Cyberculture Essay :: Internet Technology essays

Cyberculture Essay E-mail today is the medium of choice when it comes to formal or informal exchange of written information. It has changed the way we thought about writing and drastically changed the way we correspond through writing. E-mail has added a certain type of convenience and its own unique style, although impersonal at times, to the written form of today’s communication. James Sosnoski said it well when he wrote in 1995, â€Å"reading electronic texts on screens is likely to be the predominant mode of reading in the very near future† (Tribble and Turbek 400). If he had only known how right, he was. E-mail today, in short has made the act of simple written correspondence so easy and convenient for all to do. Just over ten years ago, I can imagine many could never have fathomed that they would be able to write to a friend halfway across the world and have them receive the message in a matter of minutes. Writing letters on paper has lost its novelty. It used to be, not long ago that receiving a written letter wasn’t very uncommon, whereas today, it’s simply a rarity. Now not only are you able to send a letter in a matter of minutes, but you can save yourself the pains of writing several of the same copy; you can foreword or carbon copy them to as many people on your address list as you like with a click of a button. The act of revision and attention to spelling and grammatical error has all but eliminated itself in the development of this modern marvel. Dennis Baron wrote, â€Å"It wasn’t so much that I couldn’t think of the words, but the physical effort of handwriting, crossing out, revising, †¦ now seemed to overwhelm and constrict me, and I longed for the flexibility of digitized text† (Tribble and Turbek 36). Perhaps, part of the appeal that E-mail withholds is its ease of use. What was once considered painstaking, the task of writing, revising, and rewriting has now become a thing of the past. Its digitized text can easily compose with the stroke of a key and cut one’s precious time in half. With ease and convenience comes a change of what you might call the formality of written correspondence.