I really miss e-mail.
Before you look at me funny and silently consider whether I’ve gone off the deep end, let me add that I don’t miss all the e-mail I actually get: various sales communications from any store I’ve ever bought something from online, e-mail list digests, appointment reminders, notifications from Twitter, Facebook, Google+, WordPress, and let’s not forget bills and bank statements.
I miss the old days of e-mail when I didn’t get any of the above, and each e-mail I did receive was an electronic letter, worthy of excitement and anticipation. You can express so much personality in an e-mail. When I read a good e-mail, it almost feels like its writer is in the room with me. And the one-on-one nature of the communication means that e-mail builds relationships in an intimate way. These words were written for my eyes only–there is value in that.
I got my first e-mail account when I went away to college. My mom would print out the e-mails I sent her, and then she’d write a response and send it through snail mail. I tried my best to stay in touch with those friends who also had e-mail addresses. Those that didn’t…not so much. Mea culpa.
That first year, visiting the computer lab across the way to check e-mail was an event. We’d head over in our slippers in friendly camaraderie until we sat in front of those old glowing screens, at which point our focus was entirely on the act of checking e-mail. I spent so much time marveling at the wonder of e-mail, I made one of my best friends of freshman year in the computer lab.
E-mail was often my lifeline when travelling alone. I’d be meeting new people every day, but still spending hours at a stretch by myself. I learned how to eat by myself at a restaurant, but it was never a particularly joyful experience. When I got too lonely or felt too detached from anything permanent, I’d find an internet cafe and write to the friends who had become, whether they knew it or not, a kind of anchor. They reminded me of what it meant to have a home.
Nowadays I rarely receive this kind of e-mail. My inbox becomes clogged with messages that feel like work. I stay in touch with people via social media, a kind of communication that, while efficient, can also be impersonal. People “like” my statuses, but we don’t have the sort of conversations we’d have if we were discussing the same topic over e-mail. And too often it feels like the friendship is being held in stasis instead of being actively developed.
I do have one friend with whom I e-mail regularly, and it’s just as good as I remember. It’s also something of a miracle that we both managed to continue the correspondence, especially in the beginning. But I’m glad we did. If we had merely stayed in touch via Facebook and Twitter, we wouldn’t know each other half as well as we do now. We would only see the edges of each other’s lives instead of being able to go deeper. We might not even be friends at all.
Yes, I miss the golden age of e-mail. Do you?
The Practical Free Spirit 
Yes. And I still believe in, and try to keep up, the practice of treating emails as letters rather than as notes or status updates or long tweets. People don’t always reciprocate–in fact, many simply don’t reply because a letter takes work to reply to–but those who do reciprocate understand the value of such conversations, and that works for me.
I think things are moving close to a counterrevolution here, against the everything everywhere culture of the present Internet that makes it near impossible to find anything anywhere. The same thing happened with the early use of the printing press after Gutenberg, then again after the absolute glut of large cheap print ads that were plastered over every outdoor space during the early Victorian period, and then again when colour printing became cheap and billboards went up everywhere in the late 70s and early 80s. Each time the response was an emphasis on clean, spare designs, against the vapid in favour of the content-rich (at least in theory). It’s like we discover the means to create excess, and then have to relearn restraint. I hope this time the shift also includes less focus on the generic and more on the personal, less focus on social media and more on contemplative media. In the very least, I’m trying for these things in my own interactions with the web.
I have to say, I find the rise and development of the Internet to be a fascinating subject. I can’t wait to see what happens next! I too hope there can be room for the substantive as well as the more superficial. The historical parallels you point out are fascinating too–I hope you’re right!
I miss letter-type emails too. Like you I have a few e-penpals, but it’s nothing like what I started off with.
I wonder if maybe part of it is that you meet a large number of people in high school and college who are local and with whom you inevitably spend a lot of time with. So there’s more possibilities for e-mail buddies, but as time passes, the number of them slowly decreases.
OTOH, I feel like I meet a fair amount of people these days too…although they tend to not be local and I can only spend time with them in bursts.
my first year of college (1987), we had “webmail” or “netmail”. it took ten whole minutes for the message to reach the person sitting beside us; we thought it was the coolest thing since sliced bread. 😉 but yeah – i think both long, in-depth letter writing and emails have both gone he way of the dodo. it’s a shame, really. now i really miss real letters – and 15 cent stamps.
Maybe a wave of nostalgia will sweep over us and e-mail will make a comeback. Look at how popular Mary Robinette Kowal’s letter writing month was this year!
oh totally!! i took part. it was fun! 🙂
The issue might be one more of creating a context than creating a demand. I think that if people had an attractive, simple, very readable program that was meant specifically for getting emailed letters–no notes allowed, no bills or notices or anything but honest-to-goodness letters–that would be an excellent format that a lot of people would use (at least, from time to time) and would truly enjoy using. Less expensive than writing paper letters, and people wouldn’t have to read each others’ handwriting. 🙂 Maybe your husband would have some thoughts on its feasibility? On my part I could talk to some of my design and web development contacts–if I can find any of them that still do design.
I miss email too…the right kind of email. I think there’s an art to writing an email of the right length. Some missives just seem too long and weighty for email sometimes, especially if you could see the person face to face instead, and of course some emails are so brief as to just be status updates.