E-mail's Use for Love Letters Is Growing

NC State University News Services
Campus Box 7504 Raleigh, NC 27695
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Media Contacts: Dr. Robert Schrag, 919/515-9750 or [email protected]

Pam Smith, News Services, 919/515-3470 or [email protected]

Feb. 5, 1999

You've Got Mushy Mail: E-mail's Use for Love Letters is Growing

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

In today's world of fast-paced communication, looming deadlines and hectic schedules, who has time for old-fashioned love letters? Just about everybody, says Dr. Robert Schrag, professor of communication at North Carolina State University and one of the nation's top experts on the use and abuse of interactive media.

The ease and speed of e-mail is helping revive the art of intimate correspondence, Schrag says. Come Valentine's Day, more lovers are likely to exchange sweet nothings via e-mail this year than ever before.

"A typed e-mail message lacks the sense of human touch that gives a handwritten letter much of its power and intimacy, but it compensates by having great ease and immediacy," he says. There are no writer's cramps, no ink smears or stacks of crumpled paper, no need for 33-cent postage and nice stationery. Spontaneous thoughts or feelings can be typed in and sent to a lover faster than Cupid's arrow.

Such spontaneity and speed appeal to a society so heavily invested in immediacy, Schrag says, despite the danger that rashness may lead to regret or embarrassment later.

Equally appealing is the perceived intimacy of e-mail. "In some ways, we perceive the other person as being just beyond the screen, not miles of tangled Web pathways away," Schrag says. Researchers call this man-to-machine phenomenon "distanced intimacy." For many people, it makes e-mail seem a more intimate communication medium than old-fashioned letters sent through the mail.

Another point in e-mail's favor is that unlike phone calls, face-to-face conversations or Internet chat rooms, it allows a writer time to think. He can reconsider and revise his message countless times -- if he chooses -- before sending it. This can lead to more honest, meaningful expressions of love, Schrag says.

Or, in the hands of dishonest or desperate modem-linked lovers, it also can lead to deception. Creating a new, exaggerated or modified persona through e-mail is an intriguing option for many people. You can choose to deceive others outright, or simply avoid socially imposed constraints and imperfections to reveal your "true self," Schrag says. But though e-mail may make it easier to deceive someone, it also makes it easier to be caught, he says. Messages can be saved on file or printed out, making it much easier for the other person to detect inconsistencies in your story.

Despite the problems inherent in the medium, the use of e-mail to send love letters was inevitable, Schrag contends. No matter what new communication tool comes down the pike or how seemingly impractical or impersonal it is, "sooner or later we humans will use it to write love letters," he says. "Love letters are standard cultural artifacts." You find them -- finely written on perfumed paper or scratched and scrawled on bark, animal skins or cave walls -- in nearly every culture with a written form of communication.

Like the old-fashioned handwritten love letters Grandpa sent Grandma from the war, modern e-mail missives also will be tied together with ribbons and saved in the attic to gather dust and sentimental value, he says. The only difference is, they'll be on InkJet or LaserJet paper and won't smell like cologne.

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