Got your email – wish you’d sent me a letter!

What is it with emails these days? I get them by the thousands yet none of them ever say anything.

I require news about the personage that wrote it, what is new, old or broken? How is he surviving? What dreams still remain? Short, pithy email pronouncements mean nothing to someone expecting information of a sort.

Of the approximate 200 emails a day I receive most are “forwarded” jokes, movies or quips. They arrive at one friend’s computer, and as he often drinks at the same well as I do and wants nothing left to doubt– he energetically sends the message on.

Just like everyone else does who drinks in the same bar, or frequents the same gym, restaurant, coffee shop or bus stop. A million people I recognize per day and can nod my head toward them in recognition and in return they send me meaningless blog and feel better for it having done so.

Now a picture of a naked woman with fine breasts is a glimpse of eye candy momentarily, but if it appears six times more it is a nuisance and disliked.

Weeks, months and now years of this same off-handed treatment has gotten me no where learning anything new about what’s happening around me is almost impossible. I have had to go back to the village coffee shop and spend a good 20 minutes per day to get caught up with reality.

Or, I often stroll over to others tables while they are collecting their morning thoughts and sipping their java, sit myself down like Danny the Dice does and just start talking with them. “Did you see that piece on the news wherein the Palestinians want to become a country?” I blurt to unexpected new friends soon to leave.

Whatever they say their words are real, authentic and almost cherished as they are in fact NEW and not forwarded.

The internet world is turning us users into a syndicated world wide web of morons promoting banality. I regret, and am embarrassed to tell you that I haven’t written a meaningful email to any of my family or close friends within the last six months (sent lots of risqué photos tho).

Disgraceful, worse yet—I have now joined the ranks of the trite, insignificant, boring and common.

They were a different race that went before us. Those born without modern tactical communication. They got their knowledge the old fashioned way, through books or gossip from church. Many stayed up late and breathed in the fumes from the candle wick while they read, their eyes burning from the smoke and yet their minds a glow with bright thoughts from the written page.

When they put pen to paper what came out was always significant and purposeful. Nowadays, if the email message isn’t short, contrite and entertaining—the index finger hits the delete key and in a blink you are relieved of the offending matter.

Rightfully so! It is not just the over kill of too much of the same information, it also is too much is contrite, poorly written, and inconsequential.

The other day, while discussing one of my favourite anthropological problems – the peopling of the Americas – I was pleasantly surprised  when the other person actually shared a similar interest. He asked me if I had read a book related to the topic and I could easily pull up pages of correspondence I had shared with the book’s author.

My friend was startled but I assured him, even authors lack decent substantive material in which read or repute.

Of course the www is a good way to say hello, but is that saying anything—really?