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Nobody writes the emails that killed the letters anymore

2022-01-03T11:12:39.098Z


During the first decade of the 21st century, it was common to exchange personal emails with loved ones. Social networks and, above all, WhatsApp have ended the practice.


Adriana Ponte-Guía, 46, says that when she and her ex-partner started fooling around, they did so by email with messages in which they pretended "to be 18th century characters." In addition to

love

mails

, he maintained regular digital correspondence with friends who were far away (also with those closest to him, but exchanges “less frequent and less extensive”). For a few years now, your inbox has hardly received personal emails anymore. "I think everything has been devastated by WhatsApp and instant messaging," he says - of course - by email.

The arrival and expansion of email, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2021, revolutionized the way we communicated with people far away.

Suddenly writing letters was no longer necessary.

The golden age of personal email can be traced by following the history of household internet penetration, from the late 1990s to the

smartphone

revolution

that started the iPhone in 2007.

More information

The imperfect but irreplaceable email resists half a century later

In 2003, for example, according to the National Statistics Institute (INE), 25.2% of Spanish households had internet access (half of households had a computer).

However, not having internet at home did not mean not connecting: 68.1% of young people aged 15 to 24 had connected at least once in the last three months.

Whether it was from home, a library, the university or an internet café, many of these users sent emails to their friends through their accounts in services such as Hotmail, Microsoft's email, which had six million users in Spain in 2004.

Hotmail email access portal in November 1998.hotmail

A few years earlier, in 1998, personal email communication starred in one of the highest-grossing romantic comedies of the moment,

You have an email

. Directed by Nora Ephron, in the movie Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks met in an AOL.com chat room and fell in love through e-mail exchanges (not knowing, because they used

nicknames

- the usernames of the time). -, who knew each other in person and hated each other, as in all good

romcoms, the

name given to romantic comedies).

This ease of exchanging messages made many people switch from traditional letters to email.

Now personal letters are somewhat marginal (according to the Household Panel of the National Markets and Competition Commission, during the second half of 2020, 75% of households did not receive any letter from a private individual, a percentage that has been growing over the year after year), but the

emails

that theoretically killed them have also followed the same path.

The instant messaging revolution

"Letters, emails and instant messages fulfill the same function: to communicate remotely, establish a

co-presence

, maintain a correspondence with an infinite number of purposes", explains by email Elisenda Ardèvol, professor of Arts and Humanities Studies at the UOC. For this function, each communication method supersedes the previous one. "The letter that is sent by post is a disadvantage compared to email, and this is at a disadvantage compared to the immediacy of instant messaging," the expert details.

That's what 36-year-old Lorena Durán thinks happened. She wrote a lot of emails with friends, especially in the first decade of the 21st century. Now he still sends some, but "many times you send that

email

and they do not see it or it falls into the void or they respond to you on WhatsApp," he says by phone. "I think we have become accustomed to the immediacy of everything, to the double

check

[the two marks on the platform that indicate that the message has been read]," says the interviewee. For her part, Adriana Ponte-Guía adds that “it is a circular issue: when responding quickly, the bombardment of messages is much more frequent and demanding, which forces you to respond in the same way. That valuable and extensive time to think better what you say and to whom you say it is no longer possible, it does not exist ”, he points out.

Ardèvol also indicates that instant messaging "is much more accessible to everyone than email or writing a letter, which is much more formal". The question of formality is another key. Juana Rubio-Romero, PhD in Philosophy, professor at the University of Nebrija and specialist in social research and communication, has done much research on the use of WhatsApp in young people and explains that they do not use email to talk because they see it as “excessively formal ”, Something relegated to academic or administrative issues. In fact, he points out that he believes that generation Z has taken a step further and has moved from WhatsApp to Instagram, because they see that the instant messaging application is very formal for them.


Cristina Vela Delfa, professor of the Spanish Language department at the Faculty of Social, Legal and Communication Sciences at the University of Valladolid and author of the book

Communication by email. Discursive analysis of digital correspondence

(Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2021). “When compared to other non-digital texts, email leans towards informality; on the other hand, compared to other digital texts, it is the most formal of them all ”, he explains.

This does not mean that it is not possible to be informal by email, where you can even add

emojis

, but that little by little their use has shifted towards that register. But we use few

emojis

in

emails

, among other things, for usability reasons, explains Agnese Sampietro, PhD in Linguistics from the University of Valencia, postdoctoral researcher at the Universitat Jaume I and author of a thesis on emoticons and

emojis

. "If I type an email with my computer and enter

emojis

is not as easy as in WhatsApp, well I will not." In addition, he adds that we are creatures of habit and that, since we are not used to using

emojis

in emails, we don't.

"Furthermore, WhatsApp messages are shorter, more like dialogue, while emails tend to be longer and more like written genres, such as letters," he explains.

Finally, Elisenda Ardèvol also adds that instant messaging makes us feel always connected and “we do not feel the need to write to our loved ones even if they are far away, since we know that we can keep track of their daily activity through the mobile phone ”.

Do we miss something by abandoning

personal

emails

?

Anyone who's had a lot of personal email correspondence knows that if they didn't delete their archive or lost their account, they can access those old emails with a simple search. That record, more complicated in WhatsApp, is one of the things that Lorena Durán likes the most. “I keep those

emails

in folders with great affection

. It makes me very funny to read them and see how we saw things and how we see them now ”, he says. She says she still prefers to type those longer texts on a computer keyboard than on a phone. “I think it also generates less invasion. I feel more comfortable writing an

email

, it seems more personal to me ”, she indicates.

What Adriana Ponte-Guía misses the most about those

emails

, which in her case began to disappear in 2009 (the year in which WhatsApp was also born), is depth. "Feelings were discussed, situations were described, opinions were asked about events from families, countries, and cultures from those who were far away," he recalls. He also especially valued that "they responded with time, thinking each word and each phrase, intuiting how the other would take it."

Cristina Vela Delfa believes that, in part, we have that feeling of depth and pause in contrast to the maelstrom of the rest of our digital lives. “Given the explosion and interactivity of social networks, the feeling of intimacy generated by the tranquility of the home, of the personal computer, from which a good part of the emails are written, in the face of massive access to social networks through the telephone, strengthens its reflective and intimate dimension ”, he reflects.

However, all this nostalgia is only possible for those who lived through that golden age of email and filled it with

personal

emails

.

The youngest continue to write messages of love, but in other ways.

Where then are the love letters now?

Juana Rubio-Romero admits that she doesn't know, but she has an intuition.

"I think on Instagram or WhatsApp.

I don't think they are going to send a love letter by

mail

.

The

mail

is an absolutely formal means of communication ”, he insists.

“It is not conversational.

Neither love nor anything, email is an anachronism for them ”.

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Source: elparis

All tech articles on 2022-01-03

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