E-Mail Or Road To Hell? Computers Allow Us To Keep In Touch Even When We Have No Way To Touch

The technology explosion has allowed us to keep in closer, faster touch with one another. Is this deepening our bonds with fellow human beings or destroying our privacy and leisure time? Two Spokesman-Review writers share their very different views.

By age 15, I’d taken care of many babies.

But Tony was the first warm bundle I ever held and thought: “Wow. It would be neat to have a kid of my own someday.”

Eventually, I did. Jake even came equipped with his Uncle Tony’s blue eyes and blond hair. But I’ve had little chance to compare them side-by-side. I left my Illinois hometown for college, and then the West, and never really got to know my youngest brother.

That’s changing, thanks to electronic mail.

Seven of us nine children in the Titone family are “on line.” So are my parents. From New Jersey to North Idaho, from Dallas to D.C., e-mail wizardry is tightening the weave of our close-knit family.

My daily rituals include coming home from work, switching on the computer and checking my electronic mailbox. There’s almost always a personal note there, sometimes several. My curbside mailbox, in sorry comparison, often contains nothing but bills and catalogs.

E-mail certainly has its limitations. There’s no substitute for seeing and touching. Instead of my computer, I’d rather be sitting at my folks’ kitchen table, cheating at Scrabble with my sisters and munching Mom’s homemade bread.

I’m here today, though, to preach the glories of e-mail. For family communication, it’s the next best thing to a kitchen table. It has some advantages over phone calls. For one thing, it’s cheaper. While most people pay a monthly access fee, most do not pay long-distance charges. It’s also efficient: You can write more than one person at a time.

E-mail is great for early risers, night owls and people who are time zones apart. I can transmit a letter at 10 p.m. to Tony in New Jersey, where it’s 1 a.m. and he’s in bed. He can read it at 8 a.m. Eastern Time, when I’m still snoozing.

What I like best about e-mail isn’t the cost or convenience, though. It’s helped me make new friends and grow closer to old ones, especially those who share my last name. I’ve learned that Dad, a longtime newspaper production manager, writes so clearly and cleverly that he could’ve had a career in the news department.

When my youngest nephew got his first tooth, I heard about it. When sister Maureen narrowly escaped a storm that made national news, I quickly knew that she was OK. (She said the hail was the size of grapefruit. I say she’s been in Texas too long.)

I chuckled when Tony and his wife wrote about the “weed police” who patrol their community garden. That prompted a note from our brother Drew, who said weeds are ignored in his Ohio vegetable patch: “Our motto is ‘survival of the fittest.”’

Food is a big Titone family theme. I couldn’t attend the Mother’s Day brunch hosted by sister Marilyn, but probably gained weight just reading about the casseroles, waffles, pancakes, fresh fruit toppings and multiple meats.

I know that the strawberries are ripe in Illinois and what kinds of produce truck farmers are selling in the nation’s capital. I get restaurant reviews and recipes.

Most serious family messages still come in phone calls. That’s for the best. But because written words are a big part of my life, I’m delighted that electronic mail is here to keep alive the art of letter writing. , DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Staff illustration by A. Heitner

MEMO: See accompanying story by Ken Sands under the headline: E-Mail or Road to Hell?/ Technology is fine, but we all need a time and place that’s ours, and ours alone