Sunday, February 16, 2014
Epistolary Form Synthesis
It seems like most people are on the same page in saying that modern epistolary form is going the way of social media. The majority has recognized several different mediums including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. While Clarissa's letters appeared lengthy, social media users are allowed to make posts in succinct statements. This is especially true of Twitter. While Clarissa would go on and on for pages at a time in her letters, Twitter users are only allowed 140 characters to get their message across. The difference in epistolary forms attributes to the changing of the times. While Clarissa was written hundreds of years ago, Clarissa was able to write long letters in order for her to get her story read. But, nowadays, society is more concerned with getting the message quick and getting on with their day. Society has changed into being more on-the-go as most people don't write letters back and forth anymore. Whether people know it or not, we're all using the modern-day form of epistolary writing, but we're doing it in a more brief and convenient way than Clarissa did.
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Thanks for this synthesis, Chris. You point out how social media is a prominent venue for our current epistolary utterances today; it is increasingly through social media that we do what people used to do (though, to be fair, often still do) in letters: depict our daily lives, maintain relationships, and articulate a trace of ourselves. Your claim that current epistolaries are more "brief and convenient" is easy to see, but I might point out that brevity and convenience are relative things. In the 18th century, for instance, letter writers would have been perfectly fine with the speed of their correspondence. And given the time that middle-class people would have devoted to letter writing in their typical day, it would not seem burdensome to write lengthy letters. And in fact, if you think about the resources that we need to devote to the technologies that enable social media (paying for internet access and phone plans; the infrastructure that must be maintained in order for these to work smoothly; the production process that builds phones and computers, and the list goes on), perhaps it only seems "convenient" when we use social media--when in fact, we're actually spending a lot of time and energy to enable it.
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