Facebook Vs. Letters

a compare and contrast essay i wrote for Comp 1 with help from Kayla, her mom, and Jenn-chan.

At first glance, communicating on Facebook and through letters seems a lot alike; however, a closer look reveals that they are very different in many ways. Until computers and the internet became more common and popular, writing letters was the only way to communicate with friends and family if you didn’t meet in person or talk on the phone. Now it seems that almost everyone has an e-mail and a Facebook account.

Staying connected and update with friends and family on Facebook is really simple. Sharing new pictures, events, and daily thoughts and activities is as easy as going to their Facebook page and looking around their wall and photos. You can even comment on it right there or send a message to them directly if you don’t want anyone else to see. On Facebook you can talk with someone 10 miles away just as easy as someone 10,000 miles away. Since you already have your pictures on your computer, uploading them unto the internet is a snap. Most sites even give you a step-by-step process.

Staying connected and up to date with friends and family through letters is a little harder. You still share the same photos, events, and daily thoughts and activities; you just send it through the mail instead of posting it online. By sending communication through a letter you make what you are saying more personal because you took the time to write the message by hand. You can also talk to people around the world. It is harder to communicate through a letter because everything is already digital, so you have to either print it off or write it by hand.

One of the main differences between communicating on Facebook and through letters is the time it takes between sending the message and your friend or family member receiving it. On Facebook as soon as something is posted online, people can see and comment on it. At the same time, when you send a letter in the mail it could take a couple of days or weeks until the letter arrives based on how far away the receiver lives from you, if they get the letter at all. This is especially valuable when you are trying to make a tough decision on something that you can’t explain on the phone and want feedback right away. Not everything can wait days or weeks.

Another difference is the type of language you use when communicating on Facebook or through letters. When you make comments on friends or family member’s pictures, events, and daily thoughts and activities, write you own daily thoughts and activities, or just chat on Facebook, you are more likely to use “text language”. Some examples are “lol” for laugh out loud, “u” for you, and “r’ for are, using no capitalization of the first word in a sentence and less punctuation, if any. When you write a letter to send to a friend or family member, you use “formal language” almost always because it is “proper” language for a letter. The only time we use “formal language” on Facebook is when you are talking to someone who doesn’t like or understand “text language”. The fact that our generation grew up learning the “text language” doesn’t mean that we are better off, it actually makes it harder for us to use “formal language” when we need to. Glenford Smith, a motivational speaker, once said that “One emerging challenge for users of social media is to recognize, in practice, the difference in writing within a social media context and writing formally. This challenge will especially be relevant to high-school and university graduates who have grown up in an age of instant messaging and mobile phone text messaging.” (Careers: The Write Context �" Facebook Vs. Formal Writing). I believe that Smith is absolutely correct. I know that whenever I was made to write formal letters in high school and now in college that I struggled because I automatically started using “text language” without realizing I was.

The final difference between connecting with people all over the world on Facebook and through letters is the price. People are able to stay connected for free on Facebook, but have to pay to ship their letters. Depending on where you are sending the letter, you could pay anywhere from 44 cents to over a dollar. The cost of shipping will only continue to keep getting more expensive year after year. You also have to pay for the paper, pens or pencils, and envelopes you use to write and send the letter. While there is a big difference in the financial price of communicating, what about the non-financial price? By communicating on Facebook, you lose the joy of getting a letter in the mail, that you can keep “forever”, and trying to figure out what they are saying because you can’t read their handwriting. At the same time, if you communicate through letters, you lose the ability of being able to have conversations about the same thing with many people at the same time.

While letters are starting to become almost worthless compared to Facebook and e-mail these days that does not mean that we should stop writing them altogether. Letters are still an important way to communicate with friends and family, they are just less popular to today’s generation who are a very digital generation. The internet and computers have become a daily necessity in today’s world. If you ask our generation how many have a Facebook account and check it at least once a week, almost everyone will have a Facebook account. If you ask how many write letters and send them in the mail, instead of e-mail, once a week, you will be lucky to find a couple who still send letters in the mail. While I don’t find this surprising, I still believe that it should be. The ability to write letters is very important and should not be lost; it is how the whole world communicated up until the birth of our generation. Both writing letters and Facebook are very important way to communicate and I believe that people should use a combination of both instead of one or another. Should we switch to writing letters and then sending them in an e-mail instead? While this is one compromise between the two, it still leaves out the few people who either don’t like the internet or have trouble online. It really depends on who you are communicating with, not what is more convenient to you. There is also the fact that when you receive a letter in the mail that someone wrote by hand, you get a happy felling. Someone on Honestcomm.com explained this perfectly “Sending letters are much more personal ….When you receive a letter it makes you feel privilege that someone has taken the time to write a letter, buy an envelope, buy a stamp and find a post box to post the letter into” (Advantages of communicating by sending a letter). Are the physical letters more valuable; maybe, maybe not. It depends on the individual receiving the letter.

Reviews

[SRMarx]

I think letters take more effort, especially if they are hand written. I still write letters to my friends even though I can easily call or facebook them.