Blog Entry

I used to write holiday cards religiously every year. I started when I was five years old, initially because my Mom forced me to. When I moved to a different junior high school, those holiday cards became one of my main sources of connection to my old friends, and I started to understand the value of them. (Thanks, Mom!)

I continued the tradition through and after college, and I received a healthy number of cards as well. Many of those consisted of a typed, xeroxed, and signed letter. I wasn’t offended by that, but I wasn’t particularly impressed either. I understood the practicality, but it wasn’t for me. It’s not that I wrote a particularly deep message to each of my friends. It was more that the act of handwriting a message had deep meaning for me.

After I started Blue Oxen Associates in 2002, the tradition stopped. I just found myself so overwhelmed with starting up a business, I couldn’t summon up the energy to handwrite all those cards. Each subsequent year, it became more and more of a sore point for me. I was making so many meaningful connections with new people through my work, my list kept growing and became more overwhelming, and I was never able to restart my tradition.

Letters

Last year, after once again not sending out any cards, I decided enough was enough. I was going to send a typed, xeroxed, and signed letter. Better to at least let my friends know that I was thinking about them and let them know what I was up to rather than not touch base at all. By now, people were sending e-cards, emails, and so forth, so I felt that a xeroxed letter really wouldn’t be so bad.

A chance conversation with my girlfriend, Lisa, (who was not yet aware of my new resolve) made me change my mind yet again. She had just received a letter from Bill, her next door neighbor from when she had lived in Cleveland. Back then, she was new to Cleveland, didn’t know anybody, and was the youngest person on her block. Bill and his wife, Ellie, welcomed her and brought her fruits and vegetables from their garden.

They were the epitome of good neighbors, and they developed a close friendship over time. They often checked in on her, looking after her house when she was away on business and offering companionship when she was home.

One day, Lisa had just returned from a business trip, when Bill knocked on her door. Ellie had suddenly fallen ill, and he wasn’t sure what to do. Lisa suggested he take her to the doctor. The next day, they learned that Ellie had cancer all over her body. They were devastated. When Ellie returned, Lisa played her violin at Ellie’s bedside so that she would have music to comfort her. One week later, Ellie passed away.

Lisa later moved to California to pursue a long-time dream. She and Bill corresponded via cards and letters. He would write about the neighborhood, describe her old house and its new residents. He would talk about old haunts and new developments. He discussed his art and his photography, which he had decided to pursue more seriously. And he continued to check in on Lisa, providing much needed encouragement for her pursuit of her dream, acting as any good neighbor would, even though he was now 2,000 miles away.

I listened to this story, I heard about his most recent letter, I thought about some of my own correspondences, and I was overwhelmed with emotion. I decided that I couldn’t go through with my plan to send out xeroxed letters. It’s not that my original thinking was wrong, it was that the handwritten cards had deeper meaning for me, and that I didn’t want to lose that.

Mediating Meaningful Relationships

I’ve thought long and hard over the years about how different communication mediums can mediate more meaningful relationships. There are a million stories like these, and it’s easy and dangerous to see new forms of communications as less meaningful. It’s easy to look at tools such as texting and Twitter, and to worry about the loss of meaningful interactions and relationships. And to some extent, it’s true. If you lower the barrier to interacting, you enable things like spam.

But there’s a flip side to that. Meaningful relationships are not all about long walks and deep philosophical conversations. They are also about the silly and the mundane. They are about learning that the people in your life are addicted to chocolate and are devout fans of the Washington Capitals. They’re about learning that the people in your life were elite swimmers in their youth and that they raise chickens in their backyard.

Modern technology seems to be particularly good at mediating the mundane, which is not the same as the meaningless. We are overwhelmed by spam, we hear about “sexting”, and we shake our head in sadness. Those of us who do not use these mediums regularly (and even those of us who do) wonder whether today’s youth will ever know what a deep, meaningful relationship truly is.

There is some validity to this question, but the truth is that it’s naive. Studies and real-life experience show that people are constantly developing trustful, meaningful relationships in online-only mediums. Young people know this, but even older folks are catching on. Tara Hunt points out in her book, The Whuffie Factor, that the 50-plus generation is a rapidly growing demographic on the Internet.

The mistake that we often make is that we confuse the medium for the relationship. One of my least favorite terms in this business is “online community.” Community is community, regardless of the medium of interaction. Different mediums offer new opportunities to connect, they do not replace existing opportunities. When you think about building community or facilitating collaboration, the medium is important, but it is not the only thing.

Coevolving More Meaningful Tools

All that known and said, I still chose to continue to handwrite my cards, even if it meant shortening my list or even skipping entirely. I can send a canned letter or email to my friends anytime, but it’s harder to find opportunities to do something more meaningful.

Which raises the question: What are the opportunities to develop digital tools that elicit deeper conversations and connections?

The one that intrigues me the most is the following: Slow down. If we can elicit the mundane by restricting posts to 140 characters, then perhaps we can elicit deeper reflection by restricting the frequency with which we’re allowed to say things. I started noodling with this idea five years ago, and I think the potential for these ideas is strong.

When pondering this question, I think often of the philosopher, Martin Heidegger, who wrote essay after essay decrying modern technology, arguing that it led to an inevitable loss of humanity. However, in the midst of his overwhelming pessimism, he also quoted the poet, Friedrich Hölderlin, who wrote:

But where danger is, grows
The saving power also.

The downsides of technology are real, but I think the upsides are vastly unexplored and even underappreciated. Perhaps the biggest upside is that technology — both good and bad — reminds us of our essential humanity. If we’re losing it, we feel that loss, and we are reminded of what we’re missing. Remembering our humanity is the first step toward reasserting it. And reasserting our humanity is the first step toward harnessing tools for what they should really be used for, which is to augment our humanity.

Acknowledgements

I wrote this post in response to a wonderful email from Suzie Kidder, with whom I had worked years ago at the 2003 Planetwork Conference. She, in turn, was responding to my May email newsletter, where I wrote:

One of my great joys from last month’s newsletter was hearing back from so many of you, re-establishing ties after many months, even years in some cases. Technology today offers so many interesting ways to stay connected, it’s easy to forget that the old ways — a simple email or better yet, a phone call — are sometimes the best.

Suzie, thanks for reconnecting, for your appreciation, and for making me think.

Categories: Stories