Issue 6 2010 - TLS - Victoria University

His fears concerning his revolutionary theory are laid
bare through the letters. In 1843: “I believe (though
why should I trouble you with my belief, which must
& ought to appear the merest trash and hypothesis)
. . . P.S: Will you . . . keep this one letter of mine to
be returned; as at some future year, I shall be curious
to see what I think now.”
Can you imagine such an exchange via email Most
emails are deleted. And knowing they will be, why
bother to make them good Never mind linguistic
muscle or anything edging on profundity, most lack
basic punctuation. And yet they are ubiquitous.
The Radicati Group, a tech market research firm,
estimates 247 billion emails were sent in 2009
something over 3 million a second.
Richard Sellick, professorial fellow at Melbourne
University’s Centre for the Study of Higher
Education, laments the surfeit of computer
information. Everything a business does is on
computer. Researching it is like watching that
company’s history in real time. And the cost of
archiving information means emails usually remain
on computers. And even if a computer is kept for
20 years, who after that time has the technology and
know-how to access it
Then there is the stuff of which letters are made.
Handwriting can be as intimate and reminiscent
as a person’s voice or scent. A letter arrives and you
recognise the hand from the address. It is from a
close friend you haven’t seen for years and you smile
as a throb of memory passes through you.
In 1846 Charles Dickens wrote to a friend,
W.C.Macready:
My Dear Macready,
The welcome sight of your handwriting moves me
(though I have nothing to say) to show you mine,
and if I could recollect the passage in Virginius
I would paraphrase it, and say, ‘Does it seem to
tremble, boy Is it a loving autograph Does it beam
with friendship and affection’
A friend’s handwriting can beam with friendship,
love and affection; it is their voice, and thus their
spirit, laid magically before you. Historian John
Barnes, now working on a biography of La Trobe,
says the man’s handwriting became terrible when
he was under pressure, a nightmare to decipher.
Tweets, texts, emails and Facebook messages are at
least easy to read. But then blots and crossings-out
can say a lot about the state of mind of a person
writing a letter, too. As an execution or an expedition
approaches, the script becomes fevered with telling
amendments.
Strangely, the things that have killed the letter
are not like the letter. They do not replace it or
replicate it. Facebook differs from a posse of idle
teens sitting in a mall only in that Facebook teens
are wearing pyjamas and slathered with pimple
lotions to resemble the Sioux made ready for war.
It is more a spoken communication than a written
one. A conversation. And like most conversations
it is reflexive, speculative, inexact, rambling and
repetitive. Thoughts and inanities are yammered
as they occur. No editing, no shaping, no
contemplation. The moment a comment is received
an answer is expected.
The historian who has taken to trawling through
Facebook for anything of value has accepted the
stone from Sisyphus. Unless some search engine is
invented with a relevance filter fine enough to find
a fact in this bletherworld, she will search forever
because the content is limitless. Every second
thought or musing is now sent to some acquaintance,
or a group, many of whom will respond. Nearly all is
dross. And Twitter Tweets can offer real-time newsbites
of earth-shattering events that help determine
how we see those events. But they are more often
a form of mental dandruff that falls from the gods,
offhand observations from the famous whose every
act or musing is a fascination and a wonder to the
followers who hang on their tweets half-believing
they are eavesdropping on a conversation between
semi-divines who might, at any moment, reveal some
molten gossip about an all-star DNA swap-meet in a
toilet cubicle at 30,000 feet.
Not quite. Ever. Beyonce has just bought some
cool black knee-high boots at Dolce and Gabbana.
Andy Roddick hates trains. President Obama thinks
English kids are cute. Wil Anderson is bored by
awards nights. These are tweets.
One might have optimistically expected
communications to gain in potency as they
diminished in size; that they would distil into poems,
sonnets, haiku and aphorism. They didn’t. Most
tweets resemble fortune cookies written by cats. And
they are without number. (Without comprehensible
number, anyway. Twitterers are tweeting 50 million
messages a day; 6000 tweets a second.)
Texts are something composed on a tram while an
iPod is injecting Arctic Monkeys in your ears. I have
taken the trouble to translate a famous letter into a
text to demonstrate the relative paucity of this new
communication from the historian’s point of view.
The letter was written by the Koshoviy Otaman Ivan
Sirko and signed by the Zaporozhian Cossacks of the
Ukraine to the Turkish Sultan Muhammad IV who
was demanding subjugation.
Thou Turkish Devil!
Brother and companion to the accursed Devil, and
secretary to Lucifer himself, Greetings.
What the hell kind of noble knight art thou Satan
voids and thy army devours. Never wilt thou be fit to
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