown or caught my eye at summer camp. A trip to the mailbox in my adolescent days certainly had a different feel than it does today. But I dare say that even though today's peer-to-peer messages don't have the ink smears, stickers, lipstick prints or the other qualities that we loved about letters, our social relationships with one another continue to thrive and our understanding of each others' thoughts, feelings, and plans for the future has only improved.

Though handwritten letters may have gone the way of the milkman, our capacity for communication has scaled proportionately with our improving infrastructure and technology. As the internet flourishes, so do social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, adding thousands of new users daily. And with more people to talk to, our personalized messages to one another have transformed from elegant & personal to lowercase & efficient. But I don't necessarily view this as a bad thing.

When I wrote letters to long lost friends and family members, a majority of their content comprised of updates about my everyday activities: who I was hanging out with, where I had gone on vacation, where I was working, and what music I was listening to. These details weren't customized for the recipient, but they were nonetheless important. Today, those "Scott-specific" life details that I want to share with everyone are delivered by a single Facebook profile instead of by dozens of of individual letters.

Because of the inherent redundancy of the essential common, non-personalized details, letter writing was an inefficient way of meeting our "keeping-in-touch" communication needs. It was a time consuming process that forced us to either make extra time for writing or pick and choose our recipients. Now, the substance of our messages can be more relevant and customized for each friend, as much of the overhead is handled by our online bulletin boards. This lets us keep in touch with more people with less effort.

A criticized downside of our current forms of electronic communication is the degraded quality of individual messages; we don't write with the same beauty and prose as our ancestors. However, I believe that our beautiful, prosaic writing has simply shifted to another platform. As technology enables me to share my photos, status updates, profile information, and efficient instant messages with my friends, I am able to concentrate my real writing elsewhere. The way I see it, real writing is far from its death. And the capabilities of electronic socialization combined with our ability to communicate with more people compensate for potentially lower quality language and grammar in our personalized messages.

After all, why do most of us communicate with our friends? To impress them with acrobatic linguistics? Or to tell them what we're up to, consult them for advice, and remind them that we care?

Felony DWI offenders

After learning about my cousin's recent arrest for DWI, I decided to digress from the normal genre of my site and share with you a letter I submitted to the editor of my hometown newspaper in upstate New York.

Though I love my cousin dearly and wish for nothing more than his wellbeing, I am enraged that he was allowed behind the wheel in the first place, which is what inspired me to write to the paper.

He has been convicted of driving while intoxicated multiple times. It had been a few years since his last conviction, and he was proud to recently recover his driving privileges. But before long, he was back to his old ways and got picked up Saturday for felony DWI. I am disappointed that drivers with multiple convictions are ever allowed to recover their unrestricted licenses. Repeat offenders, though requiring extensive alcohol and, potentially, mental treatment, are a complete menace to society.

Below is my letter to the editor:

As a former resident of Cooperstown, I regularly review the Daily Star online. Each time I read about an arrest for felony DWI, I applaud the police for their watchful, protective eyes. But I am beside myself with frustration and anger because the judicial arm of the law enables these repeat offenders to find their way back to the driver’s seat.

New York gives the moniker of Felony Drunk Driver for a driver’s second DWI incident. Repercussions of felony convictions are quite a bit higher than for misdemeanors. The maximum fine shoots from $1,000 to $5,000. The maximum jail time in a State prison skyrockets from one year to four years.

But clearly, the threat of State punishment is not enough to stop some repeat offenders, nor is the risk of seriously injuring innocent motorists and pedestrians. It should be obvious to judges that many criminals who continue to drink and drive despite previous fines and incarcerations are not capable of controlling their destructive behavior.

Sex offenders with multiple convictions are treated differently. Though not always permanently incarcerated, they often forfeit many civil liberties for the rest of their lives. So should repeat drunk drivers.

I challenge our judges to view repeat offenders as I do: as serious, uncontrolled threats to the safety of my family. Many of them need help; let us give it to them. All of them have been given a second chance; let us not be so generous with the third. After all, those to whom they pose the biggest threat are those of us who never needed a second chance.

Those who willfully risk the lives of their neighbors for mere personal convenience must be stopped with the utmost priority. Though the police can take them off the road, only the judges can keep them off.