Originality in e-mail is getting very difficult to find

We are back at our routines, but the heart is not really in it. Not while rescue workers still dig in the rubble of New York City and Washington, hoping against hope that even a single life endures after the terrible events of Black Tuesday. Not while the national pall cast by those grisly images still lingers, permeating the subconscious and slowing our drive.

Conducting business at the same old hot dog stand is not among the easiest things to do these days, nor is it likely to be for some time. But stay the course we simply must, as President Bush so eloquently counseled Thursday night, or the bad guys win.

That being the case, allow me to ease back into the harness by pointing out a sorry situation that last week’s disasters highlighted: The Internet, with its easy access to other people’s creativity, appears to have turned us pretty much into a nation of drones incapable of an original thought and too lazy to much care, one way or the other.

If you have checked your e-mailbox since the catastrophe, chances are you found that it resembled mine – awash with sentiments concerning everything from bedrock patriotism to misquoted prophecies of Nostradamus and the sinister implications of the terrorist attacks having occurred on the 11th day of the ninth month, the anniversary of the 1972 Munich Olympic Games massacre.

The material comes at us from all directions, without letup. From dear old Uncle Mert and from long-lost cousin Hortense. From ex-Army buddies and onetime college roommates, casual acquaintances and anonymous sources. From old friends and old enemies in equal numbers. From the movers and the shakers. From the pros and from the cons.

Reams of stuff – impersonal and at times sufficiently maudlin to cause the eyes to glaze over and the medulla oblongata to seize up – forwarded to you and me and several hundred of the sender’s very dearest friends at the click of a computer button, with nary a word of greeting or a query as to how the wife and kids might be doing. Cyberspace has been turned into one giant recycling bin as this warmed-over material makes the rounds, dumbing us down something fierce and widening rather than closing the gulf between us.

Undoubtedly, these spreaders of the gospel according to the Internet mean well. We have to give them that, even as we are thankful that the guy who invented the computer had the foresight to prominently include a “Delete” button on our control panels.

My quarrel here today – when actually putting pen to paper to communicate is simply out of the question – may lie more with technology than with my e-mail correspondents, I suppose. The technology that once seemed the salvation of the lost art of writing a letter to a friend, making the act easier than falling off a bar stool at last call down at the local pub, has taught us well: If it takes little effort to type our own words on the computer screen and punch a key to instantly send them half-way across the continent, it takes even less effort to lift and send the words of someone else who happens to agree with our position. Let others do the heavy lifting, the reasoning seems to be, for we have places to go and things to do in our extremely busy lives and we’re running late.

And so we “borrow.”

As the personal touch – or what passes for it in our computerized world – takes a beating, the impersonal approach becomes the norm. When the list of addressees at the top of your e-mail message exceeds the length of the message itself, rest assured that when your correspondent pressed the “Send” button you were in his thoughts about as much as I might be in, say, Greta Garbo’s if the sexy old gal were still among us.

Don’t misunderstand. E-mail is the straw that stirs the cyberspace drink, and I like to receive it as well as the next person. A day without e-mail is like a day without sunshine. But if someone has just witnessed something as gut-wrenching as the destruction of an American city I’d a damned sight sooner hear about it in the person’s own words than in the words of some faceless author who cranks out the stuff by the bushel from his garage in Hoboken.

We’re much more credible when we tell it like we believe it is, using words that we hooked together our very own selves. And, for the most part, a hell of a lot more readable, as well.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.