Allow the author, Naughton, to do the talking:
‘What makes email special is that it’s a strange blend of writing and talking. Although messages are typed, most of them read like stream-of-consciousness narratives, the product of people typing as fast as they can think. They are often full of typos and misspellings, and niceties like apostrophes often fall by the wayside. Indeed I sometimes think that the missing apostrophes are the key to understanding it. Sitting reading e-mail messages I am often reminded of the letters and diaries of Virginia Woolf, surely one of the greatest correspondents and diarists of the twentieth century. Her private jottings have the same racing immediacy, the same cavalier way with apostrophes, the same urgency.’
Naughton goes on to show examples from one of Woolf’s
letters (dated 28 December 1929) and a recent email from a friend. The similarities
are striking.
‘These two passages are separated by sixty-seven years and a world of social change, yet they clearly belong to the same genre – a highly personalised, subjective, compressed kind of reportage which blends external observations with private experience and eschews the typographic conventions usually employed to distinguish between one and the other.’
The author concludes with the belief that Woolf ‘would have loved email’. If only laptops and iPads were made available to great modernist writers such as Woolf, Joyce and Faulkner! The Worm likes to think that these heavyweights of literature would not be tempted by the dangerous time wasting peril that is Angry Birds.
