Elegy for a Genuine “Letter” from the Editor

Among the litany of annoyances that we’ve been forced to endure because of the pandemic, it is our overreliance on technology which concerns me the most. As a long-time luddite, I am worried that our newfound inability to escape the virtual world may be one of the life changes brought on by COVID-19 that will be here to stay. I’ve always been concerned by the number of people who prefer to text rather than call or choose who they want to date based on 4 photos and an emoji on an app, but our reliance on technology over the last year has reached a new level. For example, in order to stay on top of my McGill Law classes and clubs, I must continuously be logged in to my McGill email, Facebook, Messenger, Discord, and Slack. My computer is an incessant orchestra of soulless boops, dings, and beeps informing me that somebody is demanding my instant attention. I’ve had enough of this Pavlovian hellscape, and I’ve begun to contemplate how I can take small steps to live more like a baby boomer. 

One of my closest friends is exceptionally worried about his data being harvested by Google and Facebook. He believes that Facebook is using our data on Messenger and What’s App to train artificial intelligence to respond to human prompts and mimic our individual voices. In this nightmare scenario, this Letter from the Editor would write itself once the computer has automated my voice and writing tendencies. Recently, I received a text from this friend saying that I should download Signal because it’s “fully encrypted.” After wondering whether my friend was either in the FBI or on the run from them, I decided against downloading yet another application of ceaseless notifications. Instead, I told him that I’d rather opt for the original encryption: writing letters. If concealing your information from the Silicon Valley behemoths is your goal, then there is no better way of preserving your identity than sealing it in an envelope. It’s also an incredible method to reconnect with our generation’s lost patience, because as fantastical as it may sound, once upon a time there wasn’t a need to respond to everyone immediately. I know some people who doubt their significant-other’s fealty if they take one hour to reply back to a text message. Contrast that with our grandparents and great-grandparents who had to go months at a time without knowing if their loved ones were alive or dead during the World Wars. We seem to have lost our collective patience in a world where efficiency is worshipped and immediacy is demanded. 

Another reason why I’m taking up letter writing is that I feel our correspondence has become increasingly devoid of individuality. There are certain flourishes of a letter that reveal the human spirit behind the note, and the identical Helvetica font on our apps makes the reading experience mundane. I have a habit of visiting auction websites and drooling over obscure objects that I’m thankful I don’t have enough money to waste on. Recently, I stumbled upon several letters from my favourite author, John Steinbeck, to Jacqueline and Bobby Kennedy. I zoomed in to the tiny auction photos aching to read their correspondence and uncover more insight into their personalities. Despite Bobby Kennedy and John Steinbeck dying within six months of each other in 1968, their voices live on fifty years later through these scraps of paper. I realized how thankful I was that Steinbeck didn’t console Jacqueline Kennedy on the loss of her husband through Instagram messaging. Our modern-day correspondence is temporary and locked behind passwords and screens. There isn’t any character to be discovered about the person behind the flashing notifications on our screens. There is something incredibly impersonal about the way we communicate with the most important people in our lives. A letter can sit in a drawer for decades but still elicit powerful emotions upon being found again, something that scrolling back on Messenger to that time you wrote “lol” to your friend cannot.

I’ve written in this space every three weeks since I started law school, and not once have I contemplated the word “Letter” in the title of my articles. The Quid Novi has been published weekly since 1975, and I imagine that letters were as common to those first editors in chief as writing a Facebook post is to my generation. There is a reason why this section of the paper is not titled “Notification from the Editor,” and I think that it’s because the medium still holds a certain charm, even if many of us haven’t written a letter in a decade. In the last ten years, the most frequent form of correspondence for people my age has moved from MSN Messenger, to texting, to Facebook Messenger, and now to Instagram Message. That is an incredibly rapid evolution in how we connect with one another, and requires us to be on the lookout for the newest app for fear of missing out on conversations. I don’t know if MSN Messenger even still exists, but I do know that there is a mailbox on my street. Despite all the changes of our online lives, the mailbox still persists, and I’ve decided to finally make use of it. After refusing to download the Signal app, I told my friend that I will instead attempt a grand “journey to the past” experiment in which I will only correspond with friends living in other cities by mail for the next three months. If you’re reading this virtual Quid from another city, email your address to quid.law@mcgill.ca to receive a letter. Join me in stepping away from your screens and embracing communication with personality.