purposeful communication

I have to admit I wasn't very excited at first about writing to people who have had an influence on me. Most of the people who have an influence on me--a positive one at least--I don't really know that well or would not feel comfortable writing to them. Most people wrote to a parent but I am at a weird point in my life when my parents seem more like children and I am the responsible adult. Maybe they're just at a weird point in their lives, I don't know. Regardless, I didn't feel like writing them a thank you letter right now. Luckily, one letter was a no-brainer. My wife, of almost ten years (I got married young), has been an amazing partner. Her ability to not only put up with me but also grow with me has been inspirational in itself. And her support in my return to school has been wonderful too. This got me thinking about what people have been inspirational in her life, and more specifically, her parents. Her mother died this winter of a rare Alzheimer-like disease, her father taking care of her mostly by himself until the end. I decided that he was certainly deserving of a letter of thanks for his influence.

I hand-wrote the letter to my father in law and emailed my wife. My father in law is beginning to use a computer and has email but I don't think he checks it very often (or necessarily knows how). My wife works from home and is always on her computer. And why use a stamp to send a letter to my own house? The two letters were much the same in message and content, in that I thanked my wife for her commitment to our relationship and thanked my father in law for being a role model for not only his daughter but for the both of us. The letters did vary in length, language, and approach. The hand-written letter to my father in law needed much more preface. It was going to seem odd that I was writing to him, let alone writing about things that are serious and personal. So, I felt I need to be more specific in the letter about why he has been influential and what I have taken from this influence. It was a bit awkward writing to him in that way, as it is a completely different kind of talk than we have established over the years. When I would read back over it, it reminded me of the old letters the narrator reads on the History Channel programs. The email to my wife however, was completely different--more like a note than a letter. In the email, I could just make my main points without explaining why I was doing so. I think though that in this situation this had to do more with who I was writing to rather than the communication channel. It seems natural that I would briefly acknowledge my appreciation of my wife and we have a greater sense of shared meaning between each other.

Ironically, my father in law responded via email. I'm not sure if he was being funny, trying to show off, or both. It did serve to ease my anxiety about writing to him about such personal things. To me, the email response sent the message that a shared meaning or understanding about our relationship had been established and that we could now communicate about that relationship in a more shorthand fashion. My wife simply came upstairs to my office and asked me what I was up to--what did I want from her. I think she thought I wanted to spend money on something and I was buttering her up.

Through this assignment, I believe I have come closer to understanding what Postman is saying about our high-speed information culture. In chapter four, he works to illustrate how our culture has become inundated with information--a glut of communication so to speak. We are saturated in it. He writes, "...the tie between information and human purpose has been severed, i.e., information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning, or purpose." (70) In short, I think he is saying that we can only have so much relevant, important, and meaningful stuff to say in our lives and the more we spread out this meaningful stuff over an ever-growing number of increasingly less meaningful messages, the more we become meaningless. This assignment, especially the hand written part, has brought a realization of the difference between the thinned out version of what communication in our culture has become with the onslaught of technology and the antiquated slow version that is based on purpose and meaning rather than on the technology itself. People used to communicate because they had something important to say, not just because they could?