In Communicado

Email is awesome. Except for spam. But the concept of it is pretty amazing for anyone who bothers to think about it. The downsides? My penmanship is getting pretty bad, and the only things to look forward to (holidays and birthdays notwithstanding) when getting my mail are magazines and Netflix. These things are great, but the only person who writes me letters is grandma.

I don't know many teenagers really, since I am not one any longer and I am not a parent to one yet, but I am fairly certain that they don't do handwritten letters. Maybe the occasional mandatory thank you card or, like me, a letter to grandparents. Do they even pass notes in class anymore now that there's texting? Circle one: Yes/No.

A lot of people don't even send party invitations in the mail.

I am an occasional graphic designer, specializing in print, not web, which was a conscious choice. I can design websites--that's not much different than print design in that your job is to aesthetically arrange text and images in a space--and can do some web coding. At the same time, I'm against paper itself as a rule in that it's wasteful and takes up real estate, though recycling helps, yet I am also deeply into painting and drawing, and using the Wacom just doesn't feel as cool as doing it for real. But I greatly favor digital photography. Go figure.

My point is that so much personality--and sometimes meaning--is lost in email and texting. (Ahem. Especially if you accidentally send it to the wrong person.) It's like the computer is middle management for our relationships. And while I'm grateful for the ability to shoot off a quick note on gmail, and post my thoughts online instead of writing in a journal, I miss the look and feel of a letter from my best friend who lives in another state, or a really cute or creative invitation to a party, or the nice way my favorite pen brings out my best cursive lettering, shopping for stationery, even the act of putting a letter in the mailbox and anticipating the response.

Type can be produced by anyone with a keyboard, and written material forged much more easily and anonymously. Handwriting is so much more powerful than type in that you can really imagine the writer, sitting at a desk, thinking about the words you're just now reading, then committing them to paper. Think of the weight such a thing has when you say "in their own writing" or "in their own words," especially when the author is no longer among us. Handwriting is proof of an individual's existence. What really separates letters from email is that they can be kept for awhile as mementos. A lot of history has been pieced together by such heirlooms.