THE HANDWRITTEN LETTER
A. Michael Noll
July 16, 1996
[first published as " The e-mail generation puts its stamp of approval on the written letter," The Sunday Star-Ledger, July 21,1996, Section Ten, p. 5.]
Last semester, I taught an honors seminar to 10 undergraduate students. As I would expect today, all 10 students used e-mail and the Internet. The great surprise to me was that they all also wrote and received handwritten letters by post!
I have since spoken to other undergraduate students and discovered that they too write and receive conventional letters. When I told this finding to attendees at a recent conference, there was a gasp at the surprise that anyone was still writing personal handwritten letters, particularly students.
When I have ask students why they still write handwritten letters, they say that the handwritten letter is personal and intimate. They state that e-mail is impersonal and clearly not private since nearly anyone can have access or can easily forward a personal letter to others. They tell me that they save many letters for rereading later.
Unlike students, most faculty today no longer write handwritten letters. They mostly use e-mail. In fact, my school has a policy that all faculty should use e-mail. I am one of the few holdouts who defy this policy.
A colleague routinely sends me old-fashioned typed letters by post. I cherish his letters, knowing that he typed them personally and took the time and effort to mail them to me. I respond instantly when I receive one of his letters. But now even he has been captured by the cyber world, and he repeatedly asks me for my e-mail address. I do not have one, so he is forced to type his letters to me. Soon he will be lost in cyber-space, and I will no longer receive his letters.
Handwritten letters are cherished and saved, sometimes even collected and wrapped in ribbon. E-mail is instant and transitory--quick, fast messages. I know a colleague who sent an e-mail to another colleague saying personal critical things but goofed and inadvertently posted the e-mail on a bulletin board for general consumption.
The impersonal nature of cyber-space does not lend itself to the warmth and personal self-disclosure of the posted handwritten letter. I can not imagine collecting, saving, and cherishing e-mails--nor how to wrap disks of e-mails in ribbon.
Could it be that many oldsters have been too quick to adopt the supposed efficiency of e-mail and have forgotten the thrill of receiving a letter by post? Do our young students have the good sense to cherish the handwritten letter that has become a relic of the past to we older professionals?
In our rush to adopt the new in the name of efficiency and instantaneous communication, have we forgotten to take the time to gather and ponder our thoughts and to write in leisure rather than in haste and pressure? Have we forgotten the message that the time and care of a personal handwritten letter sends? Are all our communications with only colleagues and business associates that we no longer have close friends to whom to write a letter by hand?
Many years ago, the French computer-scientist Jacques Vallee mentioned to me the intimacy of the love letter--of the things one would never say in person but would write in a letter.
A few year ago I received a hand-written letter from a top executive of a large telecommunication company chastising me for an op-ed piece that had angered him. The fact that he wrote it personally with no review by a secretary or his staff greatly increased its impact on me. I still have it. Had it come by e-mail, I probably would have quickly trashed it or perhaps copied it for distribution to the whole world, greatly to his and my ultimate embarrassment. Or I might have as quickly responded by e-mail in anger to him and regretted it later. This letter and how it was written and mailed to me told me much about the author's temperament and personality--none of which would have been revealed by the cold of cyber-space.
In this day of instant electronic communication by the telephone, fax, and e-mail, it is heartening to know that the handwritten letter is still with us. So too are those greeting cards that we buy for those special occasions for those special persons and those post cards that we love to receive and display above our desks or on our refrigerators. The new electronic media have their place too, but not on my refrigerator
A. MICHAEL NOLL is a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. His new book Highway of Dreams will be published later this year by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. © 1996 AMN
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