This week I received a physical letter in the mail. It was from a 90-year-old woman whom I guess you could say is my Fag Hag-in-Law (my fag hag's grandmother/new modes of learning, new modes of kinship?). The pertinent issue to the class is that Mrs. Bornstein's writing style was evidently untainted by digital technology: as if she had never been "exposed" to any new writing outlets since WWII. She gave me updates on her life, her family's life and world affairs as if she were my first and only source for them. As if I hadn't gotten the same news (her granddaughter's summer activities) by text message, phone call, Google chat, Facebook and postal card exchanges months in advance.
"To my well travelled, very sharp, dear, dear friend," she announces on the top of the text, revealing an attempt for intimacy and the lack of ubiquitousness of her "interface". She embellishes her words, works hard for her adjectives because this is not a fragment of communication that she plans on engaging in very often. This may be the only letter she will ever send me.
It is also worth noting the way she bids goodbye, "Affectionately, Helen", which one could liken to the "emoticons" of today (yesterday?). Which signals the different approaches for portraying authorial intention/mood and, perhaps, language's inevitable failure to "handle everything" -- its ultimate need for an infinite barrage of supplements.
This letter, written by a woman born in 1919, is not only a potential relic -- whose writing will still bear residues from a pre-digital era once Mrs. Bornstein's generation dies off? -- but also a great way to bring to the surface what has and what hasn't been de-formed by/through/with the aid of digital technology.
Beautiful post. I wonder in what way the artfully written letter is still separable from digital technologies - once you take a picture of it and post it on a blog so that it enters a new and continued circulation, not to speak of the post office's probable use of digital technology along the way from her hand to yours. And what will happen with younger generations (do we still write letters and send them via mail?) to whom the tradition of handwriting a letter will probably not be passed down to anymore. The post office will not go bankrupt so soon though, with all the internet buying which replaces going to the local shop...
ReplyDeletei love this post too and also mei's qeustions about what is lost. much of the discussion at this summer's neh seminar revolved around the issues of 'loss.' what is lost when argument goes non-linear? what is lost when print is no longer the lone privileged form? i think there are losses but (obviously, i guess, given my work) i also believe in the gains....
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to think that we so readily assume linearity as a product of "linear" writing -- a kind of tautological equation -- when the kinds of connections and processes that the reader engages in before a "linear text" can be anything BUT linear as well. There is a kind of conceptual acrobatics the reader must "perform" in relating, say, Epicurus with Onfray via Lacan that is, perhaps, closer to the kind of non-linearity of thought we tend to think digital technology enables.
ReplyDelete