Letter vs. Email

This week I chose to write to two different people that have had a big impact in my life. The first I chose to write a hand written letter to was my best friend from high school, and the second I wrote an email to was my brother.

In class everyone talked about how hard it was for them to write the hand written letter. I personally didn’t agree. I like writing notes and letters to people because it shows them that you care enough to take time out of your day thinking about them. Granted, it is more difficult to have to think about what you write before you write it because there is no delete button, I don’t think its any more difficult than writing an email. In each scenario I was making myself vulnerable by telling someone how much they mean to me when it was unexpected. Most people don’t write sentimental letters out of no where. While I wrote the email over a week ago I have not gotten a hand written response. My best friend called me and insisted we go to dinner to catch up. This is just how our culture is. We talked about the culture of cell phones in class and this lined up with it perfectly. Instead of sitting down and writing me a letter back that would take a few days to reach me, he called me because it was quicker and easier and would get the job done faster. Our culture wants it now and using a phone instead of writing a long letter fits right in with that.

After writing the hand written letter I sat down and wrote an email to my brother. This is our main form of communication anyways so it wasn’t out of the ordinary for me to send him an email. However, he was rather startled by what the email contained. I got this response “wow Anna, thanks I appreciate you too.” And that was the last of it. I’ve seen him since and he hasn’t said a word. My brother and I aren’t usually super vocal about how much we care about each other so he probably didn’t know what to do in that situation. This doesn’t bother me at all because I was completely expecting it. Our culture doesn’t encourage vulnerability, and I feel like its especially strict on males. Pop culture has created the strong, emotionless guy while the girl is able to show her emotions and its not thought about twice.

When writing my letters I was writing with a producerly like text. It could have been readerly because I was writing and who ever was reading should just accept what I say as true. But it could also be writerly because it challenges what they think and feel and they have to challenge their vulnerability. Because it is challenging but also must be accepted with a mind ready to accept it, it becomes a producerly text.

I’ve done this assignment two other times before and I think this is the first time I really thought about how pop culture affects even little things like how my friend called me instead of wrote me back. I would except him to do that but I never would have thought twice about why he would chose to do that. Its sad that we have a culture that is so based on time that people don’t even take time out of their days to tell the people that mean the most to them that they do.