On a mission you only get to communicate with friends and family via email and letters, or sometimes you get the "Dear Elder" letters that are just emails that are sent through the mail. So it's the combination of the boring type of an email without the convenience of getting it right away. An awful idea within the United States.
This brought up a lot of issues in communication. Letters could be fun and more natural than email because you could write all over the page, draw, and have the personal feel of handwriting. However, because it took so long for letters to get from the Dominican Republic to Alaska, my girlfriend (now fiancee) and I would lose a lot of the context and meaning behind the letters so a direct reply or answer to a question wouldn't ever make sense. It's easy to lose track of a conversation that only goes back and forth once every 3 weeks.
Email, like texting, can quickly get informal and lazy. This creates a really bad environment for sharing accurate thoughts and feelings. I also found that email was an easy way to put up a wall if I didn't want to tell my family that it sucked sometimes and I wasn't having fun. It is a lot harder to hide your feelings and emotions over the phone or in person.
I continue to find out more about my friends' missions as they tell stories in person even though I read about them our entire missions. Writing rarely depicts the reality of what we are all experiencing or what we wish to convey.
Dang, I've known for a while that I need to start writing letters to my sister, but now I have a second witness of the step up that is from email. I like how you talked about putting up a wall to hide negative emotions from your family by just emailing, or writing in general. Yes, writing can be filled with emotion, but it takes that extra effort to make sure our audience receives it correctly, or in this case doesn't receive the real emotions at all. I'll have to come up with a way to be more "real" in my letters to my sister.
ReplyDeleteP.S. Nice hashtags.
I get what you're saying! For about nine months of my mission I didn't have internet, so everything was snail mail, and that took two or three months. I got my cousin's wedding announcement the day after she got married. Having that gap between delivery and response can be a pretty serious barrier, even if it's onlynthe minutes of email.
ReplyDeleteIt really is interesting that despite the great technologies available to us, the most effective one is still speech! I could really identify with what you were saying about losing track of a conversation... it's so hard to find that "flow" when you're writing a letter, email, or even text.
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