News
Loose Talk by Les Cowan
08/07/2010 08:47:00
Pens, paper and Facebook friends
Anyone who hasn't spent the last thirty years in outer space or marooned on Love Island knows we're living in the Information Age. Whatever there is to know about anything - we now know more of it than anyone else in history - with all that information instantly available. My random web searches on Begonia, Beatles and Barbecue produced 1,820,000, 54,300,000 and 36,700,000 hits respectively in about 0.2 seconds each. In the case of any of them I could probably grown old and die before reading a tenth of it. So you would probably think that anything that could possibly count as information is bound to be in more plentiful supply than ever before. Wrong. I've recently stumbled on something truly informative that used to be part of almost everybody's life but has now almost entirely disappeared. It's not the secret knowledge of the druids or even the contents of latin volumes nobody can read any more. It's the humble, hand written, personal letter.
Now I'm well aware that the Post Office delivers millions more 'items'
than ever before - but how many of them are real letters? Almost none.
What we get is a deluge of pseudopost from banks, insurers, marketing
companies and a million catalogue distributers. But nobody we actually
know writing personally to us. And that's a very big change. Letter
writing used to be very common. Children to parents and back again,
sweethearts to each other, friends to friends, business contacts and
even total strangers to people they had something to say to. That's not
to say of course that the sum of interpersonal communication has
decreased - quite the opposite with the ghastly phenomenon of social
networking. Facebook and its ilk seem to mostly thrive on gossip,
backbiting, backstabbing, snide remarks and downright abuse. Better to
call it 'anti-social networking'. It's the electronic equivalent of road
rage where just because you're behind the keyboard of a computer it
seems to be OK to say things you would never say directly to a living
person for fear of a punch on the nose. But the destructive effect can
be the same.
But I digress. Personal correspondence is down. Total communication via
email, networking, phone and text is hugely up. So what's the problem?
Well, this train of thought comes about by having just read a wonderful
collection of letters by a very interesting person. Joy Davidman may not
be well known by that name, however, if I tell you in later life she
became Mrs C S Lewis and was partly the subject of the very successful
film Shadowlands then bells might ring. Lewis and Davidman met in late
middle age and had a short but intense romance before her early death.
Her collected letters Out of my Bone written over about thirty years are
a fascinating record not only of her life and growing relationship with
Lewis, but also of the times she lived in. Along the way we hear of her
typing the manuscript of Lewis's famous Screwtape Letters or that a new
book in the children's Narnia stories has just been completed or that
they are having lunch with T S Eliot or a pint of the best with Arthur C
Clarke (who has just become divorced from his nightclub hostess wife of
18 months to whom he will be paying $5,000 per year allowance!) Besides
this there is all of Davidman's own wit and wisdom alongside efforts to
cope with lone parenthood, struggles to make ends meet and eventually
her losing battle with cancer.
Now of course, writing by hand still more or less survives so a
collection by some interesting 21st-century figure is still entirely
possible, but the fact is that it's just hugely less likely than a
generation ago. It is just so much easier and convenient to bang off a
quick email. It's quicker, more convenient to reply to and easier to
keep track of. What's not to like? Well - an envelope with your name on
it that someone has addressed by hand, filled with a three-page letter
they've just sat down at the kitchen table and written, stuck a stamp on
and dropped in a post box - that's what. It's the very inconvenience
and effort I appreciate. Someone was thinking of me and took the time
and effort not to send an email. Wonderful.
And I recently received and appreciated just such a letter - probably
the first in years. An old (ie former - not actually old) university pal
we had spend New Year with heard that my Mum had just passed away and
wrote by way of condolence. But rather than just a card and a brief
'thinking of you at this sad time' (though that would also have been
appreciated), they took the time and effort to sympathise, chat, update,
comment, question, joke, laugh (on paper) and express something our own
thirty years of friendship. Whatever else it does well, email just
isn't the same.
So, what you get a glimpse of in a letter is relationship expressed with
pen, paper, stamps and envelopes, journeys to the post box, delivery by
the post man and the pleasure of receiving, opening, reading and
keeping that letter over most of a lifetime. Compared to that the
invitation to be someone's 'friend' on Facebook somehow doesn't quite
cut the mustard.