Mail

Is e-mail the new snail mail?  Then what's snail mail?  Hieroglyphics chiseled in stone?  Yes, I had to use spell check to spell hieroglyphics, but only because I reversed the i and the e.

I was just reading this article in the New York Times (what am I going to do when they go to paywall?) about how traffic to e-mail sites is in steady decline because that's just not how people communicate anymore.  It's all text messages and Facebook messages.  I'm guilty of it, too; why keep track of someone's current e-mail address when I can just pop over to Facebook?  Remember address books?  Holy crap.

Perhaps this is how my parents feel about letters and phone calls, but I remember e-mail with fondness.  All the way back to the sixth grade, when I shared my parents' ISP-provided e-mail account, trading e-mails with all of two people, somehow allowing myself to believe my dad wasn't reading them.  Before you protest, Dad, I still remember the time I made a document called "journal" to see if you would try to read it, which you did.  Then I discovered what was almost too good to be true: that there were websites that would give you e-mail for free.  So my first personal e-mail address became nmk116@startrekmail.com.

Yes, that's right.

I think my current e-mail address on Gmail represents the longest I've ever had one.  Six, almost seven years now?  The days of people changing e-mail addresses, I think, are mostly over.

Anyway, I'm off on a tangent, which is what happens when you get a blogger with severe ADHD.  I ask if e-mail is the new snail mail because it has been reduced to a formality.  I use it for work and parents, and that's about it.  My inbox, starting with the most recent e-mail, has messages from the following senders:  Myself, Mom, a co-worker, CouchSurfing, Mom, Mom, a group of friends, Mom, Mom, Mom, and Mom (the frequent appearances of my mother are mostly from conversation; I [still] use IMAP and detest the thread view of e-mails).

I have recently found a new use for e-mail: formal letters.  The kind other people like to write out and send to my physical metal mailbox--the kind I love getting--are just too hard for me to write.  My handwriting sucks, I don't have any stamps, and I can't keep up with my thoughts unless I'm using a keyboard.  So I write eloquent e-mails and attach stationary.

Since I cannot help but think philosophically (my philosophy major housemate gave me a book in he inscribed "from a lover of wisdom to a lover of peace with a philosopher's soul"), my concern is more than just nostalgia.  I have to ask, what are the implications on our minds and our societies when we can have fifty conversations without even leaving our rooms?  We were not designed to communicate as much as we do.  Our brains scatter in a thousand directions.  Attention deficit becomes the norm.  Is looking longingly at a past being a luddite, or just self-preservation?

While writing this post I talked with Brandi, who linked me to this manifesto.  I think it's worth a read.