RIP Snail Mail - Not So Fast

The Christian Science Monitor yesterday published a piece entitled In an electronic age, the letter endures. It's ironic that I'm using a blog to discuss paper-based communication. But the truth is we are in the process of losing something very important in our move from snail mail to electronic-based forms of interaction.

Yes, it is true that e-mail and its companion technologies facilitate a volume and speed of interaction that physical media will never even approach. It is also true that lower barriers to entry - namely cost-per-message and reduced logistical requirements to get said message from point A to point B - open up the possibility of communicating with folks who otherwise would have never heard from you.

But the immediacy of e-mail makes for an obvious dilution in the quality of our messaging. Compare the typical e-mail (or worse, instant message) of today with a letter from years ago. Letters forced us to sit up straight and think about what we said and how we said it. E-mail has turned us all into vocabulary-and-grammar-challenged slackers.

Beyond mere textbook knowledge and application of the language, the attics of tomorrow will have no shoeboxes filled with letters. Actual paper and ink represent a physical connection to the person who wrote you. No inbox can ever be as rich. And even if you think it is, and you want to burn your e-mail correspondence onto CD for posterity, the computers of tomorrow likely won't be able to read them anyway.

Technology advances every day. I'm not sure we're advancing along with it.