Increase Your Email Size In 10 Days!
 
Several things occur to me as I sit here patiently waiting for my significant other (who is NOT to be referred to as “my friend” when making an introduction, as experience has taught me) to send me an invite to get a groovy new Gmail account (Google’s so-new-it’s-not-even-public email service). One of these mini-epiphanies is the quietly rational voice from in the back of my brain repeating, “You already have six email accounts.” Thankfully, I listen to that voice with the same regularity that I play albums by the Carpenters – it’ll happen once in a while, but the result is always boring and I end up regretting it (or in a vegetative state). The net result is my continued impatience for a new email experience.
 
The other thought that’s actively roaming around my noggin is how the advent of email in our shiny new age of easier communication is really eroding the art of letter writing, and maybe even writing in general, for that matter.
 
You see, as a typical mid-western American, I view email as a boon to my everyday life. First off, due to years of negative reinforcement while using the telephone (on the dispensing end of “customer service”), I’ve developed a fondness for talking on the phone that runs roughly parallel to the enjoyment I receive while cleaning my toilet. The end result is that I use email to communicate whenever remotely feasible, almost to the point of not getting to hear the cool ringtones that I paid to download onto my cell phone. So, the moral of the paragraph: Phone bad. Email good.
 
Now, as a reader of this little essay, you might come to the conclusion that I (being the short-order cook equivalent of a writer) take some care and detail in writing nice, prosaic letters to my friends. And you’re absolutely right in thinking that.
 
(Honestly, I’m completely lying out my ass by saying that. I was trying for a plot twist, but it just wasn’t going to work. Sorry for the failed ruse.)
 
My communications via email are total fragmented crap, and it’s because I suffer from the same problem that is spreading slowly around the plugged-in world – email’s TOO easy, and we’re all damn lazy. For example, here’s a reproduction of an email I’d typically send to my mother:
 
Hey,
 
Sorry I didn’t get back to you last night. Had a show, so I didn’t get home until like 11:30. Drop me a line back when you get a chance. And if you happen to think about it, please send me some of those pics you took while I was home.
 
Love you!
-Your kid
 
It’s a problem inherent to folks of my generation and those younger, since we’ve grown up in a world designed to not hold our attention, but I can see that it’s slowly starting to decay the correspondence of older generations as well. Here’s a hypothetical example of a reply from my mother to the email above:
 
You work too much, kiddo! Haven’t had time to get the pictures uploaded yet. Busy trying to keep up with the house, and I had to lead a 30-mile ride this morning. Oh well, someday I’ll have the energy.
 
You’re the best kid ever!
 
And it very well might not even be signed (which is a habit I too am guilty of). Why bother? It clearly says at the top of your screen who sent the mail to you. It’s all too easy to write short, clipped notes because you can always send another email 10 seconds later just as easily.
 
The fact is, people used to write long, eloquent letters to each other. Even the largely uneducated soldiers fighting in wars generations ago have left us touching, well-written letters to the loved ones they left behind – you know, the ones that PBS documentary content is based solely upon. Average folks like you and I used to spend serious time composing letters simply because it was the only way to communicate with someone at a distance… no phones, no fax, no rapid transportation. When you wrote a letter to someone, it had to be not only an investment of time to put as many details as possible into the content, but to tell an entire story to go with it. Maybe the last time you wrote to your cousin back east, your husband hadn’t contracted and died of typhoid. A one-line sentence of “Also, Josiah died yesterday from drinking bad water,” (Actually, for those of you scoring at home, that’d be cholera -- not typhoid. I couldn’t remember what typhoid did to you.) just wouldn’t cut it, would it? You’d need to fill in the timeline and breathe some meaning into that situation, because you only write to your cousin every three months -- and a month of that is just time spent getting the letters back and forth – one way! – from Duluth to Boston.
 
But email has changed the paradigm completely. Now thoughtful notes are mere minutes away, and the investment of effort that’s required is much, much lower. Coupled with the ability to send the same email to anywhere from tens to thousands of people at the same time, we’re generating a communication breakdown of a much different sense. Plus, with all this influx of largely uninteresting, run-of-the-mill correspondence coming our way, it’s becoming ever easier to simply tune it out all together and lose interest. That side of the problem is a potential danger because when we DO get a nice piece of email that someone took the time to properly author, it’s suddenly become far too easy to say “eh, I’ll get to it later.” Time passes, the reply becomes an afterthought, and soon you’re falling out of touch. I can speak from experience that this has been a real issue.
 
So I think it’s high time that we try to bring the art of letter writing back off the shelf, dust it off, and see if we can breathe some restored life into it. Take time this week to pick someone in your address book that you’ve not spoken with recently, and dedicate more than a minute to actually writing him or her a real letter. After all, it’d be nice that since you’re breaking up with your girlfriend by email after four years of dating, that you give her a little more than “I really don’t feel like being with you anymore. You’re crazy, BTW.”

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Dustin likes to pretend he wears the pants in the footnote household. Sadly this isn't the case, as he often forgets to wear pants altogether. Sitting in front of your computer all day will do that to you...