For me, email has made postal mail much more effective. If I want to get in touch with one of my friends, I have two options: fire up Communicator and send a few millicents worth of email in thirty seconds, or dig out a postcard, write in ink and manually my message, put a twenty-cent stamp on it (How many emails is that?), and drag the lot out to the mailbox for my friend to recieve in a few days.
Slow? Of course. Expensive? Certainly. Primitive? In the extreme. But such impact! Even among people who aren't always the best about replying to email, a personal letter or card among the morass of bills, credit card applications, and catalogs stands out.
It also makes for a good protest medium. As a friend of mine said, "It's a lot harder to delete a thousand letters than it is to delete a thousand emails."
I use email extensively, of course, but postal mail can be worth it when you're willing to trade the advantages of digitality (speed, cost, reliability, ease of processing) for those of solidity (impact, permanence).
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The University of Wisconsin's Web site has a story about this.
For me, email has made postal mail much more effective. If I want to get in touch with one of my friends, I have two options: fire up Communicator and send a few millicents worth of email in thirty seconds, or dig out a postcard, write in ink and manually my message, put a twenty-cent stamp on it (How many emails is that?), and drag the lot out to the mailbox for my friend to recieve in a few days.
Slow? Of course. Expensive? Certainly. Primitive? In the extreme. But such impact! Even among people who aren't always the best about replying to email, a personal letter or card among the morass of bills, credit card applications, and catalogs stands out.
It also makes for a good protest medium. As a friend of mine said, "It's a lot harder to delete a thousand letters than it is to delete a thousand emails."
I use email extensively, of course, but postal mail can be worth it when you're willing to trade the advantages of digitality (speed, cost, reliability, ease of processing) for those of solidity (impact, permanence).