BREAKING NEWS
I am just about to start the year 1960 of the diary, i.e. the events of 56 years ago. I was astonished to see that my grandmother wrote to my mother (then in Germany) at least 30 times in the course of year, and no doubt wrote fairly often to her other three daughters based in England, not to mention her older grandchildren. It brought home to me once again how much the art and practice of letter-writing has now all but disappeared. It also raised the possibility that Gran saved her gossip and opinions for her letters, using her diary solely as source material. There's certainly precious little sign of either in her diaries!
What caused the demise of letter-writing? One is tempted to lay the blame on the keyboard of the personal computer, but this does not resist examination. At a pinch, we could contend that it signalled the demise of hand-writing but even this is not true. How many of us used to type our letters? No, the death blow to letter-writing (and hand-writing) was dealt by the advent of the Internet and, by extension, of email.
Then, just in case anyone was still interested in writing a post with a semblance of structure to it, along came Facebook and Twitter and turned us all into raving lunatics.
I am just about to start the year 1960 of the diary, i.e. the events of 56 years ago. I was astonished to see that my grandmother wrote to my mother (then in Germany) at least 30 times in the course of year, and no doubt wrote fairly often to her other three daughters based in England, not to mention her older grandchildren. It brought home to me once again how much the art and practice of letter-writing has now all but disappeared. It also raised the possibility that Gran saved her gossip and opinions for her letters, using her diary solely as source material. There's certainly precious little sign of either in her diaries!
What caused the demise of letter-writing? One is tempted to lay the blame on the keyboard of the personal computer, but this does not resist examination. At a pinch, we could contend that it signalled the demise of hand-writing but even this is not true. How many of us used to type our letters? No, the death blow to letter-writing (and hand-writing) was dealt by the advent of the Internet and, by extension, of email.
Then, just in case anyone was still interested in writing a post with a semblance of structure to it, along came Facebook and Twitter and turned us all into raving lunatics.
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