Sharing: The Email murderer
When I was younger, I loved to write. At the age of 10, I found myself with at least half-a-dozen pen pals from around the globe. I loved receiving mail from all those exotic places and asking kids my age what it was like to live in other countries.
What happened to that little girl?
By the time I reached college, I still had about 3-4 regular pen pals. This meant at least one letter written and received each week. I was ecstatic because, unlike the other students, I was the only one consistently receiving something other than the latest University flyers.
And I responded to each of them diligently, taking the wait time between classes to scribble down a couple of lines of text. It was common for the letters to end up being 3-4 pages by the time I mailed them out. I tried to describe every little thing going on in my life, several times feeling like I was a broken record. But I knew, to those pals receiving my mail, that each letter had something new for them to experience in my life. In return, I gained a glimpse into theirs.
Then came the Internet. At first, the idea of "emailing" someone was unique and exciting. I reserved it for limited, class-specific things, like emailing a classmate to setup a study group time. At that time, very few folks outside of the university had email. Most companies had internal electronic mailing systems, but no way to reach the outside world.
Shortly after, I discovered online gaming. This opened up a whole new window of opportunities and friends. (Check out my article on how I meet my husband this way.) Some of them even started to write good, ol'fashion, snail-mail letters to me and became new pen pals.
However, unlike my former pen pals, all of these friends had to have email accounts. It was something that came standard with an Internet account. That meant, if I didn't want to write a letter back right away, I could email them instead.
That was when Email murdered my letter-writing childhood.
It occurred slowly at first, little things. Writing to my new Internet pen pals both online and in letters started to get redundant. More times than not, I'd find myself sending them an email instead of writing a letter.
With my older friends, I had started to wait longer than a week to reply. I had start sending shorter and shorter notes. I had ask the pen pal if they had an email account and would rather prefer to correspond that way.
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