Email: A step forward or backward?

In class today we talked about the philosopher Borgman who wrote about focal things and practices. He expresses how focal things and practices come to light within modern technology. Borgman describes how focal things are the central things of life that we need to bring into focus, family life being a prime example. Borgman goes to say how each focal thing is connected to a focal practice, and technology cannot provide focal things or practice. Some examples he gives is running which connects us to the environment, culture of the table are sacred times for our families to connect to each member, hiking gives us insight into the wilderness, and etc. Personally, I think hand writing a letter should be on this list as well, something that very few people still do.

Hand writing a letter used to be the prime way of long distance communication, it was how nations communicated with each other, how scientists released there discoveries with other scientists, and etc. These hand written letters did not just prove as a way of communicating with each other at the time, they are now historians ways of looking into the past, an insight into how someone was thinking at that time. When you hand write a letter, you have to put time, effort, and personality into it, so the person receiving the letter will be able to read the letter for not only what it means, but be able to read the emotions that the writer put into it. With hand writing a letter, you could almost connect with one-another, email as almost completely destroyed that aspect of hand writing letters.

Email, or electronic mail, is fast, easy, and efficient. Scientists can spread their information across the world to other scientists to help make world discoveries, nations can communicate with each other just from a click of a few buttons, students can email their professors for questions from their own home, and etc. Email has led to text messaging on phones, which is not only extremely convenient, but it is the main source of communication across the the younger generation of today. So whats so bad about email? Email conveys the message from the writer to the recipient, but it does not convey emotions. Where hand writing letters would help bring two people together, show their true feelings, email does none of this. People used to wait for and become extremely excited when they have mail from distant relatives or anyone, but with email, we get more than we want, email which we call spam. People used to only receive hand written mail from family or friends, but now with email, it is more of a type of advertising and propaganda. Borgman claims focal things and practice only come to light in the midst of modern technology; because of email, we can really see how hand writing letters is a focal practice for connecting with other people rather than just broadcasting information. So is email a great technological advancement, or is it disconnecting us from the very humans we are?