Expression in the Information Age

Thanks to the Internet, I have over the years managed to get back in touch with many long-lost friends. But one of them recently sent me an e-mail complaining that, now that we are communicating on a regular basis, she actually misses me more, not less.

Astounded by the seemingly paradoxical statement I immediately hit reply: "L. what on earth do you mean?"

Within half-an-hour or so, her e-mail came back with a strangely familiar passage in quotation marks.

"Late last night the rain fell. It dripped and dropped against my windowsills announcing the departure of a lethargic winter. Yet L. I must confess, I didn't mind the winter nights. What I fear is the warmth of summer. When my skin turns bronze and my body is ripened for love, when that afternoon sun lingers a bit too long on my shoulders, oh L. I get in trouble."

Only when I got to the end did it dawn on me that it was my own writing. I wrote this passage to L. more than a decade ago in a handwritten letter, something I regret to report that I rarely do these days.

L. concluded: "See what I mean? Where is the writer of this letter now? We e-mail, but are we really in touch?"

Hers is a fair accusation, though she, too, has stopped writing such expressive letters. Since we communicate by e-mail, we say things that are neither deep nor profound.

We are communicating again after some silent years, but L. and I communicate badly. Our electronic correspondence stays on this shallower side of the lake, and our prose, if such it can be called, is only a bit wittier than the yellow pages of the phone book.

"How's it going?" I would ask in one message. "Bye."

"Went to see Stomp last night," L would answer in another.

"Fantastic. But my kid's crying though. Got to go. Love."

My suspicion is that in a world where we are constantly chatting, very little is actually being said. We substitute human emotions with those strange symbols :-) and :-(, hoping somehow these colons and exclamation points could substitute our sensibility and taste and convey the nuances of our lives.

The US Department of Education recently supported my suspicion. Last October, it found that only one in four students in high school, both public and private, could write "at a level of proficiency necessary for future job success."

The survey also found that while students are often capable of "social chit chat," language for the purpose of narration or argument is beyond them. Nine out of 10 of these students are native-born speakers of English.

It is worse, actually, with people who speak English as a second language. Robert Woo, who hails from Hong Kong, says that he can't write in Chinese anymore.

"I e-mail all my family and friends in Hongkong in English but I haven't written anything in Chinese in almost a decade. My parents used to get these expressive letters from me when I was in college, but they can read in English, via the Internet."

He doubts that he can write in Chinese anymore. "Not enough time," he said, shrugging, "not enough incentive. Besides, there's always the phone."

So with speed and easy access, the first few casualties may be depth and style. But I fear the last might be literacy itself. "She was, like, you know, so mad ... " or so the housewife on a talk show began this morning, "and like I don't know why".

Neither did I, to be honest, but her incoherence made me wonder what happened to language and ideas in a country where people are less self reflective and yet, at the same time, as if cursed by Andy Warhol, more expressive.

To live in the information age is, in a way, to live in a modern day Tower of Babel. One is constantly communicating -- with cell phones, e-mails, pagers and in chat rooms -- but one may very well be out of touch. One gets on the "right" side of the digital divide but one might have to pay a price: Language is streamlined, and intimacy is forsaken for the high valued currency called information.