Cyberculture and the Future of Print :: Technology Email Computers Papers

I can remember, as a child, looking forward to the post being delivered. The eagerness I felt as I waited for my mother to sift through it and the blessedness I felt when, on those rare occasions, I received a letter. It was not the actual words on the rogue that held the true fermentation but rather I was important enough to receive that page of words that came wrapped in an envelope with my name on it Now, some years later, I watch my ten-year-old daughter eagerly check her email with the same enthusiasm, to see if she has received a special letter. The ordinary mail holds no excitement for her any longer, unless of course it is birthday mail, and physical composition a letter has lost its flare as well. Instead of asking me to subvert her pretty stationery to write upon she insists I teach her how to change the text and background colors for her e-mails. And instead of exchanging home addresses at summer inhabit she comes home with lists of e-mail addresses. Sv en Birkerts informs us, in his essay entitled Into the Electronic Millennium, that a shift is happening throughout our culture, away from the patterns and habits of the printed page and toward a naked world distinguished by its reliance on electronic confabulation (63). Although this technology is relatively new, it has already changed the way we think about writing and has enhanced our communication abilities. Electronic mail, known simply as e-mail, was started in its earliest form around the 1960s. It was not until the early 1990s however, that companies such as America Online and Delphi connected their systems to the Internet, which began the large-scale adoption of e-mail as a global standard (Crocker). According to Dave Crocker, an Internet researcher, Email is the virtually widely used Internet application and for some people, it is their most habitual form of communication (Crocker). In our society today it is almost expect that people are connected to the In ternet and use e-mail on a regular basis and in fact is often a requirement in more areas of our lives. For myself, as a college student, this is not merely a requirement for my English class but is also how many of my professors contact me with pertinent information.