Am I alone in thinking this is utterly infantile behaviour?
It makes me rather sad that the art of correspondence (the beautiful letters of bygone times) is now gradually being replaced with Facebook Messenger and animated GIFs.
It makes me rather sad that the art of correspondence (the beautiful letters of bygone times) is now gradually being replaced with Facebook Messenger and animated GIFs.
(Manny also said something like, the second time it's half-funny, with a geometric progression downward.)
It's possible to look at the glass as half-full: People can still write nice letters, and sometimes do (often by email), but they also have other avenues of creative expression.
Infantile == bad? No.
On a more interesting note, someone should revisit Giambattista Vico's theory about language. The closest that I could find on the English internet after a 30-second search was this (http://www.philosophypathways.com/fellows/fahey.pdf - PDF link):
> Vico borrows the three ages of human history from the Egyptians. As shown above, the languages which corresponds to each are, first, the mute language of signs and physical objects; second, the language of symbols, comparisons, images and metaphors. The third is vernacular or epistolary language.
It seems like we're about to fall from the third stage ("epistolary language", which you mention) to the second stage, that of "symbols, images and metaphors". Now, what that means exactly I don't know.