Email Follies

Here’s the thing about emails: very very safe, but no body language or voice tone and no follow up questions. I’ve embraced it all, of course, and the other technological computer stuff I’m surrounded by, but there are losses. You are reminded when you read older novels and other narratives of daily life.

I'm reading Mary Lee Settle's memoir of her years during the Second World War in England in the WAAF as a 21 or 22 year old. Not the best written of her work-- fascinating but repetitive and depends on swoops of rhetoric and generalizations like "one of that type of English lady who..."

Smoking and partying, conversation as entertainment. More boredom, at least among the upper classes, ennui among the lower in their repetitive tasks.

Today, we’re in a buzz cloud haze of messages and images. Sometimes I think it’s the technology depressing me. Sometimes I think it’s just weariness or a night of bad sleep, or maybe it's old age opening up in front like the mouth of a cave, sloping down, and surprisingly bright, but bright that loses some details.

Here's an interesting corporate take on the etiquette of email.