You've Got Mail

Reading the book, Dear Me which I blogged about here made me think about how we communicate overall. When I was a lot younger my Mum used to make me write letters to my cousins in Nigeria. I used to hate it because I felt that it ate into my precious time when I could be watching TV or playing with my mates. Back then in the early 80s writing a letter seemed really laborious as it was difficult to go back and correct mistakes. So when the invention of email came along I was ecstatic. Not only could I communicate to anyone around the world at anytime, I was amazed by the wonderful fact that as soon as I pressed the send button my recipient would have my mail sitting in their in-box waiting for them to read. Email was fast, convenient and efficient. However as what normally happens to all great things, emails lost their innocence and pretty soon my in-box was full of spam messages and mails from fraudsters. It got to the point where I no longer looked forward to logging into my account as I spent 90% of the time deleting unwanted messages. Then Yahoo messenger came into my life and the concept of exchanging instant messages to someone on the other side of the world was very intoxicating. Of course after that various forms of social media kicked off ie MySpace where you could meet likeminded people from across the globe, Facebook where you could catch up with old school mates, find out what they are up to and last but not least is Twitter. Now this amazing facility allows you to natter on about anything you want at anytime to anyone – well as long as they are following you. It is also amazingly addictive as you can sit in on conversations and find various interesting people from anywhere. The 140 character limit makes sure that what you say is concise and succinct. Sadly with all these delightful forms of interaction this means that the urge to send an email is very small, I can’t remember the last time I sent or received an email that was non work and blog related. So one of my plans for 2010 is to start emailing again. So come on, make my day and drop me an email at ondolady@googlemail.com to say hi.