Commentary: Internet age of e-mail and fast communication causing the decline of letter writing

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Commentary: Internet age of e-mail and fast communication causing the decline of letter writing

Host: ROBERT SIEGELTime: 8:00-9:00 PM

ROBERT SIEGEL, host:

One consequence of the online revolution is the decline of letter writing. These days, a handwritten letter in the mailbox is a rarity. And commentator Andrew Lam says we may be saving the price of postage, but we're losing something that's priceless.

ANDREW LAM:

Thanks to e-mail and the Internet, I have managed to get back in touch with many long-lost friends. Yet, one of them recently sent me an e-mail complaining that now that we are communicating on a regular basis, she actually misses me more, not less. Astounded, I immediately hit `reply.' `Elle(ph), what on earth do you mean?' And her e-mail came back with a strangely familiar passage in quotation marks.

"Late last night, the rain fell. It dripped and dropped against my window sills, announcing the departure of the lethargic winter. Yet, Elle, I must confess, I didn't mind the winter nights. What I fear is the warmth of summer when that afternoon sun lingers a bit too long on my shoulders, my lips. Elle, I get in trouble."

It was my own writing. I wrote this passage to her more than a decade ago in a handwritten letter, something I regret to report that I rarely do anymore. Elle concluded with satisfaction, `See? Where is the writer of this letter now? We e-mail, we chat, but are we really in touch?'

Indeed, if Elle and I are communicating again after some silent years, we communicate badly. Our sentences are fragmented and our thoughts jumbled, and our prose stays on the shallower side of the lake. My suspicion is that in a world where we are constantly chatting, very little is actually being said. To live in the information age is, in a way, to live in a modern-day Tower of Babel. One is constantly communicating with cell phones and pagers and chat rooms, but one may very well be out of touch. One gets on the right side of the digital divide, but one pays a heavy price. Language is streamlined, and intimacy is forsaken for the high-value currency called information.

Odd that in a world where one does not need fire to boil water or a teller to withdraw cash, there isn't any time left to complete a whole paragraph, let alone a self-reflective sentence. Reading the passage Elle sent me, I was overwhelmed by the desire to possess those letters I had sent away long ago; or, rather, I longed to know him again, that lonely writer who never heard of such things as e-mails or Internet in an age not long ago but already another era, one where the mailman still played a troubadour of sort for star-crossed lovers and not what he is now, the carrier of bills and junk mail.

So, dear Elle, I miss you, too. I'm sorry I don't write letters anymore, sorry that I've lost the impulse. But perhaps I can make it up to you some other ways, an ad in the paper to say I miss you maybe, or a billboard over the exit to your house, or maybe a commentary on the radio.

SIEGEL: Andrew Lam is an editor with the Pacific News Service.

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