When we think about letters, there’s this little personal thing that keeps coming into my head, like opening an old shoebox that is filled with a bunch of letters; their margins are turned brown, and the handwriting is tilted, just like someone’s mood. The paper has a faint smell of jasmine and the faintest trace of time; you can almost feel the pause between lines, what the writer decided to say, or what to leave in the air.
Letters arrive as objects, heavy, with history; each fold is like punctuation in a relationship. They embody slowness, deliberation, and a kind of physical intimacy that seems, at first glance, impossible to replicate with a message that is timestamped in blue, beeps, and disappears into a conversation thread. Yet, we live in times saturated with messages: a thousand small exchanges like voice memos, emojis, GIFs, and short texts, which all create a continuous hum of contact.
We’ve gotten great at being there in these quick pulses: we “see,” “like,” and send quick little “how are you’s” as well as deep midnight confessions or may reach out for an emergency. The pressing question now isn’t so much about whether digital messages allow us to connect, I mean, obviously, they do, but the question is whether they can carry the same deep layers that letters could. Can the super quick structure of today’s communication hold the depth and the patient structure of intimacy that comes with the handwritten letters?
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Letters as Slow Art: The old Romance of the world
I think to answer this, it helps us to recall how letters worked as a social technology. Walter J. Ong argued that the shift from oral cultures to literate ones changed the shapes and textures of thought (Ong, 1982). Letters were private performances of self; they needed crafting, rereading, and often a physical act, that is, the inking, folding, and stamping that one does before getting out of the writer’s hands. Those actions created space that shaped meaning. Some of Pennebaker’s work on expressive writing shows that composing words and reflecting on them can be really therapeutic in itself (Pennebaker, 1997). Therefore, a letter goes beyond just being a vessel for information or communication; it is a means that embraces reflection, creativity, and vulnerability.
Messages That Live in Our Pockets
Digital messages, contrasted with traditional letters, emerge from, well, quite a different logic, right? Computer-mediated communication (CMC) was theorised as having the capacity to develop relationships over time, but differently. (Walther, 1992) Whereas letters rely on, kind of delay to deepen relationships, CMC leaned or leans on what we call affordances of interactivity; this includes turn-taking, immediacy, and multimodality.
Texting, messaging apps, and social platforms all allow for a different intimacy: it’s porous and continuous, too. Picture this: a lover can send a photo of their morning coffee at exactly 7:07 a.m., and then a friend maybe can just react with an animated sticker just two seconds later. This continuous presence builds familiarity and emotional closeness for many (Baym, 2015). You feel accompanied, yet you don’t have the logistical difficulty of, well, scheduling correspondence or actually meeting; through texts, you can virtually be with them.
But presence isn’t the same as depth, you know? Digital interactions often prioritise speed and efficiency—a phenomenon Naomi Baron captured, tracing how being “always on” reshapes language and attention (Baron, 2008). Those tools that enable this constant contact also make us compact our thoughts, right? Into small, byte-sized (packets). We adapt and learn to summarise, abbreviate, or even to perform ourselves in reduced forms. Emojis become shorthand for complex emotions. Voice notes, while offering more texture than texts, can also be listened to and discarded with just a swipe. It’s like a paradox: we are in others’ lives, yet sometimes just on the surface.
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When Screens Try to Imitate Paper
Yet, there are counterpoints, important ones. Some digital messages deliberately mimic, let’s say, letter-like qualities. Long-form emails, reflective voice notes, and even scheduled digital letters, for example, messages composed and set to be sent later, they do bring back some deliberation. Platforms supporting long-form writing, blogs, longer social posts, and newsletters allow the craft of composition, the rhetorical scaffolding, much like letters once did.
In addition, Joseph Walther’s Social Information Processing Theory posits that CMC users construct equivalent impressions and relationships to face-to-face interactions in the same time frame when enough messages are exchanged (Walther, 1992). In other words, it’s not that depth is impossible; it’s that online, it might look different and take longer to get there despite an eventual comparable outcome.
Effort Is Still the Real Intimacy
Finally, a consideration of intentionality matters. A letter often feels special because someone put in visible effort to create it; they chose the stationery, hunched over a desk, folded, and sealed. Digital equivalents do the same if they have chosen intentionality behind them. A voice note that’s recorded carefully and captures a hesitant laugh, a typed message that boasts long, unedited paragraphs of thought, and an email timestamped after a person pulled an all-nighter to craft it; these all indicate effort. When we see these things, we read them with a different mindset and feel as though we’re reading something personal, like a letter.
Finally, there are sociocultural implications to consider. Letter writing was once the only way to connect, but it bore social rhythms of slowness where not everyone had access; class, literacy, and geography all prevented some from being able to send and receive letters. Now, in a digital world, for better or for worse, everyone can at least touch their devices to connect, and someone halfway across the world can send a voice note. This extends to whose narratives get to be told over distance.
However, it also flattens ritualised meditation; real-time connection can worsen anxieties of being available and expectations of instant responsiveness, which then highlights the opposite of needed expansiveness for reflection (Turkle, 2011). Depth also depends on the reader; sitting down to read a letter requires compartmentalised attention, whereas reading a message while doing something else requires a different mental space, regardless of intention. The medium invites varying habits of attention.
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Ink, Fibres, and Forgotten Scents: What Digital Can’t Touch
Studies by Pennebaker have shown that consciously composing writing has a positive effect on producing clarity and creating insight into an individual’s emotions (Pennebaker, 1997). With readers and writers in this digital environment being able to make an effort to create space to give themselves the opportunity to focus (i.e., turn off notifications, take the time to listen to that long voice note, spend time reading that lengthy post), then we can begin to work around some of the limitations of the medium.
However, as you would expect, there are aspects of letters that will always be unique and very difficult to emulate: the materiality and temporality of a written piece. The stroke of a pen (or pencil) leaves behind a trail of emotion; the blots and smudges of the ink leave behind a record of the writer’s moment of creation. In fact, even the physical evidence left behind from the paper itself (e.g., dog-eared pages, the scent of the paper) all contribute to the overall story. On the other hand, the timestamps on digital communications provide a level of transparency regarding when the recipient opened your message, if they responded at all, and how quickly after receiving it they responded.
While this provides a sense of immediacy that can be both deeply personal and rawly invasive, it creates a level of anxiety in the writer as well. Letters provided a delay that created room for imagination and the myth-making associated with longing. In today’s world of constant presence, as seen with timestamped communications, the myth-making is threatened with collapse due to the reality of present-time communication.
Read More: Handwritten Letter as Heirlooms: Intergenerational Memory And Emotion
Love in a World That Screenshots Everything
Another factor that plays a role in shaping modern-day intimacy is ethics and privacy. While a letter may be taken from one person to another, most digital communications are transmitted through networks, servers, and platforms that can store, recover, and monetise private moments. As such, the question becomes, how secure is it to express vulnerability? Letters may be lost or stolen, but because of their physical nature (assuming they were not photographed), they are much harder to search for digitally. As such, digital intimacy requires a new form of literacy regarding the storage and potential discovery of emotional artefacts.
Can digital messages create the same level of depth as letters? To put it simply: yes and no. Yes, under specific conditions. It takes a commitment to using the affordances that allow for reflection. Literacy that teaches individuals how to use notification-free environments for concentrated emotional exchanges.
References +
Baym, N. K. (2015). Personal connections in the digital age. John Wiley & Sons.
Baron, N. S. (2008). Always on: Language in an online and mobile world. Oxford University Press.
Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Writing about emotional experiences as a therapeutic process. Psychological Science, 8(3), 162–166
Suler, J. (2004). The online disinhibition effect. Cyberpsychology & behaviour, 7(3), 321-326.
Turkle, S. (2011). Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other. Basic Books/Hachette Book Group.
WALTHER, J. B. (1992). Interpersonal Effects in Computer-Mediated Interaction: A Relational Perspective: A Relational Perspective. Communication Research, 19(1), 52-90.
Weber, E. I. (2017). “Ong, W.J., 1982. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Reprint 2002. New York, NY: Routledge.” Into the Pores of the Brain, Bâtard Festival, Brussels 2017. Into the Pores of the Brain.
