10:23:11
Dead Letter, E-mail Fatigue
New technology changes how we interact. For me, it's people stopped
writing letters. In a few decades, the art of correspondence, a
practice of educated society for literally thousands of years, seems to
have washed away with cheap or free long-distance phone calls, texting,
email, IM, and the like.
One quick personal example suggests how much, collectively, we've
subtracted from correspondence. I've corresponded for the better part
of twenty years with another writer. An author who years ago kept up a
fair list of correspondents, many inveterate book readers might
recognize. I mentioned a few months ago these are not times for letter
writing. He replied with regret his correspondents, me included, were
down to three. One, he's sure, doesn't have a computer!
![[journal]](journal.gif)
The writing of old-fashioned correspondence
has
durability. As I write this, I am looking at a diary kept by my
great-grandfather in 1868. Written in pencil, it's as fresh as if
written months ago. Contrast this low-tech attribute with email stored
on the electronic media of a hard drive. Who pays to recover that when
the drive crashes?
But in our speeded-up, always-connected world, the real loss is
something more basic. In William Powers' meditation on obsessive
connectivity, Hamlet's Blackberry
(2010), he argues for a pause to
reflect between message and response. Once upon a time, we received a
letter and took time to ponder its content and the writer's words. Then
we responded.
I suspect people still want that "pause to reflect and reply" author
Powers describes. Why else has the phenomenon of email fatigue and
unanswered missives set in?
When email first arrived on the scene, ten+ years ago for most of
us, it often read like letters, often more than a screenful. The
subject line could be a throwaway (like Hi!). But now with daily
inundation of one's INBOX, the subject line is everything. Nobody wades
through every email. The most useful key is DELETE.
So dead letter, email fatigue. People retreat from considered email
exchanges and instead deploy broadcast strategies, as in the endless
Christmas letter that is Facebook.
Or go for texting. No surprise, if one doesn't have unlimited
texting, the cost of an "over-the-limit" short digital burst is 20
cents each. So one text exchange costs about the same as first-class
postage for a one-ounce letter, anywhere in the United States, Alaska
and Hawaii included.
Ironic, isn't it? Someone still makes easy money, even if our communication seems poorer for it.
Read Charlie Dickinson's
story collection, The Cat
at Light's End, as an ebook in these downloadable
formats:
.mobi
(Kindle)
.epub (most other readers)
.pdf (for PCs)
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