Letter: From Morse To E-Mail

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Letter From Morse To E-Mail

• Beginning with Mr. Morse's innovation, modern
  communication technologies have slowly but all
  too surely eroded that necessity, first rendering
  letter writing one option among many and then
  merely a quaint habit.
• By the 18th century, letter writing was so
  commonplace that one of the first prose
  narratives to be considered a novel, Samuel
  Richardson's "Pamela," was composed entirely of
  letters of a daughter to her parents, and the
  epistolary method lent that novel what realism it
  possessed. More contemporaneously, look to
  popular song for an index of just how commonplace
  letter writing was in our culture as late as a
  generation ago ("A Soldier's Last Letter,"
  "Please, Mr. Postman," "I'm Gonna Sit Right Down
  and Write Myself a Letter," "P.S. I Love You").

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• The decline in letter writing constitutes a
  cultural shift so vast that in the future,
  historians may divide time not between B.C. and
  A.D. but between the eras when people wrote
  letters and when they did not. Historians depend
  on the written record. Perhaps a better way of
  saying that is that they are at the mercy of that
  record. Land transactions, birth and death
  records, weather reports, government documentsto
  the historian, nothing written is trivial,
  because it all contributes to the picture we have
  of the past. In the last century or so, as
  historians have turned away from their fixation
  on the doings of the great and included the lives
  of average people in their study, the letters
  those people left behind are invaluable evidence
  of how life was once lived. We know what our
  ancestors ate, how they dressed, what they
  dreamed about love and what they thought about
  warfare, all from their letters. Without that
  correspondence, the guesswork mounts.

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• There is e-mail, certainly, and texting, but
  this is communication that is for the most part
  here today and deleted tomorrow. And there is the
  enormous trove of information about daily life
  multiplying by the hour in the digital
  recordtelevision, camera phones, spycams,
  YouTube and chat rooms all capture what seems
  like every second of every life on the planet.
  The problem is not that there is not enough
  information about what we think or how we live.
  The problem is sifting through that sea of data.
  The most common complaint of our time is that we
  are overwhelmed by information, unmediated and
  unstoppable.

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Letter is Future

• Letter is identity of You (Personal)
• Letter is identity of Nation

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• Lets Study about Letter

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Why Study About Letter?

• Trust
• Hope (Feedback)
• Record (History)
• Appreciation
• Appeal (Relationship)
• Culture (Age, Ethnic, Nation)
• Jobs (Secretary, Administration)

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Assignment TODAY

• Write a Love Letter for your girl friend?
• Write a letter for your wife? The letter explain
  about your plan for polygamy.