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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