Technological transformation

Interior design sophomore Jessica Mazur crafts individualized Christmas and birthday cards to her friends and family. She uses construction paper, watercolor paints, pastels, scissors and glue to make them. She prefers to deliver the cards by hand, but mails them if she must.

Mazur said she believes the days of homemade cards are coming to an end because people can make cards on computers or simply e-mail cards. In fact, so many people are communicating online that postage sales have decreased, said Imtiaz Jaffer, operations manager of the post office in the Union.

Jaffer estimated that the Union post office made about $600,000 per year 10 years ago but now earns about $300,000 per year in total sales. To compensate, the post office has had to cut student hours, keep the post office open a half-hour later every day and pick up other services, like international express mail and more passport days. Jaffer joked that an Internet crash would be the best thing to happen to post office sales.

Although fewer people might be snail mailing letters, letter writing is far from extinct — it’s just taken on a different form, said William Donohue, a professor in the Department of Communication. People are replacing handwritten letters with e-mails, phone calls and Facebook.com wall posts, and those who write blogs and letters to the editor in effect create a letter to the public, Donohue said.

“We have all these other forms of communication that are more direct,” he said. “Even soldiers in Afghanistan have cell phones and e-mail.”

Donohue said written messages are much less eloquent because students aren’t taught to write in an eloquent fashion and writing skills aren’t as strong. However, in the past, there was a very small minority of people who wrote letters or who even could write letters, and the idealistic old love letters people celebrate weren’t commonly written. Today, the electronic exchange of information is much more common.

Romantic rituals

Gone are the days when anxious male suitors would ask for their ladies’ hands in marriage by letter or when husbands sent off to war would let their wives know they were doing well by letter.

“We’ve lost the art of the love letter,” Donohue said. “What is the purpose and function of the love letter, and how do we do that now?”

Still, every year around Valentine’s Day the post office at the Union gets swamped with people mailing packages with pink hearts, valentine-themed wrapping paper and flower stamps, Jaffer said.

“People pay the express rate to get gifts, cards and letters out to loved ones,” Jaffer said. “They don’t care how much it costs. I think one place e-mail will not be able to compete with us is Valentine’s Day, since people are not as appreciative of an e-mailed valentine’s card.”

Although writing love letters regularly almost doesn’t exist anymore, Donohue said they hold an important place in a relationship.

“A relationship has to grow and develop inside your head, and writing a love letter helps do that,” Donohue said.

Corporate communication

While the personal letter has been transformed, digitized and simplified until it’s almost unrecognizable, the business letter has grown more essential. People write cover letters to go with rsums, professors write letters about their coworkers who are up for tenure and letters of recommendation for students, and colleagues send each other faxes and write memos.

Perhaps the most publicized business letter written recently was the letter Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer wrote to Yahoo Inc.‘s board of directors, offering to purchase the company for $44.6 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.

“You might even argue letter writing has exploded rather than declined,” Donohue said. “Whereas before people wrote letters for personal reasons, right now there’s lots of context for professional reason, based on modern technology and society.”

A timeless tradition

It’s letter season for child development sophomore Katie Kosko, which means she’s in East Lansing while her friend from home is away at Purdue University. The two started writing letters to each other when he left for college to keep in touch. Both enjoyed it so much they’ve kept the habit up for three years now.

“It’s a lot of fun to get an actual piece of mail in the mailbox,” Kosko said. “At the beginning of every letter season, it’s a race to see who can write the first letter.”

Kosko also sends letters to her 92-year-old widowed great-grandmother who tells Kosko to write her often. Although they aren’t always understandable, she always mails Kosko back a letter in a little pink envelope.

Kosko said she loves every part of handwriting letters, from stamping and addressing the envelope to checking her mailbox for the returned letter, and she wouldn’t think about switching to e-mail.

“Letters take time to write and are very personal,” Kosko said. “E-mail is very impersonal and you lose something by only dropping Facebook messages here and there, or even with phone calls.”

Mazur feels the same way about her handmade cards — she said it means a lot more to give someone a card she made herself.

Kosko plans on saving the letters she’s received to remember her college years in the future.

“I just have a feeling I’m going to be writing letters for a long time, it’s just so fun,” she said. “When e-mails get erased and Facebook is nonexistent, I’ll still have the letters.”