Back in 1997 I was convinced that the World Wide Web was a very nasty thing indeed. If it were a person, it would be the kind of person who would pull wings off butterflies and microwave gerbils just for the hell of it. I foresaw only negative consequences for what was then a small but growing force and decided that I was going to remain haughtily aloof and have nothing to do with it. As its momentum built, and URLs started to accompany mainstream advertising, I feared for a world that would depend on interaction with VDUs and felt that personal relationships would suffer irrevocably.
I had over 20 penpals at the time. I'd return home from school and spend almost every evening fashioning endless ambitious epistles to my gathered group of faceless friends. I never asked for photographs; it wasn't important. A few were sent unsolicited, but for the most part the appearance and demeanour of my chosen communicants was revealed only by their hand written words over time, like the door to a beautiful walled garden slowly creaking open in a summer breeze.
Without a computer or the desire to own one, I filled pages of A4 refill pads as my biro struggled to keep pace with all the thoughts and questions that my stimulated mind was suggesting. I used carbon paper to make copies of each missive, carefully cataloguing them to keep track of what I was saying to whom in order to avoid repeating myself. A loner then as I am now, it was a way of escaping the walls of my bedroom and tracing my fingertips over the seams of these people's lives, looking for ideas and presenting my own.
There was a news story at the time about the rise of email and how fewer letters were being posted. It was suggested that to counteract this, emails should require virtual stamps before they could be sent, or that a daily limit should be imposed. Good, I thought. Make them suffer. Make it as inconvenient as possible. The internet advocates scoffed at the idea. They had nicknamed the postal service Snail Mail, which made me seethe. I mean, you could post a letter in Plymouth and have it arrive in Edinburgh the following morning - as far as I was concerned that was miraculous. And it wasn't a digital facsimile, fragmented into binary code and impersonally reconstructed at the other end; it was the actual paper I used, embossed with the tactile strokes of my fervent pen. It was thoughtful. It required more effort, which afforded it greater value. I vowed that I would never send a email as long as I lived. Do you remember those reply cards that they used to put in CDs? You filled in your details and they sent you information about forthcoming releases from the artist in question. Most of them asked for an email address in addition to the other information and I took great pleasure in writing NEVER across the space provided. It was a feeble stand, but I enjoyed taking it.
I can't remember what changed my mind, but over the months the number of penpals began to drop. We had shared what needed to be shared and the time span between letters eventually turned into realisations that I would never hear from an individual again. No fanfare, no eulogy, just silent divergence. I purchased my first PC, a Pentium II behemoth with 64Mb of RAM and a 10Gb hard drive that the retailer assured me I would never fill. He was right. I just used it to type up a novel I had written in longhand. I could see the benefit in that. However, a couple of years later curiosity got the better of me and I purchased a modem. Wise men examine both sides of the coin before assessing its value, I reasoned, but soon I saw that my misgivings were an embarrassing misjudgement that I would have to bury and pretend I never held. Ahem.
The point I was going to make, and from which I have meandered quite a distance, is that communicating is a lot harder for me these days because it's easier to do it. I still have the copies of those old letters and if I flick through them now I'm surprised at how vibrant and inventive I was. I still keep in touch with three of those old penpals, two of them exclusively by post, but the letters I write now don't have the same sparkle that the old ones have because I've fallen out of the habit. All the effort I put in back then is what makes it appear so effortless when reading now. That feeling of reaching outside my bedroom that I used to get has become so accessible and commonplace that of course it is taken for granted, but it would be nice to get it back.
Obviously I'm a fully paid up advocate of the internet these days. Somehow I fragmented my luddite self and reconstructed my code into something more nerdlike. But I'm glad to have grown up in a time when the only common forms of communication were landlines and letters; it gives me a sense of purpose and deliberation to remember, acknowledge and aspire to.
