Peter,

  I agree with the sentiment you forwarded.  But having been born when
pianos and victrolas were widespread but radios were a rarity in homes, I
see television as the initiator of the present sorry state of communication.
Its predecessors allowed people to go about doing useful things while
listening, but the TV pins them down to one spot.  They thus not only lose
muscular strength from lack of exercise and gain weight from munching but
also have only the bathroom as a quiet place where they can think and
reflect.  The TV set is likely to constantly fill the home with sounds far
more distracting than radio used to broadcast.  But now radio imitates
Television, and modern electronics permit people to fill their cars with
sounds that nearly exclude attention to anything else.

  I believe the Internet's not the problem; the way we use it is.  Of
course, spam doesn't help; we have to try to quickly delete as much as
possible from our inboxes in order to find what deserves our attention.
However, if spam can be stopped, we'll be able to let e-mail sit there while
we read and reread it, think about it, write a little in reply, move it to
the drafts folder, and continue writing for days or even weeks, during which
we may find nice things to include like what you sent.

Nelson Blachman
Oakland, Calif.

P.S.  In rereading it just now, however, I noticed the phrase "on a regular
basis," which represents for me a form of spam.  The adverb "regularly" does
the job with one-fourth as many words.  Elsewhere one often nowadays
encounters "on a daily/yearly  basis" for "daily" or "annually,"which are
other examples of this wordiness.  All that I wwrite, anyhow, needs to be
edited and re-edited before sending in order to try to  make sure it's
coherent and concise.  (I'm not sure I've succeeded here, but I did try.)
----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Altschul" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, December 06, 2003 11:23 AM
Subject: Expressions in the information age


> Expression in the Information Age By Andrew Lam, AlterNet December 3, 2003
>
> Thanks to the Internet, I have over the years managed to get back in touch
> with many long-lost friends. But one of them recently sent me an e-mail
> complaining that, now that we are communicating on a regular basis, she
> actually misses me more, not less.
>
> Astounded by the seemingly paradoxical statement I immediately hit reply:
> "L. what on earth do you mean?"
>
> Within half-an-hour or so, her e-mail came back with a strangely familiar
> passage in quotation marks.
>
> "Late last night the rain fell. It dripped and dropped against my
> windowsills announcing the departure of a lethargic winter. Yet L. I must
> confess, I didn't mind the winter nights. What I fear is the warmth of
> summer. When my skin turns bronze and my body is ripened for love, when
> that afternoon sun lingers a bit too long on my shoulders, oh L. I get in
> trouble."
>
> Only when I got to the end did it dawn on me that it was my own writing. I
> wrote this passage to L. more than a decade ago in a handwritten letter,
> something I regret to report that I rarely do these days.
>
> L. concluded: "See what I mean? Where is the writer of this letter now? We
> e-mail, but are we really in touch?"
>
> Hers is a fair accusation, though she, too, has stopped writing such
> expressive letters. Since we communicate by e-mail, we say things that are
> neither deep nor profound.
>
> We are communicating again after some silent years, but L. and I
> communicate badly. Our electronic correspondence stays on this shallower
> side of the lake, and our prose, if such it can be called, is only a bit
> wittier than the yellow pages of the phone book.
>
> "How's it going?" I would ask in one message. "Bye."
>
> "Went to see Stomp last night," L would answer in another.
>
> "Fantastic. But my kid's crying though. Got to go. Love."
>
> My suspicion is that in a world where we are constantly chatting, very
> little is actually being said. We substitute human emotions with those
> strange symbols :-) and :-(, hoping somehow these colons and exclamation
> points could substitute our sensibility and taste and convey the nuances
of
> our lives.
>
> The US Department of Education recently supported my suspicion. Last
> October, it found that only one in four students in high school, both
> public and private, could write "at a level of proficiency necessary for
> future job success."
>
> The survey also found that while students are often capable of "social
chit
> chat," language for the purpose of narration or argument is beyond them.
> Nine out of 10 of these students are native-born speakers of English.
>
> It is worse, actually, with people who speak English as a second language.
> Robert Woo, who hails from Hong Kong, says that he can't write in Chinese
> anymore.
>
> "I e-mail all my family and friends in Hongkong in English but I haven't
> written anything in Chinese in almost a decade. My parents used to get
> these expressive letters from me when I was in college, but they can read
> in English, via the Internet."
>
> He doubts that he can write in Chinese anymore. "Not enough time," he
said,
> shrugging, "not enough incentive. Besides, there's always the phone."
>
> So with speed and easy access, the first few casualties may be depth and
> style. But I fear the last might be literacy itself. "She was, like, you
> know, so mad ... " or so the housewife on a talk show began this morning,
> "and like I don't know why".
>
> Neither did I, to be honest, but her incoherence made me wonder what
> happened to language and ideas in a country where people are less self
> reflective and yet, at the same time, as if cursed by Andy Warhol, more
> expressive.
>
> To live in the information age is, in a way, to live in a modern day Tower
> of Babel. One is constantly communicating - with cell phones, e-mails,
> pagers and in chat rooms - but one may very well be out of touch. One gets
> on the "right" side of the digital divide but one might have to pay a
> price: Language is streamlined, and intimacy is forsaken for the high
> valued currency called information.
>
> Soon, I fear the thick novels of Tolstoy and Melville and the like will
> fall by the wayside as Americans and the rest of the wired world fail to
> understand or, for that matter, to create language that is complex and
> substantial.
>
> Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian professor of Renaissance literature, foresaw
> the decline of all that he loved and knew - the age of literacy. He
> predicted, instead, the rise of new oral/aural technologies. People
> chatting while driving, reading their e-mails at the coffee shop, but
don't
> pause long enough to reflect. Indeed, these days I find the only people
who
> write good letters are the old or those living in refugee camps or
soldiers
> writing from the war front. The dispossessed refugee, robbed of his home,
> his future uncertain, becomes a consummate writer. He picks up his pen and
> begins to bleed himself into words. And the soldier, too, who lives
> intimately with the knowledge of his own mortality, and who longs for the
> insularities of the world he left behind, finds his voice true and clear.
> For the rest of us in this age of mobility and information, there simply
> isn't any time for such a thing as a long, flowing, hand-written letter.
>
> Odd, isn't it, in a world where one does not need fire to boil water or a
> teller to withdraw cash, there isn't any time left to complete a whole
> paragraph?
>
> I am, alas, no exception. The impulse to write a handwritten letter has
> long left me. I am not unaware of the irony: Me, a writer and journalist
> who makes a living out of writing on the pages of various newspapers,
> finding it harder and harder to write a letter the old-fashioned way.
>
> Like everyone else, I am a hopeless e-mail addict who has been seduced by
> its split-second convenience, and only on special occasions do I dust off
> the writing pad and fountain pen to jot down thoughts and emotions and
> write something close to what you would call a narration.
>
> L., as if to chastise me, sent yet another passage from my past: "A
curtain
> of fog fell on the Merced lake today. Everything is obscure outside my
> window but I can hear the sea beyond the dunes and see a few joggers
> appearing in and out of the fog. Then I hear a seagull let out a piercing
> cry somewhere overhead, lost perhaps from its flock, and L., he might as
> well be singing my song."
>
> But I had already got the point and the cry of the seagull does strike its
> chord once more.
>
> Reading the passage I was overwhelmed by the desire to possess those
> letters I had sent away so freely a decade or so ago. Or rather, I longed
> to know him again, the lonely writer of those letters who never heard of
> such things as e-mails or the Internet and who lived in an age not so long
> ago, but that might as well belong to another era.
>
> It is one where the mailman still played the troubadour of sorts for
> star-crossed lovers, and not what he is now: The carrier of bills and junk
> mail.
>
> So. Dear L.: I miss you, too, dearly. Especially this foggy morning
walking
> again at our beach, I smelled that salty odor of the sea with its hint of
> dry kelp and dead fish wafting in the cold air and feel the caressing
> fingers of winter.
>
> I'm sorry I don't write letters anymore, sorry that I've lost the impulse.
> I am wracking my brain to think of how I can make it up to you.
>
> An ad in the paper to say I miss you, perhaps, or a billboard over the
exit
> to your house. Or, maybe, just maybe, an editorial.
>
> Andrew Lam
>
> ( href="mailto:[log in to unmask]">[log in to unmask]), an editor at
> Pacific News Service, is a journalist and short story writer.
>
>
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