To the Return of Snail Mail
Reconnect With the Slowness of a Letter
When email was first introduced to the general public in the early 1990s, it was seen as a revolution. It wouldn’t be necessary anymore to buy envelopes and stamps, we wouldn’t have to make inconvenient trips to the post-box and it would be quick, very quick; it would improve the way we communicated. With email you just typed your message and with a single click of the mouse you’d sent it to the other side of the world in a matter of seconds — not that you’d actually knew anyone on the other side of the world, but that didn’t matter, you could!
Soon after its introduction, however, the email communication revolution was, as the song goes, postponed because of rain. Instead of becoming the quick and efficient messaging tool envisioned, our in-boxes quickly got clotted with a continuous dribble of promotional messages we now refer to as spam.
Fast forward 25 years and we can see that the revolution wasn’t just postponed, it has been extinguished like an oxygen starved flame. Although spam seems under control, most emails sent remain unopened or unanswered. Email has become the poster-boy of the Mañana, Mañana Syndrome. Instead of responding instantly to received messages, we’ve all fallen into the maybe later trap and keep postponing our replies until it’s become too embarrassing to respond. In other words, instead of becoming more efficient communicators, we have become non-communicators.
On a personal level we can see this in the fact that many of us have stopped sending postcards when we’re on holiday. We might send quick messages via Facebook, using badly formulated sentences and with little regards for spelling and grammar, but the handwritten postcard is all but extinct and email hasn’t really replaced it. On a professional level the situation has become even more dire.
In 1992 I was unemployed for a while. To receive my unemployment allowance, I was required to apply for a least one job per week and, once a month, to show letters of rejection as proof of my efforts to a career counsellor. Nine years later, I was unemployed for a while again. The situation was similar to before, but with one big difference: whereas in 1992 I’d had to show letters of rejection as proof of my job seeking efforts, now, in 2001, this wasn’t required anymore. The counsellor explained that they had stopped asking for rejection letters as corporations simply didn’t send those anymore. Email had destroyed snail mail, but hadn’t effectively replaced it.
Then, at a conference some time ago, I spoke an entrepreneur who told me that he had gone back to sending real letters to his potential customers in addition to his regular email campaigns. Enthusiastically he told me that, whereas his emails were mostly ignored, the response rate to his letters was close to a hundred percent! Of course many of these responses were just to decline his offers, but instead of being ignored, a communication channel had been opened.
It does make sense to me that the real letters achieved an almost perfect response rate. There is something very warm and comforting about receiving mail. I vividly remember how, when I was young, on Saturday mornings, when we didn’t have to go to school, at around 10 o’clock the postman would open the letterbox with a loud kalang, after which the comforting sound of envelopes tumbling to the ground followed. I would then rush down the stairs to see our catch. Of course it was often quite disappointing, mostly bills for my parents, but I also had pen-friends in Germany, Denmark and Sweden and so every now and then there would be a crumbled envelope with foreign stamps and my name written in familiar handwriting; the joy.
Another great advantage of proper letters is that we tend to make more of an effort than when we send electronic messages. Because of the unhurried nature of a piece of paper, or a word processor’s blank page on your screen, we take time to compose our thoughts before writing them down as complete ideas. We then carefully re-read what we’ve written, scanning for spelling and grammar errors, rephrasing parts of sentences, and editing when necessary. Printed on good quality paper with a nice signature added, you’ve got a message that most people won’t put away unread. Isn’t this far more effective than an email which gets quickly scanned and then archived or deleted.
My final thought on snail mail is a social one. Emails and other electronic messages always feel like an interruption, an intrusion of our time demanding attention. Letters don’t interrupt, they add value to someone’s life. When I was a student, I worked as a postman on Saturdays. Every Saturday morning I did my round and there was one house where, whenever I came near, the door would be opened and an old lady hopefully asked if their was any mail. Sadly enough I never had any letters for her. I told my sisters about this and they decided to write the lady a letter. So the next Saturday when I got near her house and the door opened, I was able to give this kind old lady two letters. The look of wild excitement and true happiness on her face is something I will never forget and haven’t seen since. This is the power of real letters.
In this hurried age of continuous messaging, our eyes glued to the smartphone, perhaps we should slow down. Electronic messaging has its place, but maybe we should reconnect with the slowness of a letter or postcard and get reacquainted with the excitement of opening an envelope. Let us re-embrace snail mail.
[T]here you are.
