A3: Sorry Shakespeare, it's not just in the word

Instant messaging has become one of the preferred methods of communication online due to its capability to carry on a dialogue in real time. Like e-mail, instant messaging allows the sender to converse with anyone who has a computer and an internet connection, regardless of physical location, as long as the other person also has the same client. Many years ago, where AIM was just beginning and ICQ was king, I always found it infinitely more appealing than e-mail. If I was going to be hogging up the phone line anyway, why not talk to friends and family while I’m surfing the web? I found instant messaging useful, simple, fast.

Letter writing, the forerunner to instant messaging and e-mail, was once an art, when literacy was uncommon and paper was nigh impossible to come by. For thousands of years, it has been the preferred means of extended communication by lovers and generals and poets, and yet, nowadays, it has become the tool of spammers and bill-collectors. Yet, despite my dislike for less than swift delivery, I am still touched by the effort expended from a handwritten letter. Maybe it’s the symbolic callback to a simpler time, where the time spent composing the letter showed that the message and the recipient was worth the work.

Besides, without letters, how would I be able to send my rebates out?

So understandably, I found the media richness theory a tad lacking with its argument that “leaner” media would not be suitable for many tasks and that a richer medium would always be better. For simple things, such as asking a friend whether he wanted to eat at 6 PM or 7 PM, I found AIM rather quick and painless. It could do much more than that though; I commonly carry on conversations with faraway friends or puzzle out problem sets with a partner, complex tasks that MRT would never consider instant messaging to be suitable for.

Although it lacks the speed of the instant messaging or e-mail or the emotional attachment of face to face contact, letters have a strong history and symbolic implications. For example, though it may be leaner than an e-mail according to the MRT, a love letter as a handwritten letter is vastly superior and conveys a greater sense of intimacy. The depth of a message lies not only in the words, but also in its channel; the appreciation in a thank you note for a wedding present can’t be adequately communicated in an e-mail. Perhaps it’s because our generation has adapted to the shortcomings of internet and text-based communications, but much of its potential has be underestimated by the MRT.