Apparently today is the day of me not appreciating other people's appreciation of old tech at the expense of new tech (because isn't it slightly hypocritical to write an online article about why the internet is the devil?). At Slate, Megan Marshall writes about how emails will never replace letters for biographical research. Why? Because people write shit emails.
I rebut: people wrote shit letters as well as good letters—we just conveniently ignore the bad. So we can safely ignore the bad emails, and assume that people who write well probably write long, involved emails the way people used to write letters back in the olden days of the 1990s. And eventually we can hack into their email accounts and air their dirty laundry to the world.
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Love the tag...bloggers are people too. You, Eric, and Le R have officially been nominated for the Blog Tag Hall of Fame. If there is such a thing.
ReplyDeleteThis is hilarious :). I do think the technology-wary tend to forget that it's people using everything, be it old or new. People, man. It is what it is.
ReplyDeleteThat is an indefensible position. I mean, if they are literally digging up Shakespeare's yard trying to find the remains of what he ate (and if they find organic remains that match the era how do they know whose they were, anyway?) you can't tell me no one would want to see the text exchange between Barack and Michele Obama? People are incredibly fascinated with Tiger Woods' voice mail messages.
ReplyDeleteI wrote an actual seminar paper in college on letter writing as a research tool for writers. I used the letters of Flannery O'Connor for my paper. I would have read (and used) any other medium she had available for my research. Email in particular reveals so much because it is casual, chatty.