Nice piece on if:book about e-mail and its implications on literary history.
There isn’t necessarily anything less rich about email correspondence. It excels at capturing a vibrant volley of words with great immediacy, whereas paper letters permit deeper communiques, fewer and father between. But in some cases, these characterizations do not hold up. With reliable postal service, letters can fly back and forth quite rapidly. And just because an email suddenly appears in your box does not mean that it will be immediately read, let alone replied to. Sometimes we write long email letters, expecting that the receiver is busy and will take time to reply. These differences, true and false, are worth evaluating.
But if collected emails are to become a literary tool, there is no question that we will need more reliable ways of archiving and preserving digital correspondence.
I wrote about this once, almost ten years ago, in college. It’s not a very good paper, but it was fun in that we had to write a paper and present it as a web site. In 1996, that was pretty advanced stuff. Anyway, here’s the paper I wrote:
“Keeping in Touch: Letter-Writing, Technology, and Notions of Personal Correspondence” (available under creative commons if anyone wants to do anything with it).
[Also see: the NYT piece that ostensibly inspired Ben's piece.]
