Letter Writing

For a while now, I have been writing my friends by hand. To me this is a bit more personal than just sending an email. When I started to think about why I felt it was a more personal touch than something digital, I got into a bigger topic than I had originally intended.

When you write someone a letter, there is a personal connection between the author and the reader. When you write a journal, there may be a personal connection between the author and some future reader. Similarly, when you make a scrapbook of photos and the like, the author is attempting to make a connection with the past. The consistent element of these three forms of writing is that of a connection.

When you write you're making a connection with someone.

Though information may be exchanged within the letter; letting someone know of a birthday or an anniversary, the main purpose is to make the connection with the other person. The digital age has attempted to assist with this process by creating dozens of chat programs and email system, but that is only for the information. With chat programs like yahoo and MSN you can communicate via voice-chat so that you can hear the other person's voice. Additionally you can use a web camera to see the person you're chatting with. By these additional bits of technology, the digital systems are attempting to add that personal connection.

However, I would argue that the digital 'connection' is not as strong as that of the analog. With our society embroiled within a war in Iraq, soldiers have been separated from their families once again and those connections need to be reinforced even more than before. Though several soldiers can communicate with their families through occasional phone calls and emails, it is a brief moment in time and lacks permanence.

A soldier in Iraq can't see your ribbon,
Or the flag at your front door.
But a letter they hold in their hands,
To them means so much more.
Supporter Liam Sweeny

To those who need the connection, letters from home are worth their weight in gold. The letters are kept with them and re-read frequently to make sure the connection(s) remain as strong as possible while they are apart.

Even strangers have offered to make that connection to the Troops suggesting that it is more important to have them than the information within them. Pen Pals are nothing new and now we have people offering to make such a connection with people who may need them more than ever.

Pen Pals for Soldiers

Websites such as Myspace and Yahoo offer to help people make these connections (usually for a small fee) and if technology has made it possible for us to reach out and touch the world - why are so many people looking to be a little less disconnected? The massive amounts of technology available to our society has let us access INFORMATION at a remarkable rate. Just try and google something and it will give you pages and pages on whatever you want to look up. However, as we have become more dependent upon "The Information Age", I think that we have lost "The Connection Age".

I will get into this topic a bit more in another post but wanted to toss out the start with these thoughts about writing.

More to come.

-Tom