When was the last time that you wrote a letter? Not an email, not a text, not an IM.
A letter.
I get emails on a daily bases, texts on an hourly basis, and have instantaneous IM conversations throughout the day. I don’t see these people though. I’m communicating with them, staying informed, but I don’t see them. It’s personal and impersonal all at the same time.
Think about how you feel when you get an email. If you’re like me it’s just a little notification that pops up when I get an email. I don’t have a feeling of “Yay an email!” or any other form of excitement. It’s just an email after all. Same thing for texts or IMs.
There’s no sense of it being special.
Now think about the last time you got a letter from someone you care about. Your name is handwritten (usually) across the envelope and you can feel the thickness of the paper within. You can almost feel how important you are to the sender just from the amount of paper that’s within. You know that person took the time to sit down and write out their thoughts to you.
Physical letters have become something special, because we now have to “take the effort” to actually handwrite something. I’m much faster at typing something than I am at handwriting the same thing. It’s just something I spend more time doing, so handwriting something really is more “special” than just typing.
Now it’s a bit ironic that I’m talking about not using technology to communicate on a blog, which is a large technologically based communication tool. I’m not against using technology for it’s intended purposes. Facebook has kept me in touch with people I never thought I’d be talking to all across the world. Texting has been a great way for me to communicate with friends, and IMs are a convenient way to “talk” to people wherever they are. I just have to make sure that I’m not just relying entirely on those technologies to communicate. It can be horribly impersonal to just communicate through technology.
So I’d like to issue a challenge everyone who reads this blog. Go write a letter. Doesn’t matter who the letter’s to, but write the letter and mail it.
I’ll bet that the person who receives the letter will feel like they’re way more special to you than if you were just to email it to them.
