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

I can remember, as a child, looking forward to the mail being delivered. The eagerness I felt as I waited for my mother to sift through it and the joy I felt when, on those rare occasions, I accredited a letter. It was not the actual words on the page that held the true excitement but rather I was important enough to receive that page of words that came jailed in an envelope with my name on it Now, many years later, I watch my ten-year-old daughter eagerly check her e-mail 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 constitution a letter has lost its flare as well. Instead of asking me to buy 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 camp she comes home with lists of e-mail addresses. Sven 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 new world distinguished by its reliance on electronic communication (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 committed 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 most widely use Internet application and for some people, it is their most frequent form of communication (Crocker). In our society today it is almost expected that people are connected to the Internet and use e-mail on a regular basis and in fact is often a requirement in many areas of our lives. For myself, as a college student, this is not only a requirement for my English class but is also how many of my professors contact me with pertinent information.