The printing press destroyed western oral storytelling. E=MC^2 begat the atomic bomb. TiVo obliterated our limited understanding of the VCR.
In our rush toward ultimate technology, we've failed to recognize the damage such technology wreaks.
The Internet is the new frontier. The clearest examples of the violence the Internet perpetrates on our capacity for effective communication lie in our e-mail inboxes.
Sure, e-mail can be put to good use. It can help us communicate more linearly than we can by telephone conversations, which are perfectly suited to people who talk too damn much. It beats the U.S. Postal Service in terms of efficiency, reliability and unlikelihood of being gunned down by a federal employee.
But as we have done with such other technologies as satellites and the keyboard synthesizer, we've abused it. Like a nation of 13-year-old boys with laser pointers, we've gone below and beyond what e-mail should ever be used for.
Look in your inbox. I get about 20 useful e-mails per week. The remaining 30,000 seem to be responses to questions I never asked or desires I don't harbor.
Recently, I received an e-mail from a business creatively identified as Worldcell. The subject offered, \Our cell phones work in the Middle East.""
I dug in my recent memory for an occasion when I might have mentioned, within earshot of a Worldcell operative, that I was having trouble finding a cell phone that works in the Middle East. I couldn't recall desiring to increase my telecommunications capacity in the Holy Land.
This e-mail isn't unique. It's as if e-mail was invented for people to convey information the recipient doesn't need or want.
Certainly, some entertaining jokes and informative stories can be sent via e-mail. Most, however, are embarrassing to read.
What possesses people of otherwise sound judgment to forward bad poetry about drunk driving or to pass on the assertion that people are ripping millions from Microsoft by forwarding a chain letter with spelling errors in the subject line?
Maybe forwarded e-mails have provided an easy, socially accepted solution for people who, before the Internet, might have called you in the middle of the night to express badly informed and awkwardly stated feelings about Sept. 11 or to tell you what their favorite book is.
And structural failures in the writing of forwards have seeped into personal e-mails. Many e-mailers have lost the ability to end a sentence with a period, instead concluding each thought with an ellipsis (...). This looks ridiculous ... please stop doing it ... just take the plunge and end the sentence with a period.
We've lost the ability to say exactly what we mean. Our e-mails are rife with attempts to soften the blow of our sentences, making them hesitant statements of quasi-facts subject to a quick and easy reply.
Imagine Moby Dick beginning with ""Well, I guess you could call me Ishmael, if that's cool with you...""
E-mail can be a useful tool to us if we recognize its shortcomings. Certainly, it's a step forward from telemarketer's phone calls and the waste of superfluous paper mail.
But from now on, try to only e-mail things you're sure you won't later be embarrassed to claim as your own. And if I want to know your favorite color or where your cell phone works, I'll call and ask.
Dan Hinkel is a junior majoring in journalism who may be reached at dlhinkel@students.wisc.edu.
