Only connect

A hierarchy has been established, now that the printed word has become electronically portable. Fax is good, e-mail is bad, typewritten letter is better, hand-written best. Thoughts committed to the lap-top are immediately suspect, and not to be compared with thoughts committed to lined notebooks by the stub-ends of pencils larded with gobs of candle wax. As Clive James has said, the key is "resistance from the medium."

Matthew Parris declared recently in The Times that once his readers began writing to him electronically, he would be excused from reading the letters because they would be too numerous, too easily written, for him to deal with. For Parris, resistance from the medium operates neatly: by imposing the need to gather writing materials, address an envelope, buy a stamp and go to the post-box, it separates those who have something to say from those who do not.

Perhaps by this measure he would rather listen at a cocktail party to a person with a speech impediment than one without. Forget that most of what is carried about in red vans consists of birthday cards, requests to renew subscriptions to magazines, returned credit card slips and the myriad forms of mailed advertising: the post, in the end, is what counts. Paper is palpable, the purchase of a stamp (not to mention the licking of it) an act of devotion.



This is nonsense. Mr Parris's correspondents may be an exception, but the most persistent mailers of letters to the newspapers are nutters. The difficulty of addressing an envelope, far from weeding out those with nothing to say, actually encourages them.

I live in Moscow. The pieces I write appear in Australia. The Russian post is most unreliable. Yet every so often these barriers are overcome by a correspondent whose letter slips from my daily bunch of newspapers, the archetype of the battered but triumphant epistle of Parris's model.

Even before I pick it up I know it will be a dud: a letter from a wharfie defending Stalin, perhaps, with many of the words written in capital letters and some of them underlined three times. Why, when all the evidence is to the contrary, does Parris believe that the drudgery of buying stamps and addressing envelopes is more likely to be undertaken by the intelligent?

The answer is snobbery, which is always directed at the new. A couple of years ago the Spectator carried a cartoon of a girl sitting at a computer terminal, typing the words "Dear Diary." It was a good joke. But even when it was published it was more comprehensible to the girl's parents' generation than to her own. And for her daughter's generation it will have to be published with a footnote. The diaries of girls will not have changed. But attitudes to computers undoubtedly will have.

What might be called the chattering historians have been full of complaint over the past 30 years at the raids made on their source material by the telephone: things once written down are now spoken. How can a convincing account of a Cabinet conspiracy be made without the hand-written note? As e-mail and the fax have blossomed the telephone has withered, along with the secretary who used to answer it. Fobbing-off has been automatised. And so the historians now complain about the fax: brittle, chemical-sodden paper, unfit for the archives.

Moscow's poor telephone lines have made me fax-unfriendly. I sympathise with the view that fax is a transitory stage. But faxing has also been liberating, allowing non-commercial trademarks to soar. In Canberra, in the mid-1970s, someone identifiably female sat knickerless on a photocopier and faxed the result to the world on deputy prime ministerial letterhead. You can't do that by e-mail.

Such surprises aside, though, we are always slightly disappointed by a fax. There is, first, the flimsiness: the paper seems to confirm that we are looking at a mere facsimile. Somewhere, back in head office, is the original: could I please have that instead? But even if it were translated to the most luxuriant writing paper and engraved with a blue-ink signature the fax would still be a phoney. Why? Because it does not have impress. The marks are on the paper, not in it. E-mail isn't on paper at all: that's why the "Dear Diary" gag was funny. As well as being intimate, a diary is permanent.

Messages on computers are as evanescent as airline bookings: once you have taken the flight, all you end up with are bonus air miles (which are more difficult to collect than Tasmanian tigers). And even if the schoolgirl managed to save a modicum of wit and wisdom on the hard disk, a virus would surely come along to wipe it- that is what we deeply believe.

This is not mere sentimentality. A piece of paper with writing on it tells us something that a message transmitted by wire-whether it appears on paper or on screen-cannot. It conveys character. This is a fainter version of the distinction between a face-to-face conversation and one over the telephone.

It is character-not rationing imposed by stamps and envelopes-that Parris relies on to filter his mail. Here technophobes have half a point. Half of me sympathises. I could have written this on my favourite 1926 Remington typewriter. But using it now is like going to sea in a coracle, all affectation.