Social media is often used to bring awareness about something or to receive attention whether for recreational or formal purposes. The epistolary form has expanded in modern day usage. It's not as lengthy as the traditional letter would be, in many cases it's not even a letter. Facebook and twitter posts are often brief descriptions that say what's going on with the person(s), place, or thing. Texting is another outlet of communication that can even replace sentences with abbreviations and slang. This current generation wants their information as soon as possible.
Modern technology does make receiving and sending information a lot easier and quicker than before. Yet the original epistolary form seemed more personal because of the lack of resources. There was no tracking system, there was a longer waiting period, and the separation by wars, distance, disease etc. For this purpose the letters seemed more endearing, passionate, and reflective. Not that this isn't accomplished today but the text of today's social media isn't usually as emotive. The emphasis in today's society is usually placed more on directness.
In the time frame of Clarissa, she was able to discuss her living situation, feelings, and people in her life more in depth than what could be tolerated by most people today. There are aspects of Clarissa's story that are very important in how they relate to everyday life. One being the struggle between making our decisions or compromising to social norms. There's
also the historical significance of the conditions in which women in the 19th
century had to live in. However, time and attention spans aren't what they used to be; they've shortened and adapted to knowing the basic points of a situation and acting on that information accordingly. Clarissa along with many other classical books draws out the subject with wordiness and angst with each aspect. So it's easy to lose interest or placement as a reader in what's going on and why it matters.Also, what's important to one person may not be important to the other.
P.S. A post about what someone had to eat can matter because they want someone to care about what's going on with them, not just because they have too much time on their hands. It's like a 'lesser' cry for help/attention. Not that I've ever done it.
I completely agree with you when you say that letters are more endearing, passionate and reflective. If you're taking the time out of your day to sit down and hand write something, then either what you're saying is time-worthy or you really care about who you're writing to, or both. I think texts and e-mails can be mis-read in so many ways, and so easily at that. Everyone has their own personal style of writing and their own 'frequently-used word bank' but it's so easy to read a text as emotionless or overly emotional. One of my friends told me once that she got nervous when I replied 'Ok' instead of 'Okay' because 'Ok' seemed "very aggressive"...I was so blown away by this because they're just words on a screen! They don't have feelings! In letter writing I feel that you can tell get more of a personal feel for the tone of what's being said. Some ways to see this would be the style of writing, or if someone underlined something many times or wrote something much larger than the rest of the print on the page. Letter writing seems to archaic but it's something really sentimental, like you said, and something people should do more often!
ReplyDeleteI totally agree that hand-written letters which, as in Clarissa's case, may have taken all day to compose seem a lot more heartfelt than the quick texts we shoot off every day. It is crazy to think that, while Clarissa can spend all day writing one letter (or sometimes two if something happens), we send hundreds or thousands of texts a day. Combine that with how many times we tweet, post on Facebook, read someone else's posts, and like hundreds of random things on Facebook a day. If all that reading and writing was transferred to paper, it might even be longer than Clarissa's letters! And that is despite the 140 character limit on Twitter.
ReplyDeleteWhile I also think that letters are an under appreciated form of communication, I also think that social media is under appreciated. In addition to keeping in touch with family and close friends, I can keep in touch with people I was once close with and saw every day but time and distance has forced us to grow apart. There are only so many friends that we can keep track of and Facebook and Twitter helps us do that in a broader sense. Otherwise, we might be stuck picking one (or a couple) best friend like Clarissa and Anna seem to be.
You all are raising a fascinating question here: do contemporary forms of immediate communicate blunt our ability to feel in, as Jenee puts it, "endearing, passionate and reflective" ways? Does our immersion in quick and terse communication blunt our ability to feel or express these things at all?
ReplyDeleteCorinne, your point about worrying over "OK" vs "Okay" would suggest that there is nuance even in the shortest form of communication--but also that there is so much room to be misread! Jenee, it seems to me that you're in the camp of thinking that our capacities are somehow diminished, or perhaps that we've just changed out way of reading and responding (we can't, as you say, easily follow such a long letter because we are used to something more direct). But does the "more direct" mean "less heartfelt?" Or do we imbibe our communications with sincere desire and feeling in new ways -- like in posting a photo of our lunch because we want the people we care about to feel as if they're spending the day with us (and as an aside, I personally love looking at pictures of food)?
I'm picking up the thread here that the epistolary form today is not perhaps entirely emotionally vacant (or diminished), but rather that we communicate in new, unconventional ways.
Last point: I haven't seen it yet, but the recent film "Her" is about a man who falls in love with the electronic woman's voice in his smartphone/computer... and I've heard here and there of novels being constructed entirely out of twitter-length posts.