Cyberculture and the Future of Print :: Technology Email Computers Papers

I can remember, as a child, feeling forward to the mail being delivered. The eagerness I felt up as I waited for my mother to sift through it and the joy I felt when, on those rargon occasions, I received a letter. It was not the actual words on the page that held the true agitation but rather I was important enough to receive that page of words that came wrap up in an envelope with my name on it Now, many years later, I watch my ten-year-old daughter eagerly check her netmail with the same enthusiasm, to control if she has received a special letter. The ordinary mail holds no excitement for her any longer, unless of course it is birthday mail, and writing a letter has anomic its flare as well. Instead of asking me to buy her pretty letter paper to write upon she insists I teach her how to change the text and background colourize for her e-mails. And instead of exchanging home addresses at summer camp she comes home with lists of e-mail addresses. Sven Birkerts in throws us, in his essay entitled Into the Electronic Millennium, that a shift is occurrent throughout our culture, away from the patterns and habits of the printed page and toward a new world magisterial by its reliance on electronic discourse (63). Although this technology is relatively new, it has already changed the way we think about writing and has enhanced our communication abilities. Electronic mail, known simply as e-mail, was started in its earliest form around the 1960s. It was not until the early 1990s however, that companies such as the States Online and Delphi connected their systems to the Internet, which began the large-scale adoption of e-mail as a spheric standard (Crocker). According to Dave Crocker, an Internet researcher, Email is the most widely utilize Internet application and for some people, it is their most frequent form of communication (Crocker). In our society today it is almost expected that people are connected to the Internet and use e-mail on a unfluctuating basis and in fact is often a prerequisite in many areas of our lives. For myself, as a college student, this is not only a requirement for my English class but is also how many of my professors contact me with apposite information.