mamasewingcircus.com

I’ve been reading Adventure in the Rocky Mountains,
basically the letters of a plucky woman who traveled the Westerns United States by herself in the mid 1800s. Since I’ve been to both Tahoe and many of the cities in Colorado she mentions, it is interesting to read how the landscape and inhabitants of those regions have changed and not. It also has me thinking that although I appreciate these are remarkable letters in both their detail and their description, our collective literacy must be on the decline since the advent of email. No one writes like this anymore. I’ve read many articles portending the decline into idiocy caused by email, IM, cell phones, and the internet (in general). I’ve rolled my eyes through each of those because I still read books, my friends and family still read books, we’re all basically literate… But, over the past few years I have noticed a decline in my ability to communicate. Some of this is the effect of having to communicate across national borders, as I’ve been working with a team in India whose first language is not English. Although the engineers I’ve worked with in the states are for the most part highly educated, I’d claim English is not THEIR first language, either. So, in my case, some of the language decline is directly related to the company I’ve kept. For the life of me, tho, I can’t recall the last letter I’ve written that wasn’t a 3-lined thank you, and before this blog, I certainly had not stopped to record events in my life in greater detail than a few words, with the exception of my life changing trip to India which required documenting. As someone whose preferred communication form is pen to paper, I can’t imagine that others are doing a much better job maintaining their writing skills. So, what are we missing? Are there fewer novels in the world today? Will historians have to piece our lives together from LinkedIn and MySpace profiles, the pictures on Flickr? And aside from the garbage we’re leaving behind that will outlive us by thousands of years, will there be little other description of what life was really like? What the air smelled like and what angst we suffered before the first days of… or prom … or …? Are they going to think that reality TV was reality? Or are blogs and Wiki’s replacing the letters of past, and AOL spk – which killz me – is my generation’s hieroglyphics?

Adding to the history books – our kids were Super Kids: