Men And Women Of Letters Take To Gentle Art Of E-Mail
In the foothills of the Ural Mountains at the edge of Siberia, Irina Blinoskova wrote each day to her new friend, Ellen Fiedler, in Chicago. She told of her enjoyment of the previous night’s concert or described a piece of chamber music she had just heard.
Half a planet away, Fiedler, an associate professor in education at Northeastern University, wrote back from her apartment overlooking Lake Michigan, solidifying the friendship.
“She would write letters late at night, and I would do it right after classes,” said Blinoskova, who teaches English, German and French at Urals State Pedagogical University in Ekaterinburg. “But because of the 11-hour time shift, really very little time separated us. We proved to be so much alike that we exchanged the tiniest details of our personal life.”
Until recently, letter-writing was a method of communication in sharp decline, scorned as too slow by a society used to the immediacy of the telephone. Only 6 percent of U.S. mail consists of personal communication, according to The Letter Exchange in Albany, Calif., an organization set up to promote letter writing.
But in a high-tech, low-tech twist, the use by ordinary people of computers in homes and businesses to send electronic messages has led to a resurgence in written communication.
“Letter-writing is a grand tradition that was being lost, and I think e-mail has really changed that,” said Bill McKeen, a journalism professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
“People who use e-mail don’t all fit the cliche of the dweeb living behind a computer screen,” McKeen said. “A lot of people recognize this as a very nice adjunct to other forms of communication. Some even say we are on the threshold of a new era.”
Fielder is one of two Northeastern faculty members who went to Ekaterinburg in June of 1994 to set up a computer lab at Blinoskova’s university. Blinoskova is now in Chicago to obtain a master’s degree in gifted education at Northeastern, with Fiedler as one of her teachers.
The distance between Russia and the United States made computers the only practical way Blinoskova and Fielder could stay in touch.
But many people who have ready access to phones and next-day mail say they have come to prefer the convenience and relative permanence of electronic messages.
Robert Phipps, a graduate student at the University of West Virginia, keeps in touch with friends only five to 10 miles away by e-mail.
“You have an almost immediate response and you have a record of what you have written and what you get back,” Phipps said. “Regular mail is so slow, and my friends and I are so busy that we wouldn’t have time to talk on the phone.”
E-mail is much cheaper than talking on the phone, especially long distance, because the writer has to pay only for the time it takes for the message to be sent in virtually seconds. E-mail can be written and read while the computer is disconnected from the phone lines. It is also less intrusive, because e-mail can be written and read at one’s convenience.
If the electronic communication is in the form of chat-room discussions or posts to message boards, however, the savings can disappear into online charges.
Some critics denigrate e-mail as being too informal and chatty to be considered true writing. But while abominations of spelling and grammar do appear in cyberspace, so do some rather sophisticated literary allusions.
In the midst of a debate on the effect of artificial light on star-gazing, for example, Rebecca, 15, defended light as comforting, and ended her message with the cryptic comment, “Cottleston Pie.”
Tom Farrell of Lawrence, Kan., a former Air Force communications engineer working on a doctorate in electrical engineering, asked Rebecca what “Cottleston Pie” meant.
“It means to simply let things be … not to worry about things you have no control over,” said Rebecca, who lives in Wichita. “It’s a principle of Taoism.”
Rebecca says she was quoting from “The Tao of Pooh,” in which Benjamin Hoff used A.A. Milne’s classic “Winnie the Pooh” to explain Taoism.
In her written answer to Farrell, 33, Rebecca quoted the first verse of “Cottleston Pie,” which Pooh Bear sings to Eeyore on his birthday.
“Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie,
A fly can’t bird, but a bird can fly.
Ask me a riddle and I’ll reply,
Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie.”
“We have nearly abandoned written language in this culture, and it is really good that e-mail is bringing it back,” said Robert May, frequent e-mailer and senior vice president of TEMPO, the entertainment division of Kaytell International, based in Atlanta.
Cynthia Schneider, a Native American in Pueblo, Colo., says e-mail has helped her focus her writing.
“In a surface letter, I don’t get my sentences sent back to me like I do on the Internet,” said Schneider, who has a law degree and teaches college business courses. “This enables me to see how my writing style must be more clear and tight to convey my message.”
Schneider started using e-mail to help her husband seek work during two years of unemployment. That has led to a joint project with e-mail pal Lea Docken of Sioux City, Iowa, to write a book on unemployment among Baby Boomers.