My sister-in-law stopped by tonight with a treasure trove of old high school notes for my wife. (While packing up for a move, she had come across boxes that hadn’t been touched in nearly 20 years… and felt like sharing.) Since I knew my wife and sister-in-law in high school, rehashing old memories was fun–especially for me, since I got a chance to see what I looked like from the other side!
The recurring theme of the conversation, however, wasn’t about how silly we were in high school. It wasn’t about how people have changed. It wasn’t even about favorite memories.
It was about the use of paper to pass notes.
Artifacts of a bygone age… paper slips with alternating handwriting of two friends who traded secrets every 42 minutes between classes. Could you believe it?
Call me sentimental, but it was nice having something to hold and touch to remind us of days past; even the notes about nothing triggered memories through use of a name, place, or phrase. That’ll all be gone in the digital age.
But let’s be clear about one thing: the sentimentality doesn’t run very deep. There were a lot of sheets of paper in that pile that contained a whole lot of nothing! As a recipient, I’d have been mighty frustrated if I had waited all through English hoping for an update and then got a page of, “I dunno, nothing much, I’ll tell you when I have something to tell you, OK? I’m not hiding anything, there’s just nothing to tell! Well, OK, maybe a little, ask me at lunch. I’M SO BORED. Why do you think Danny said what he said? Is it ever appropriate to use an interrabang?! Gotta run… wait, tell me something…” There is a reason guys don’t pass notes. That’s it.
Texting, though it lacks the bonus of a built in trip down memory lane 20 years from now, is much more in the moment, and much more effective. Here’s a back and forth I had with a good friend of mine two weeks ago:
HIM: U still going to LA?
ME: Yes. Home on Sat nite red eye
HIM: Change yr plans. Meet us in Vegas.
ME: Not gonna happen.
HIM: Bull puckey. Already got you a room.
ME: Unget it. I need to be home Sun. THX tho.
HIM: You suck.
Total elapsed time for messaging was about 60 seconds. Total amount of communication wasted on anything extraneous: zero words.
Not bad.
Texting isn’t quite ready for prime time yet, but it’s close. I’ve watched college classrooms in which six students all laughed simultaneously–the result of a particularly funny text sent at that exact moment. I’m not advocating for laziness in class, but let’s give respect where it’s due: reaching multiple people at once is something pen and paper could never achieve!
So no, you won’t hear me bemoaning the loss of paper as the medium of exchange in the world of notes. My kids won’t communicate the way their mom did, but they’ll have their own forms of communication that, while perhaps less charming than what my wife used, will open up doors we never dreamed possible back in the day.
ttyl
