Email, blogs, etc

I do love living during The Age of The Internet, the Information Revolution, whatever you want to call it. What did we ever do before the age of email? Websites? Online catalogues? Blogs? How did we ever cope?

Granted, in my more cynical moments my answer to that last question would be “Quite well, really”, but some things are so much easier with online tools. I’m thinking about activities like sharing your photos with family and friends scattered all over the country and the world. (See Flickr. I put all the photos I took at work Christmas parties up on Flickr, and now my work colleagues have Flickr accounts.) Or communicating all sorts of interesting issues and organising all sorts of important happenings with members of your family. Email does this well. Everyone can see what times suit people for the weekend get-together. No need to ring around and around.

While my parents were in holiday in Malaysia recently, my Mum wrote a series of emails detailing what they did, who they saw, and what they ate. I think there were around twelve emails, and they were only away for three weeks! I wonder what I’ll do next time I’m away (probably in March, when work sends me to KL). Maybe I’ll do what Mooiness has. Note to self: get Tablet PC wireless working.

And I love being able to keep up with my sisters’ lives via their blogs. (Should I out you guys here? 😉 ) Of course it’s not exactly the same as talking to people face to face, but it can still be good, especially when they are far away and/or you just don’t get together as often as you’d like. And when it comes to learning about people you’ve never met, and are not likely to, blogs can be wonderful. I do love reading people’s writing and finding all the different voices and points of view.

Reminiscence: I can still remember writing letters to my sister in London, and that annoying up-to-three-week interlude between letters, and that’s if we were both good and wrote back immediately. Sometimes news would be so stale by the time you wrote back. Now there’s email, which is so immediate and easy. I do miss the joy of finding an envelope in the letter box, looking at the postmark and the stamps, slitting the letter open and holding the paper in my hands.

These days I still get letters but they tend to be bills or wordprocessed, which is a little disappointing. Nothing makes me happier than finding a handwritten letter or postcard in the letterbox. It’s true, ask M! Simple pleasures…

Categories: Internet, web, email, blogs, letterwriting