Letter Writing in the Digital Age

Don't write beyond the subject line.

In the information age, brevity comes first. I sent the following message to invite my friends to a popular Peruvian restaurant:

Near the intersection of Valencia and the 17'th Street sits the legendary Limon restaurant, whose succulent ribeye steaks and tender grilled scallops have earned its reputation far and wide in the Bay Area. To this restaurant I invite you to join me, on the wondrous Thursday of March the Tenth, at the felicitous hour of 7:00pm.

......

Soon, I received a reply asking why I sent an email talking about a restaurant. It dawned on me that the person did not read beyond the first sentence.

Email was just getting popular when I entered graduate school. My very first emails were sent to American schools inquiring about their application procedures. Internet was still a rarity in China at that time, and I paid 20 cents per minute to type my letters in the terminal room of the chemistry department of my college. I wrote short messages to save money.

Then I went to Columbia University. Immediately I had a free email account with unlimited letter writing privileges. I could write for free to all my friends who were similarly blessed with an email account. The internet revolution had started in earnest. Two and a half years after its launch on the Independence Day of 1996, Hotmail had more than 30 million active users. It seemed that suddenly everyone in the States was sending emails, and our inboxes exploded. Our workdays were transformed: the morning would begin with composing, reading, replying to and deleting emails; frequent visits to the inbox would punctuate the day; one last peek of the inbox would invariably precede our departure from work.

With the advent of every new technology, an old way of life must die. The victim of email is the post; email is killing letter-writing. Before email, I corresponded by hand-written letters with my friends and family. The letters were infrequent but thoughtfully composed. In them, I not only narrated the most significant events happening in my life, but also told of my ideas and opinions. Every letter was an intimate conversation, and the delay in the reply provided anticipation and suspense.

To send a postal mail, one has to seal the letter in an envelope, write down the send and the return address, put on a stamp, and drop it in a mailbox. Emails, in contrast, are different. Push one button and the message is on its way. This ease exercises a subconcious pressure on one's mind: the letter can, and therefore should, be sent as soon as possible. As a result, one rushes to complete the letter, pushes the send button, and moves on to the next message. Convenience is the enemy of depth.

I am probably one of the few surviving dinosaurs from the postal age who still read my friends' emails from the beginning to the end. But I have an advantage: my friends' emails tend to be short. They average two paragraphs, consisting of no more than three sentences each. They fall into the following general format:

I did some cool stuff. The stuff I did was really cool. I wish you did the same cool stuff too.

Want to do some cool stuff together sometime?

After proposing to my fiancee, I sent an email to my friends, telling my engagement story with details and great excitement. I fell cold on seeing the following reply:

Congratulations! So how did you do it?

The subject of my email was: "I am engaged!" The narrative of the full experience began in the first paragraph of the text.