Originally published 22 May 1995
My editor asked if I wanted my e‑mail address appended to this column.
Good heavens, no.
America may be online, but this is one person who prefers his electronic solitude. They say good fences make good neighbors; I want the fence to extend right through my modem.
Let communication to my house come through the slot in the door, in an envelope with a stamp. Let me see the unmistakable sign of flesh and blood, if only in a handwritten signature.
I’ll stick with P‑mail. Snail mail. Mr. Zip.
Perhaps the Globe management, like the bosses of many print journals, are running scared of the Internet, as if electronic communication is about to displace ink on paper. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em seems to be the strategy. Put columnists online. Give every department an e‑mail address. Invite the readership to dump bytes.
Interactive journalism.
Mistake. Big mistake.
Going online is OK for those newspapers that dish out news in gossipy niblets that melt in your hand, not in your brain. But not for a paper that aspires to be a thoughtful, reflective journal of record.
There’s such a thing as being too hip, too online, too immediately responsive. As for me, I want to read a newspaper that will educate me, not one I feel required to instruct. Give me opinion that has been marinated, basted, cooked on simmer; I’ve had it up to here with microwave journalism.
I’ve cruised the Internet. It’s 99 percent wasteland, a digital desert with only occasional oases of useful contact, a vast electronic balloon inflated by ego. I’m not suggesting we tear it down; I value the freedom that will let me write and do research from remote locations. It’s not the Internet that I dislike; it’s the Internet culture.
For one thing, it’s annoyingly intrusive. I’m sitting at my computer trying to get some work done and—beep—my e‑mail monitor signals a message. Yeah, I know, I could ignore it, but 10 minutes later there’s another beep and — well, you know, my thought process has been disrupted so I might as well look to see who’s there.
Usually it is someone I have no immediate need to communicate with, someone who might just as well have written P‑mail, and who arrives on my screen embedded in a mush of web-routing gobbledygook that’s 10 times longer than the message.
Then there’s the pretentious tendency of e‑mailers to use only lower case type, unconventional punctuation, and those breathlessly silly combinations of punctuation marks called emoticons — typographical smiley faces and frowny faces that are supposed to convey human feeling.
I never send e‑mail if I can write. It’s a matter of not wanting to intrude, of wanting to put a human stamp on communication, of needing time to reflect upon what I’m going to say. The younger generation seems to love the spontaneity of e‑mail, the immediacy, the uncensored intimacy. I need time, privacy, and multiple revisions to arrive at anything I think someone might want to read.
A contagion of logorrhea is sweeping the nation. Off-the-cuff chat in real time. Television talk shows. Call-in radio. Electronic bulletin boards. A Chernobyl meltdown of civil discourse. A vast finger-down-the-throat regurgitation of content-less palaver.
The Internet is the worst offender. Yakkety-yak in binary bits.
Within a decade we’ll all be online, in instant communication with everyone else in the world — an information superhighway jammed to a standstill with bumper-to-bumper extemporaneous gab. The Internet can’t have it both ways; it can’t be an effective tool for serious information interchange, and an infinite soapbox for personal opinion.
Internet freakies extol the values of online democracy — a global town meeting where everyone has a voice. But when all we hear is hot air from the guy or gal next door, then the civilization that gave us Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, H. L. Mencken, Ernie Pyle, Harrison Salisbury, Scotty Reston, and (add your journalist of choice) will have expired in a fizzle of ones and zeros.
Newspapers of stature should resist the dumbing down and speeding up of public discourse. If newspapers and magazines expect to survive as words on paper (and they will, they will), then they should expect their readers to also commit opinions and queries to paper. Snail mail is thoughtful mail, matching the brain’s own sweet time of reflective composition.
I welcome written responses to these columns; many of the letters I receive are more thoughtful and interesting than the columns that inspired them. But I don’t need to hear from readers right now, off the tops of their heads, when I’m in the midst of revising next week’s offering. Not good for me, not good for the column, and not good, I will presume to say, for the reader.
