Joel Chandler Harris Quotes

I think e-mail is kind of a cheap way to communicate. It's a lazy way of writing a letter, you know.

Things like email, and Twitter, and Facebook, and text messaging - they all work reasonably well. But we use them because they're convenient, and cheap, and easy, not because they're the best way to communicate with somebody.

Clearly texting, SMS and chat are very different than writing a letter or email.

Anyone wishing to communicate with Americans should do so by e-mail, which has been specially invented for the purpose, involving neither physical proximity nor speech.

Email has explosively supported the growth of letter writing globally.

I actually get very little phone calls. I get way more tweets and texts. My phone rarely rings.

I don't use the social media but I can see the effects in my own correspondence. I get a ton of correspondence. It used to be hard copy and now it's a very limited amount of actual letters people write. So it's mostly email.

My younger son told me nobody uses email anymore. I'm this old fogie with my email. I don't know what I'm supposed to communicate with now - SnapChat?

It's amazing how email has changed our lives. You ever get a handwritten letter in the mail today? 'What the? Has someone been kidnapped?'

As I grow old I hate the writing of letters more and more, and like getting them better and better.

E-mail is far more convenient than the telephone, as far as I'm concerned. I would throw my phone away if I could get away with it.

I had no idea that social networking would be as prominent as it is today. And it's important to understand what that phenomenon is. If you text someone, you get an immediate response; if you e-mail them, you probably never hear from them.

E-mails, phone calls, Web sites, videos. They're still all letters, basically, and they've come to outnumber old-fashioned conversations. They are the conversation now.

Very few people use landline phones for much of anything. So when you talk about things like online chat and social media messages and emails, what you're really talking about is the full extent of human communication.

I love text, I love email, I love Skype; I think it's amazing.

I don't write letters anymore.

Down on the ground, we seem to do anything but make lengthy, robust monologues. We can communicate in an instant almost anywhere. Gone is the slow old letter - itself a monologue, a sort of considered performance of best self - and in its place is the e-mail, the text, the SMS, the tweet.

Why e-mail a full emotional statement when, instead, you can text a totally insignificant and ambiguous half-considered phrase?

I don't have anyone's number; I just Facebook them.

Dominant and emerging forms of interpersonal communication have to find their way into literary language somehow - think of the epistolary novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Communication has changed so rapidly in the last 20 years, it's almost impossible to predict what might occur even in the next decade. E-mail, which now sends data hurtling across vast distances at the speed of light, has replaced primitive forms of communication such as smoke signals, which sent data hurtling across vast distances at the speed of light.

In an age like ours, which is not given to letter-writing, we forget what an important part it used to play in people's lives.

Previous technologies have expanded communication. But the last round may be contracting it. The eloquence of letters has turned into the unnuanced spareness of texts; the intimacy of phone conversations has turned into the missed signals of mobile phone chat ... ('you're breaking up' is the cry of our time).

Email cannot die in the near future because of its universal acceptance.

Digital communication is completely different from in-person, face-to-face conversations. One will give you surface insights, and the other really gives you depth.