6 ms·

The art of letter writing has been declining for a century. Most people don't even use email for most daily communication, but instant messaging. And it seems a

The art of letter writing has been declining for a century. Most people don't even use email for most daily communication, but instant messaging. And it seems a lot of instant messaging boils down to pictures, emoji, memes, and short responses ("I'll be there at XXX") The ship has really already sailed on longform communication, perhaps out of laziness or cost/benefit. Part of what we're seeing with the automation going on is giving ordinary people some semblance of what the elite have had for a long time: administrative assistants/personal assistants. "Take a memo for me, write up an invitation letter and send it to my wife's sister" For much of the uber powerful and wealthy, gruntwork communications have taken the original person out of the message. We could argue whether or not everyone getting their own AI admin assistant is good or bad for society (will everyone just have their assistants talk to each other, and no one will talk directly anymore?) But I must admit, I hate dealing with non-friends/family in communications that involve transactions. There's nothing I hate more than having to book stuff, call customer service, or write emails to service departments.

joshuamorton 8y ago
People have been saying the art of letter writing has been declining for a century for a century.[1] > A hundred years ago it took so long and cost so much to send a letter that it seemed worth while to put some time and thought into writing it. -- Percy Holmes Boynton, in 1915, 103 years ago The pace of modern life has been accelerating since before some of our grandparents were born. [1]: https://www.xkcd.com/1227/ https://www.xkcd.com/1227/
- emodendroket 8y ago
  I can never remember exactly how a block letter is even formatted because I write them so infrequently.
- mseebach 8y ago
  This does hint at the root of the matter: letter writing is a format dictated by the constraints of communication. These constraints changed between 1815 and 1915, and are all but gone today - so the format of the communication changes accordingly. The letters of yore we revere today were written by intellectuals and are fascinating, but that wasn't what all letters were like. The letters written by regular people were as banal as the IM threads exchanged by regular people today. Intellectuals still produce long form material, just not necessarily in letter form.
  - joshuamorton 8y ago
    This same concept, by the way, is why we always say that music from $previous generation is better than music from $current generation. We have access to all of the bad music from today, but the only music we remember from the good old days is the good stuff, this is doubly true if we weren't alive back then. We only have the music that survived because it was good (popular and lasting).
will_brown 8y ago
I’ve previously posted (to surprisingly supportive reception) about my Dad’s collection of letters from 1956-1966 while traveling some 4 million miles around the world in the navy and State Department. Some might find it interesting: https://www.amazon.com/Dear-Mom-Odyssey-World-Travel-ebook/dp/B01MR2ZQ5W https://www.amazon.com/Dear-Mom-Odyssey-World-Travel-ebook/d... Separately, my grandfather (on my Mom’s side) was likely one of those “elites” having been a named partner of an AM100 law Firm. His birthday cards always ended “dictated not read.” Now you to can be as detached and impersonal with your very own ai personal assistant.
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  That's fantastic. “dictated not read.” means "I didn't have time to check that this is correct, please speed extra of your unimportant time to proofread for me." What a birthday gift! To be fair, though, if the message was nice, dictation is t really an alternative to a telephone message which is also dictated but not so derided.
  - will_brown 8y ago
    In this instance he dictated the card to his assistant who in turn wrote the card/message. This is old school legal professional formatting where the Initials of the assistant followed my grandfather’s name identifying which assistant typed the dictation. He was smart, formal, thoughtful and a great sense of humor. Most of me thinks he did it as one day I would find the humor in it.
  - fzzzy 8y ago
    It’s highly amusing to me that you didn’t proofread your comment.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- boneitis 8y ago
  Having read the description on the Amazon page, this sounds precisely like the type of candid material i seek in general. Is there any non-kindle format available for purchase?
ergothus 8y ago
Tl;DR: the decline in long-form text communication is not (necessarily) because people are too lazy to write long-form. They may just be recognizing the futility. My attempts to use clear and precise longer-form text generally fail to achieve my goal, and readers will respond in ways that the text anticipated and answered, but they didn't read or didn't comprehend the points. Given a sentence at a time, with 5 or fewer sentences, comprehension improves, though I still have to repeat points and correct wrong conclusions. I've seen this lack of attention/comprehension with the text of others, both as reader and as outside observer, so I know the confusion is not just poor writing on my part. You have to compare the efficiency/accuracy by results, not against some logical but unrealistic ideal.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  I've seen this lack of attention/comprehension with the text of others, both as reader and as outside observer, so I know the confusion is not just poor writing on my part. My wife works in banking, and she's discovered that she has a superpower: She can read large amounts of dense text quickly and comprehend it. Yes, her superpower is reading! Incredible as it sounds, there are lots of C-level people in her field who basically never get past light reading. So basically, she's become an overnight expert/resource to senior people. Is this a sign of the degradation of our society, or has it always been this way? I suspect it's actually the latter.
  - fjsolwmv 8y ago
    Do you think your mom reads more than the CEO? Orperhap CEOs have other obligations so they don't have time to read a whole document in depth. If CEO could do everything alone, there would be no employees. If your mom can do everything alone, she should start a company and get rich off cost savings.
  - SCHiM 8y ago
    I remember students in my class barely passing comprehensive reading tests. I find it hard to believe that they've improved without the pressure that school/university puts on them.
stcredzero 8y ago
The ship has really already sailed on longform communication, perhaps out of laziness or cost/benefit. Really? I see a flourishing of detailed video content, much of which is interesting and fairly information dense. Examples: Civilizations at the End of Time: Black Hole Farming https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qam5BkXIEhQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qam5BkXIEhQ CGP Grey. Rules for Rulers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs Granted, that these are really pointers to other sources, in many cases text sources. Cost/Benefit is a big factor! Remember: The street finds its own uses for things.
sandworm101 8y ago
So too has the art of cave painting. We forget that the style and substance of a communication is more often an outcome of the medium than anything else. Letters were long because they needed to be. Postcards were shorter. And in Britain, during the days of multiple mail deliveries, letters too were very short. Emails and IMs are short because they also need to be short.
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  They don't need to be short. They just don't need to be long.
  - sandworm101 8y ago
    They need to be short if you want to get it sent before the next post goes out. It needs to be short if you don't have the space on the back of the card. Today's IMs and emails need to be short so that you do not burden the reader. Otherwise email conversations will take so long as to defeat their point.
sowbug 8y ago
The length of a single piece of communication might be a function of bandwidth. If my only way to reach you is by a handwritten letter that must travel by ship across an ocean, I'm probably going to say more than "Yo." Edit: joshuamorton made the same point while I was working on this comment.
eli_gottlieb 8y ago
>Part of what we're seeing with the automation going on is giving ordinary people some semblance of what the elite have had for a long time: administrative assistants/personal assistants. "Take a memo for me, write up an invitation letter and send it to my wife's sister" For much of the uber powerful and wealthy, gruntwork communications have taken the original person out of the message. >We could argue whether or not everyone getting their own AI admin assistant is good or bad for society (will everyone just have their assistants talk to each other, and no one will talk directly anymore?) But I must admit, I hate dealing with non-friends/family in communications that involve transactions. There's nothing I hate more than having to book stuff, call customer service, or write emails to service departments. The thing is, if I had to point to a problem I have in life and for which I'd be willing to pay for a solution, a lack of a secretary and excessive personal admin stuff is simply not it. This is solving a problem that, at least to my eyes, only the powerful actually have.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  Speak for yourself.
  - eli_gottlieb 8y ago
    Sure sure. The question is how large a market people like you actually make up, since companies like Google usually want to make products that can reach as many people as possible.
    - emodendroket 8y ago
      I doubt it's unusual. My father used to solve this problem by making my mother make all the calls, but that is a harder sell these days.
- brightball 8y ago
  The closest I've ever actually gotten to having an assistant was a stretch of about 2 years after we had our 2nd child. Since my wife and I both work full time, we needed child care. It was about the same price to hire a nanny as it was to send 2 kids to daycare, so we did some interviews and hired one. That 2 years was probably the easiest stretch of dual working parent life that we ever had. She did a load of laundry and a load of dishes each day while the kids were having naps. If we were low on detergent or supplies that the kids needed, we gave her cash and she'd pick it up on her way in. If somebody needed to be at the house for some reason, she was there and neither my wife nor I had to remove ourselves from work to take care of it. We literally came home from work, ate dinner, played with the kids. When the weekends came around we didn't have to dedicate a chunk of it to laundry/cleaning. It was pretty fantastic. I can only imagine how having a actual assistant would take things to the next level. All that said, the types of phone calls that Google is talking about making here aren't that beneficial...yet. When Google can call my cable company, wade through the phone tree and get a service appointment or issue resolved...I'll be all over it. Even just wading through the phone tree and sitting on hold until an actual person is reached and then handing it back off to me. Those are the time wasters I'd want saved. What Google is doing here is equivalent of automating the functionality that people pay for with OnStar.
pavel_lishin 8y ago
> The ship has really already sailed on longform communication, perhaps out of laziness or cost/benefit. Maybe, but you could choose to be optimistic and interpret it as getting communication closer to what it is in real life - I don't expound to my friends when I'm with them in real life; a lot of our communication is carried out through expressions and gestures. "IRL Emoji", some future archeologist/sociologist could call it.
Tactic 8y ago
Given that if you write more than three paragraphs you get slammed with "I'm not reading that wall of text" and that "tl;dr" is a thing, is it surprising that people are employing the short form instead?
BrandonM 8y ago
> The ship has really already sailed on longform communication, perhaps out of laziness or cost/benefit. The 3rd most popular podcast¹ regularly lasts 3+ hours. It's typically a conversation between Joe Rogan and a single guest. ¹ The Joe Rogan Experience, according to http://www.podbay.fm/browse/top http://www.podbay.fm/browse/top
vertexFarm 8y ago
I know lots of people will roll their eyes at the old man who complains and shakes his cane about the decline of long-form communication and the thoughtfulness of written correspondence. But I don't care if they think I'm paranoid and silly. I think it's a damn shame to replace common literacy and writing with tweets and autocomplete that eventually just takes over for you entirely. Here's the thing about these little conveniences and timesavers they're building. I think it's a sliding scale. Now we think it's inconvenient to call and put in a reservation or write an email to somebody. They'll fix that. Then we'll think the next most onerous thing is inconvenient. The truth is, we have extremely cush lives right now as it is. We're not going to use this to save time and do better things, become better people. We're going to use it to lazily shrink from society and become even more obsessed with electronic trivialities. Just like me writing this bitter comment right now. It's the continuation of an obvious trend.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  Writing itself is a convenience and time saver to avoid memorizing and repeated vocal recitation. I don't disagree that there is a continued march of convenience, I'm just not convinced that there is any justification to the idea that there is a “this far and no further” point at which thst March stops being a net gain, and even less coonvinced that that point is conveniently just before the convenience advanced of the last few years (or even generations).
  - vertexFarm 8y ago
    Yeah, it's been a trend in the past. You think it's linear? You don't see that it's picking up extremely quickly during this generation specifically? Do you think that we should be completely unconcerned about the fact that future generations will have lives completely dissimilar to any previous? And we don't know anything about the consequences. People have this idea that information technology is so innocent and only improves, never harms. I feel like this field is about to get a reckoning, but it's not going to be something we can undo. I don't think it's crazy to be skeptical and careful about it. I don't think it's a good idea to just assume it's fine and normal.
romwell 8y ago
I would disagree, if only I because I still write letters. But then I am one of the people who writes SMS messages long enough that they are unreadable on the recepeint's end. (And yes, turns out that you can type a long enough SMS message that it wouldn't display fully on a modern Android phone even after the auto-conversion to MMS. That saddens me. I guess you may be right, after all.) On the other hand, people write more these days than they ever have. And even in this thread, the individual comments end up running quite long - long enough to be short letters if you were to write them by hand. Turns out, when you are actually trying to make a point, being brief is more difficult than being wordy. So perhaps it's not the art of writing "long-form" (a modern term) that is dying - perhaps it's writing longform intended for one recipient only - and perhaps even that is temporary. Time will tell.

joshuamorton 8y ago

People have been saying the art of letter writing has been declining for a century for a century.[1] > A hundred years ago it took so long and cost so much to send a letter that it seemed worth while to put some time and thought into writing it. -- Percy Holmes Boynton, in 1915, 103 years ago The pace of modern life has been accelerating since before some of our grandparents were born. [1]: https://www.xkcd.com/1227/ https://www.xkcd.com/1227/

emodendroket 8y ago
I can never remember exactly how a block letter is even formatted because I write them so infrequently.
mseebach 8y ago
This does hint at the root of the matter: letter writing is a format dictated by the constraints of communication. These constraints changed between 1815 and 1915, and are all but gone today - so the format of the communication changes accordingly. The letters of yore we revere today were written by intellectuals and are fascinating, but that wasn't what all letters were like. The letters written by regular people were as banal as the IM threads exchanged by regular people today. Intellectuals still produce long form material, just not necessarily in letter form.
- joshuamorton 8y ago
  This same concept, by the way, is why we always say that music from $previous generation is better than music from $current generation. We have access to all of the bad music from today, but the only music we remember from the good old days is the good stuff, this is doubly true if we weren't alive back then. We only have the music that survived because it was good (popular and lasting).

will_brown 8y ago

I’ve previously posted (to surprisingly supportive reception) about my Dad’s collection of letters from 1956-1966 while traveling some 4 million miles around the world in the navy and State Department. Some might find it interesting: https://www.amazon.com/Dear-Mom-Odyssey-World-Travel-ebook/dp/B01MR2ZQ5W https://www.amazon.com/Dear-Mom-Odyssey-World-Travel-ebook/d... Separately, my grandfather (on my Mom’s side) was likely one of those “elites” having been a named partner of an AM100 law Firm. His birthday cards always ended “dictated not read.” Now you to can be as detached and impersonal with your very own ai personal assistant.

fjsolwmv 8y ago
That's fantastic. “dictated not read.” means "I didn't have time to check that this is correct, please speed extra of your unimportant time to proofread for me." What a birthday gift! To be fair, though, if the message was nice, dictation is t really an alternative to a telephone message which is also dictated but not so derided.
- will_brown 8y ago
  In this instance he dictated the card to his assistant who in turn wrote the card/message. This is old school legal professional formatting where the Initials of the assistant followed my grandfather’s name identifying which assistant typed the dictation. He was smart, formal, thoughtful and a great sense of humor. Most of me thinks he did it as one day I would find the humor in it.
- fzzzy 8y ago
  It’s highly amusing to me that you didn’t proofread your comment.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
boneitis 8y ago
Having read the description on the Amazon page, this sounds precisely like the type of candid material i seek in general. Is there any non-kindle format available for purchase?

ergothus 8y ago

Tl;DR: the decline in long-form text communication is not (necessarily) because people are too lazy to write long-form. They may just be recognizing the futility. My attempts to use clear and precise longer-form text generally fail to achieve my goal, and readers will respond in ways that the text anticipated and answered, but they didn't read or didn't comprehend the points. Given a sentence at a time, with 5 or fewer sentences, comprehension improves, though I still have to repeat points and correct wrong conclusions. I've seen this lack of attention/comprehension with the text of others, both as reader and as outside observer, so I know the confusion is not just poor writing on my part. You have to compare the efficiency/accuracy by results, not against some logical but unrealistic ideal.

stcredzero 8y ago
I've seen this lack of attention/comprehension with the text of others, both as reader and as outside observer, so I know the confusion is not just poor writing on my part. My wife works in banking, and she's discovered that she has a superpower: She can read large amounts of dense text quickly and comprehend it. Yes, her superpower is reading! Incredible as it sounds, there are lots of C-level people in her field who basically never get past light reading. So basically, she's become an overnight expert/resource to senior people. Is this a sign of the degradation of our society, or has it always been this way? I suspect it's actually the latter.
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  Do you think your mom reads more than the CEO? Orperhap CEOs have other obligations so they don't have time to read a whole document in depth. If CEO could do everything alone, there would be no employees. If your mom can do everything alone, she should start a company and get rich off cost savings.
- SCHiM 8y ago
  I remember students in my class barely passing comprehensive reading tests. I find it hard to believe that they've improved without the pressure that school/university puts on them.

stcredzero 8y ago

The ship has really already sailed on longform communication, perhaps out of laziness or cost/benefit. Really? I see a flourishing of detailed video content, much of which is interesting and fairly information dense. Examples: Civilizations at the End of Time: Black Hole Farming https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qam5BkXIEhQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qam5BkXIEhQ CGP Grey. Rules for Rulers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs Granted, that these are really pointers to other sources, in many cases text sources. Cost/Benefit is a big factor! Remember: The street finds its own uses for things.

sandworm101 8y ago

So too has the art of cave painting. We forget that the style and substance of a communication is more often an outcome of the medium than anything else. Letters were long because they needed to be. Postcards were shorter. And in Britain, during the days of multiple mail deliveries, letters too were very short. Emails and IMs are short because they also need to be short.

fjsolwmv 8y ago
They don't need to be short. They just don't need to be long.
- sandworm101 8y ago
  They need to be short if you want to get it sent before the next post goes out. It needs to be short if you don't have the space on the back of the card. Today's IMs and emails need to be short so that you do not burden the reader. Otherwise email conversations will take so long as to defeat their point.

sowbug 8y ago

The length of a single piece of communication might be a function of bandwidth. If my only way to reach you is by a handwritten letter that must travel by ship across an ocean, I'm probably going to say more than "Yo." Edit: joshuamorton made the same point while I was working on this comment.

eli_gottlieb 8y ago

>Part of what we're seeing with the automation going on is giving ordinary people some semblance of what the elite have had for a long time: administrative assistants/personal assistants. "Take a memo for me, write up an invitation letter and send it to my wife's sister" For much of the uber powerful and wealthy, gruntwork communications have taken the original person out of the message. >We could argue whether or not everyone getting their own AI admin assistant is good or bad for society (will everyone just have their assistants talk to each other, and no one will talk directly anymore?) But I must admit, I hate dealing with non-friends/family in communications that involve transactions. There's nothing I hate more than having to book stuff, call customer service, or write emails to service departments. The thing is, if I had to point to a problem I have in life and for which I'd be willing to pay for a solution, a lack of a secretary and excessive personal admin stuff is simply not it. This is solving a problem that, at least to my eyes, only the powerful actually have.

emodendroket 8y ago
Speak for yourself.
- eli_gottlieb 8y ago
  Sure sure. The question is how large a market people like you actually make up, since companies like Google usually want to make products that can reach as many people as possible.
  - emodendroket 8y ago
    I doubt it's unusual. My father used to solve this problem by making my mother make all the calls, but that is a harder sell these days.
brightball 8y ago
The closest I've ever actually gotten to having an assistant was a stretch of about 2 years after we had our 2nd child. Since my wife and I both work full time, we needed child care. It was about the same price to hire a nanny as it was to send 2 kids to daycare, so we did some interviews and hired one. That 2 years was probably the easiest stretch of dual working parent life that we ever had. She did a load of laundry and a load of dishes each day while the kids were having naps. If we were low on detergent or supplies that the kids needed, we gave her cash and she'd pick it up on her way in. If somebody needed to be at the house for some reason, she was there and neither my wife nor I had to remove ourselves from work to take care of it. We literally came home from work, ate dinner, played with the kids. When the weekends came around we didn't have to dedicate a chunk of it to laundry/cleaning. It was pretty fantastic. I can only imagine how having a actual assistant would take things to the next level. All that said, the types of phone calls that Google is talking about making here aren't that beneficial...yet. When Google can call my cable company, wade through the phone tree and get a service appointment or issue resolved...I'll be all over it. Even just wading through the phone tree and sitting on hold until an actual person is reached and then handing it back off to me. Those are the time wasters I'd want saved. What Google is doing here is equivalent of automating the functionality that people pay for with OnStar.

pavel_lishin 8y ago

> The ship has really already sailed on longform communication, perhaps out of laziness or cost/benefit. Maybe, but you could choose to be optimistic and interpret it as getting communication closer to what it is in real life - I don't expound to my friends when I'm with them in real life; a lot of our communication is carried out through expressions and gestures. "IRL Emoji", some future archeologist/sociologist could call it.

Tactic 8y ago

Given that if you write more than three paragraphs you get slammed with "I'm not reading that wall of text" and that "tl;dr" is a thing, is it surprising that people are employing the short form instead?

BrandonM 8y ago

> The ship has really already sailed on longform communication, perhaps out of laziness or cost/benefit. The 3rd most popular podcast¹ regularly lasts 3+ hours. It's typically a conversation between Joe Rogan and a single guest. ¹ The Joe Rogan Experience, according to http://www.podbay.fm/browse/top http://www.podbay.fm/browse/top

vertexFarm 8y ago

I know lots of people will roll their eyes at the old man who complains and shakes his cane about the decline of long-form communication and the thoughtfulness of written correspondence. But I don't care if they think I'm paranoid and silly. I think it's a damn shame to replace common literacy and writing with tweets and autocomplete that eventually just takes over for you entirely. Here's the thing about these little conveniences and timesavers they're building. I think it's a sliding scale. Now we think it's inconvenient to call and put in a reservation or write an email to somebody. They'll fix that. Then we'll think the next most onerous thing is inconvenient. The truth is, we have extremely cush lives right now as it is. We're not going to use this to save time and do better things, become better people. We're going to use it to lazily shrink from society and become even more obsessed with electronic trivialities. Just like me writing this bitter comment right now. It's the continuation of an obvious trend.

dragonwriter 8y ago
Writing itself is a convenience and time saver to avoid memorizing and repeated vocal recitation. I don't disagree that there is a continued march of convenience, I'm just not convinced that there is any justification to the idea that there is a “this far and no further” point at which thst March stops being a net gain, and even less coonvinced that that point is conveniently just before the convenience advanced of the last few years (or even generations).
- vertexFarm 8y ago
  Yeah, it's been a trend in the past. You think it's linear? You don't see that it's picking up extremely quickly during this generation specifically? Do you think that we should be completely unconcerned about the fact that future generations will have lives completely dissimilar to any previous? And we don't know anything about the consequences. People have this idea that information technology is so innocent and only improves, never harms. I feel like this field is about to get a reckoning, but it's not going to be something we can undo. I don't think it's crazy to be skeptical and careful about it. I don't think it's a good idea to just assume it's fine and normal.

romwell 8y ago

I would disagree, if only I because I still write letters. But then I am one of the people who writes SMS messages long enough that they are unreadable on the recepeint's end. (And yes, turns out that you can type a long enough SMS message that it wouldn't display fully on a modern Android phone even after the auto-conversion to MMS. That saddens me. I guess you may be right, after all.) On the other hand, people write more these days than they ever have. And even in this thread, the individual comments end up running quite long - long enough to be short letters if you were to write them by hand. Turns out, when you are actually trying to make a point, being brief is more difficult than being wordy. So perhaps it's not the art of writing "long-form" (a modern term) that is dying - perhaps it's writing longform intended for one recipient only - and perhaps even that is temporary. Time will tell.