Letters

I am the possessor of a pile of letters written between my mother and my grandmother. My parents and I were in California, because my father was in the Army, and I was a mere babe. These letters open a window on life as it was then, and the precious relationships between family members.

There is a smaller box of letters that Eric and I sometimes encounter when looking for something in the unfinished part of our basement. It is a stack of love letters, written to each other when he and I were engaged to be married, but geographically separated. Reading them gives us a sickening feeling in the pits of our stomachs, as we try to convert the syrupy words into "what the heck was I thinking when I wrote this?" Was it even English? Apparently it was... very passionate English, spiced with hormones, and punctuated with the desperation of two young people in love, but separated by miles.

How long has it been since you have written a letter, or even a note, on paper, and sent it through "snail-mail"? Even if you didn't hand-write a letter, but printed it out via computer, and put a paper copy into an envelope, you may count that. I have to confess that it has been years for me. Aside from Christmas newsletters, I can't even remember the last time I sent a hard copy of a letter to a friend.

(Parenthetically, I must add here that my handwriting is chicken scratch, and I would hate to inflict it on anyone I call a friend.)

Now, we have email, Facebook, Twitter, text messages, and other forms of electronic communication. We blurt words out in small soundbytes as quickly and thoughtlessly as we can type. How many times have you spouted an angsty, off-the-cuff thought, and hit send? Your hastily-conceived thoughts and feelings fly out into the ether, causing chain-reactions among the recipients. Then they are lost on the social web. Have you ever tried finding someone's witty (or offensive) post after a few days have passed? If someone is a relatively frequent Facebooker, Tweeter, or Whatever-er, a given post is quickly lost in the vapor trail of electronic effluvia that is the social web.

The Urban Dictionary defines "blogosphere" as: "Imagine a million lunatics wandering the streets mumbling to themselves. Write it all down and put it on the web. Congratulations, you've just created the blogosphere."

When archeologists unearth clay or stone tablets, they obtain clues about the lives and beliefs of earlier civilizations. One such discovery, the Rosetta Stone, helped us decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Portions of the Bible were written on parchment and papyrus, and then stored in clay jars in the caves of Qumran. Birth and death records all over the world are used by family genealogists to help them trace their family history.

What would happen if all of those things didn't exist? For instance, I am not leaving any records of my life for my children. When I shuffle off this mortal coil, the words and thoughts that I have committed to electronic media will not exist in a physical form, but in bits and bytes in the blogosphere. What words can or should I be leaving them? What of myself - the essence of who I am - can I bequeath them? How will they know who their mother really was, as my image slowly fades from their memories over the years?

Or thinking in larger scale about future civilizations, how will they discover the genuine identity of the human race of 2012? Will they have to try and resurrect us from the corroded hard drives that will be the remnants of the Internet?