How many cards did you send this holiday season? Probably fewer than 10 years ago. And how many did you receive? Probably fewer again. Whatever the case, wasn’t there a small burst of pleasure at seeing a once-familiar hand on the envelope, among all the dreary waste of modern postal delivery? Did you not feel that someone you knew had, for once, reached out and greeted you, in a way that an email or a text never could?
Handwriting is less important in our lives than it has ever been. In a British survey carried out in June, it was discovered that the average time since an adult wrote anything at all by hand was 41 days. One in three people surveyed said that they hadn’t written anything by hand for at least six months. Two out of three said that the last thing they wrote was for their eyes only””a hastily scribbled note, a shopping list or a reminder….
[blockquote]But these days, … we reach for electronic media. We write something that, in five years, will have completely vanished …[/blockquote]
No matter that gmail and other services will never delete what we’ve written — there will be so much stuff saved that for all practical purposes what any individual might have written will be lost in the entropy. In fact, archiving “really important” electronic texts and images is a vexing problem: pity the researcher ten years from now who needs some material that was only saved on magnetic computer tape or 7-inch “floppy disks”.