Greetings! The Art Of Letter-Writing Is Revived By The Simplicity Of Computer Commiunications

My brother wrote me a letter last week. It was a nice one. Long and full of details about his children, his job, his friends and his recent beermaking experiments. I was glad to get it.

It was the first letter I had received from him in probably a decade. I got it via the computer, e-mail that is, over the Internet. Like a lot of people, my brother found tapping out words on a screen, and then pushing the send button, easier and more appealing than putting pen to paper, or using any medium that in the end necessitated an envelope and a stamp.

If the telephone killed letter writing, which it did, then the computer may be bringing it back, at least in another form.

My brother probably said it best.

“I really like this e-mail,’ he said during this lengthy letter. “One of the problems with letters for me is that I like to put words down on a typewriter, not longhand. Also, I get bogged down looking for paper and stamps, etc. This gives me a chance to bang out what I want to say and not have to worry about the details.”

It’s funny how mundane factors can make something so much more appealing. But they do. Certainly one big bonus with e-mail is having no involvement with the U.S. Postal Service. No looking for stamps that have just gone up in price so now you’re out of them. No remembering to buy more stamps at the post office that isn’t open. No remembering to put the envelope in the mailbox on the way to work. No licking of any kind.

Various commentators have noticed that the interconnected world of the Internet is bringing back the practice of scripted communication.

Rodger Kamenetz, author of “The Jew in the Lotus” and a confirmed cybernaut, believes e-mail is a new kind of communication, with some of the home-cooked goodness of an enveloped-enclosed letter but with the fast-food quickness of the telephone call.

“It has the immediacy and intimacy of a telephone call but the slight distance of writing,” Kamenetz said, expanding on an essay he wrote on the subject for AWP Chronicle, a literary journal published by Associated Writing Programs.

“Exchanges on the Internet have the spontaneity of conversational speech but some of the rigor and substance of letter writing,” said David W. Fenza, publications editor of Associated Writing Programs at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. “People don’t feel the weight of formality on them, but they are being a little more careful and thoughtful about what they are saying.”

Still, not everyone loves e-mail.

Sven Birkerts, a book reviewer and essayist, sees e-mail and the expanding use of the computer as eroding the meditative reverie and concentration that accompanies traditional writing and reading. Birkerts is the author of “The Gutenberg Elegies” (Faber & Faber 1994), which is a homage to the joys of producing or consuming the printed word on paper. It is also a skillful attack on the contemporary culture of the computer.

In an interview from his home in Massachusetts, he dismissed my brother’s letter as a rare bit of meaningful communication in a sea of more tawdry exchanges.

“My immediate sense is that this is more of a special case than what normally happens,” Birkerts said. The relative swiftness of e-mail, Birkerts said, is accompanied by a corresponding decrease in thoughtfulness.

“I think they are implicitly less permanent,” Birkerts said of e-mail messages. “The words are floating in a different element.”

Of course, writing e-mail messages is just one wrinkle of the enormous world of the Internet. But of all the many functions of the new plugged-in and wired world, I find the ability to send notes to friends and colleagues the most immediately seductive. I suspect others do as well.

My brother has been tapping out notes to me regularly now. And this comes just weeks after he joined America Online through a free, monthly trial and informed me that he wouldn’t use it much.

Kamenetz believes we may get to the point where e-mail capabilities will be a must.

“I think it will become as indispensable as the telephone,” Kamenetz said. “Our demand for response is becoming instantaneous.”

Whatever the long-term pluses and minuses of the new world, I know I like turning on the computer, plugging into the Internet and finding a new letter from my brother.