According to the U.N. telecon agency, the world now has approximately 6 billion cell phone subscriptions, which means there are nearly as many cell phones on the planet as people. Half a billion tweets get sent out into the universe each day, says Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter. Earlier this year, Facebook announced that it has reached 1.06 billion monthly active users, 618 million of whom use the site daily.
Although the U.S. Postal Service delayed its plans to end Saturday mail delivery, it's clear our current modes of communication are continuing to outpace the handwritten letter. I find myself wondering about the broader implications of this newer, quicker technology. What will we miss out on as as micro-messages take over and letters increasingly become relics of the past?
When my grandparents moved into an assisted living facility, I went to their place to help them sort through their belongings. Armed with several large garbage bags, I walked with Grandma through room after room, sorting their things into piles to be donated, tossed, or given to family members.
By the time we got to the basement, we were both spent—physically and emotionally. Then, just as we were finishing up in the final room, we nosed around in the back of a closet and uncovered a huge trunk. I heaved out the metal box and dusted off the stenciled lettering on the front.
"Lieutenant Voiland," I read in a whisper. My grandfather. I looked at Grandma and saw that her hand was clasped over her mouth. We wrestled the stubborn hinges open, and I sucked in my breath when I caught a glimpse inside. "Letters," I said. Letters indeed—there were hundreds of them.
"From the war," Grandma told me. "I wrote to your grandfather every day." I looked in the chest, and sure enough, there were two large stacks of letters: the ones on the left, all in coordinating blue envelopes and addressed in Grandma's careful script; the ones the right, mismatched and tattered, no doubt scrawled by my grandfather when he could spare a moment amid his missions on the European front.
The letters would have been treasure enough a generation ago, but now, as handwritten letters increasingly become things of the past, they carried even more of an aura of sanctity about them.
British writer John O'Connell, in his book, For the Love of Letters: The Joy of Slow Communication, describes the countercultural and increasingly unnatural act of handwriting a letter:
The nib touches the paper. And instinctively I follow the old formula. . . . My writing looks weird. I hand-write so infrequently these days that I've developed a graphic stammer—my brain's way of registering its impatience and bemusement. What are you doing? Just send an email! I haven't got all night.
I'm grateful for technology and the ways it allows us to stay connected with one another. Today a soldier in Afghanistan, for example, can email, text, or Skype with his loved ones instead of relying on the slow communication of an old-fashioned letter with a stamp.
And yet as I think about Grandma's trunk full of handwritten letters, I wonder if the demise of slow communication means we're missing out on something. For one thing, there's the personal nature of letter writing. With the exception of formatting choices and font preferences, all electronic messages look pretty much the same, no matter the source. In the words of master penman and calligrapher Jake Weidmann, "If we abdicate everything to the machines that we create, than what we are doing is we're creating a sterile world that is void of human influence. If we do that, especially with something that's as deeply personal as handwriting is, then I feel like we're missing out a lot on each other."
A handwritten letter is an individualized, sensory experience. I can see the distinctive loops of Grandma's writing, the blocky letters penned by her handsome soldier an ocean away. I inhale the faded-paper scent of old stationery. I feel the grain of the slightly corrugated paper under my fingertips. Perhaps the most striking aspect of my grandparents' treasure is the very tangibility of it. Here is the story of my grandparents' courtship over the span of several years, filled with tales of battles—at home and abroad—not to mention fears and hopes and dreams and plans for a future this couple prayed would come to pass. And it is all chronicled here in pen and ink, a legacy that can be handed down to the next generation and the one after that and the one after that until one day it may make its way into the hands of people for whom letters are nothing more than ancient relics, gone the way of papyrus scrolls and telegrams. As grateful as I am for our efficient modes of communication, I just can't imagine passing on a chest full of texts to my grandchildren someday.
Grandma was too shy to let me read the letters. "After I'm dead, honey," she told me with a wink. But I have a feeling those letters contain more depth and life than even the most profound tweet.
Journalist Catherine Field wrote in a New York Times article, "A good handwritten letter is a creative act, and not just because it is a visual and tactile pleasure. It is a deliberate act of exposure, a form of vulnerability, because handwriting opens a window on the soul in a way the cyber-communication can never do."
There's something about the form of the communication that instructs not only the delivery but also the content. The very act of forcing ourselves to slow down and write out our thoughts by hand evokes a different conversation than if we're firing off a quick text or email, composing a brief tweet, or jotting a note on someone's Facebook wall. Instead of writing about more temporary, immediate matters, we find ourselves slowing down, communicating about the deeper things in life.
John O'Connell puts it this way: "With letters, as opposed to emails, which are obviously sent and received instantaneously, correspondents are unable to reply immediately; so the results are (or should be) longer, more careful, more persuasive—more conscious of being written outwards, towards someone, indeed 'into' someone."
So why does it matter? Should we accept this new world of communication as our technological fate and leave things like postal services and letters as artifacts of another era? One technology isn't inherently more moral than another, and certainly God can work within the structure of any type of communication. But we are created in the image of a God who places value in slow relationships. He is a God who revealed himself through the written word—indeed, the New Testament itself is comprised mostly of letters—and God ultimately showed himself in the form of the incarnate Christ—the Word made flesh.
Perhaps it would have been easier if he'd communicated in the form of well-timed tweets—short and direct—instead of in the more complicated, mysterious form of 66 biblical books and a Savior who revealed truth largely through the slow art of storytelling. But maybe real relationships—both with him and with other people—can only go deep if we dig in to the messy, real parts of life that can't be summed up in 140 characters or less.
A letter "feels like an experiment in slowing down time," says John O'Connell, "or at least in highlighting the lag between clock time and the rate at which we register change. It wants to hold on to and explore the moment."
Technology is here to stay. The post office can't turn back the clock, and neither can we. But there's one thing we can do: we can intentionally seek out deep, real interactions with other people. Maybe that will happen over Skype or in an e-mail exchange, or maybe it will happen face-to-face, over a shared meal or a cup of coffee. Or perhaps it may even occur in the form of an actual piece of mail sent through the postal service, written with a pen on an old-fashioned piece of paper.
Whatever form the connection takes, my charge to all of us is to slow down time in a few of our key relationships. Let's put the busyness of life on pause for a moment to have an exchange steeped in meaning, one that is slow and inefficient, one that takes us outside the realm of time.
That kind of communication can be delivered any day of the week. Whether you have a stamp or not.
Stephanie Rische is a senior editor of nonfiction books at Tyndale House Publishers, as well as a freelance writer for publications such as Today's Christian Woman, Christian Marriage Today, and Significant Living magazine. She and her husband, Daniel, live in the Chicago area, where they enjoy riding their bikes, making homemade ice cream, and swapping bad puns. You can follow Stephanie blog, Stubbing My Toe on Grace, at stephanierische.wordpress.com.
