[Air-l] Re: postal mail and email, cont.

[Brenda Danet]

At 03:05 PM 8/5/2005, Andrew Ledbetter wrote:

>Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 12:10:55 -0500
>From: "Ledbetter, Andrew Michael" <aledbett at ku.edu>
>Subject: [Air-l] Postal mail and e-mail
>To: <air-l at listserv.aoir.org>
>
>I am currently writing a literature review on how various communication 
>modalities are used in interpersonal contexts. One modality I am (not 
>surprisingly) finding little material on is postal mail. In particular, I 
>am looking for sources that either (a) address changes in postal mail use 
>with the advent of e-mail or (b) qualitative comparisons of the use of 
>postal mail and e-mail within interpersonal relationships. In particular, 
>I have heard anecdotal reports of e-mail being more "convenient" but 
>postal mail being "special" in a way that e-mail is not, though I have not 
>found scholarly material that documents this perception.
>
>Does anyone know of scholarly articles that address these issues?
>
>Thanks,
>Andrew
>
>----------------
>Andrew M. Ledbetter
>Ph.D. student, University of Kansas

Andrew: You might want to have a look at two chapters in my book, 
Cyberpl at y: Communicating Online  (Berg, Oxford, 2001; companion website, 
http://pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il/~msdanet/cyberpl@y/). Chapter 2 is about email 
and Chapter 4 is about digital greetings in the late 1990s.. The latter 
chapter reviews what arbiters of etiquette like Miss Manners had to say 
about handwritten vs. commercial cards, etc., and I debate paper vs digital 
greetings. My 1997 paper

    Danet, B. (1997). Books, letters, documents: The changing aesthetics of 
texts in late print culture. Journal of Material Culture, 2(1), 5-38.

may also be relevant for you. Nancy Baym knows this paper.


Brenda Danet