30 Years of Email (397 words)
What do we need to remember?
I got my first email address when I entered grad school, 30 years ago this fall. Email still wasn’t compulsory for students at the time, but I had a tech-savvy friend who knew how to set it up for me on the university’s server.
The first emails were thrilling. I would sit at my giant computer monitor, connect to the internet over the phone line—that iconic fuzzy ringing sound—and hope for something from one of my handful of correspondents in my “inbox.” Like a mailbox! If I were lucky, there would be a little digital note from a friend halfway across the country.
But we were still sending mail in those days; I have fat hanging files stuffed with postcards to prove it. I recently wondered if I should throw most of that paper correspondence away. People I’ve long since lost touch with, some people I don’t even remember, checking in from their travels, apologizing for not having written sooner, just saying hello. Do I need to remember all of that? The emails from those early days are long gone; why keep the postcards?
I think of social media, how I finally got off it after several attempts to pull that needle out of my arm. One reason I did—although not the main reason—was that, while it was gratifying to see pictures of their kids from people I went to elementary school with, I would naturally have lost touch with those people without social media. And that’s OK. It’s OK to lose touch. It’s OK to not remember that person who sent you a postcard 30 years ago.
After my husband died in 2019, I lost my sense of urgency about email. It became a thing, one of many things, that was not a deathbed thing. If we don’t think about a thing on our deathbed, or the deathbed of our loved ones, we have to question its importance. Email is important only inasmuch as it serves the things we do think about on our deathbed. Which is, mostly, the people we love.
This week, almost exactly 30 years since I started using email, I received one of the most beautiful emails I’ve ever received. It was generous and lyrical, sent with love and received with the same. I marked it as important. I printed it out. It was worth remembering.
As an octogenarian, even when not asked, I promptly tell younger people that the most noticeable changes in my 82 years relate to speed--the speed of transportation, communication and computation. Your post reminds me of the need to maintain the quality of our communication, not just increase the quantity. AI, especially large language models, accelerates what researchers call cognitive velocity: the ability to generate, process, and synthesize ideas rapidly. It’s not just about faster typing or quicker search—it’s about compressing the time between question and insight. Some thinkers even suggest AI may democratize genius by giving more people access to high-level reasoning tools.
But speed isn’t always clarity. Just as email increased the frequency of communication, AI risks increasing the volume of thought without deepening its quality. The challenge becomes one of pacing: how do we preserve reflection in a world of acceleration?
I hope you DON'T throw the post cards away. You might find, when you get to my age - which I suspect is two going on three decades more than yours - that even those from folks you THINK you've forgotten have renewed interest. I've kept almost every piece of mail I've ever received, and now I find that there's a lot in it of interest, to ME, at least. But maybe also to others, as for example a large correspondence through the 1970s with my poet friend Claudia (she killed herself in 1979) - a time when we were both coming out, in St. Louis, Chicago and Philadelphia (with many visit to New York, of course), and in which our alma mater has expressed an interest as an addition to the LGBTQ archive there. One great lament of mine is that email (and other electronic communication) will be lost to the future, and with it a great deal of what it's like living through what is already becoming the past. But then I'm a retired manuscript librarian/historian, so I may have a biased view.