But these speed-of-light missive missiles can create cacophony as well as conversation. Tap into the postings in the Internet and you’re swamped by a maelstrom of communicative debris, Does the new interactive utopia really have sectors called alt. mcdonalds. ketchup and alt.sex. bestiality.hamster. duct-tape? The meeting of awesome technology with puerile minds is dystopian rather than utopian. One immortal exchange: “I love sex. It’s a great feeling.” “Thanks for the news. Most of us would never have guessed.” Technomads hurl blunderbolts of pseudopoetry: “I hear the phlegm of fairy tale jive, and see the pursuing of rayon dreams.”
Consider: without the net, this muse abuse would probably never have occurred. Can a surfeit of pseudocommunication lead to a new pathology, Internetrosis? The pitfall is a new Babel, the promise is a new kind of literacy that fuses the oral and the written. Ann Goodstein, an advertising consultant in New York, found that E-mail has improved her writing. “I really found that the desire to communicate with people very intelligently and articulately made me want to write better,” she says.
Writing better is only part of what makes effective personal correspondence. Great epistles are letter bombs of humanity. Zelda Fitzgerald writes to F. Scott: “I look down the tracks and see you coming–and out of every haze & mist your darling rumpled trousers are hurrying to me…” It’s no accident that so many early great novels, from “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” to “Clarissa,” were written in the form of letters. The September issue of Wired, a bible of the new cyber-world, contains what’s probably the first epistolary fiction of E-mail, “Love Over the Wires,” by Paulina Borsook. Robbie to Claire: “What you are to me is an emotional laser, matter into which I can pump light of any rate and wavelength…” Claire to Robbie: “I love the fur on your ears…I would drink your bathwater…” Presumably such cybersighs reflect the deeper on-line intimacies to which we have no access. Ah, the networks of love. From the postman stumbling in the snow to the instantaneous impulses of Email, it’s the mind and heart, not the medium, that counts.
