E-mails, phone calls, Web sites, videos. They're still all letters, basically, and they've come to outnumber old-fashioned conversations. They are the conversation now.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
In old age we are like a batch of letters that someone has sent. We are no longer in the past, we have arrived.
Unlike then, the mail stream of today has diminished by such things as e-mails and faxes and cell phones and text messages, largely electronic means of communication that replace mail.
People live too much of their lives on email or the Internet or text messages these days. We're losing all of our communication skills.
Down on the ground, we seem to do anything but make lengthy, robust monologues. We can communicate in an instant almost anywhere. Gone is the slow old letter - itself a monologue, a sort of considered performance of best self - and in its place is the e-mail, the text, the SMS, the tweet.
It's hard to say conversation has become a minimal thing, because look at the rise of mobile communications in the last 10 years. It used to be only the president had a mobile phone. Now everyone on earth, even if they have nothing else, they have a cell phone.
E-mails are the cancer of modern business.
I don't take part in texting and those other things myself, so I don't really know if people put as much thought into messaging as they used to into writing letters.
I like to talk to people. I've got one assistant, one Blackberry. That's my overhead. I don't text that much or email. I like to sit down face-to-face and have a conversation with you. I'm old-fashioned.
E-mail is a whole new way of being friends with people: intimate but not, chatty but not, communicative but not; in short, friends but not. What a breakthrough. How did we ever live without it? I have more to say on this subject, but I have to answer an instant message from someone I almost know.
No texting. What happens then? Good old-fashioned letters.
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