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?