Eric Morecambe and the evils of e-mail (1)

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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23 January

In the days of love letters, being given them back was an unavoidable, physical demonstration of the desire for separation, of severance*.

Hard to think what the e-mail equivalent is (especially for those who have what I view as a mania for purging their inbox, and keep virtually nothing anyway, as they have already done it). Equally hard to conceive of what asking for something 'by return' means, as against with an item of correspondence received in the post.

Which brings us on to Eric, who, as a set-piece (turn, party-piece, trick, etc.), used to throw (or, maybe, feign to throw) something into the air, which he would then catch in the large, invariably brown, paper-bag - with a sort of 'plop', as the bag received it.


A metaphor, in our minds, for what (for it was magical in its way, every time)?:

* Capturing what can't otherwise be seen (cloud-chambers and particle-colliders)?

* Hans Christian Andersen and his little tale (lovingly told by the University of Southern Denmark)?

* Hamlet on the limits of Horatio's 'philosophy'?

* Or what about this: how can you see the tears shed when a letter was written and which smudged the ink, or the sweat of Beethoven's effort of composition, if it's, respectively, actually an e-mail or a page of a score, printed from an inbox or a web-page?


And the evils (which I am in no way laying at Eric's door)?

1. Well, how many times have you turned out to have imagined that you replied to an e-mail, when you must merely have run through, in your mind, what you would say, when you had the chance - and maybe even fondly hoped to jog your memory, by marking the message as 'unread'? Which is more real: Eric's stone (or whatever it is) or the imagined reply?

Contrast the entirely fictional reply with writing a letter (by hand, or typing it - and, if not using an actual typewriter, then printing it), signing it, addressing the envelope, sealing the letter inside, affixing a stamp (maybe having to buy one first, and wince at the price), and going to a postbox (maybe even having to find one first) where you post it - rather hard to have a false memory about all that, though, I will grant you, if the item cannot be posted (for want of a stamp, a postbox, or even the address), it can lurk in the car or a jacket pocket, where it was put in the hope of making it into the post some time soon...


2. Oh, and there's the over-hasty response (hard to be hasty with the process outlined above and do what some call 'fire-fighting'!);

3. There's sending your e-mail to the wrong person (and letters, too, can be switched, in error, between a pair of more of intended recipients);

4. Including to yourself, if you find a message of your own to which there has appeared no response (the other extreme - the message comes back straightaway and it's horrible, or you wait in vain for it), and, instead of pressing the 'forward' button, the 'reply' button is pressed, so it later shows up in your inbox, if you start some other task;

5. And those missing replies - did your message ever reach the addressee, or did his or hers not reach you (mimicking the post)?;

6. Unless you attach the intended document(s) at the time when you write about them, false memory is all too possible about that (but my 'send' function has the trick of spotting the words 'attach' or 'attachment', and prompts me as to whether I intended to send a message with no attachment) - but one can, just about, manage to post an empty envelope;

7. The attachment that you cannot open (either because it shows as one, but doesn't seem to be there, or because, say, it has a DOCX file-extension, and you don't have that version of WOrd) has, as far as I can see, no equivalent with the physical posting of a document;

8. Nor has pressing the button to send your message and then seeing a howler, which can't be corrected (although one can, for other reasons, have just posted something, and wish that one had long arms, or the postbox a backlog of letters, so that it can be retrieved);

9. Not everyone likes spam, but I find some of the gambits that the senders dream up to make me interested quite entertaining, and, for those who are prudish, junk mail has no equivalent;
10. Finally, back to missing messages, the one that 'gets delayed' and so you only see news of a good concert (or training course - whatever the event may be) when it is too late to do anything about it - or there is just so much in the inbox that, although it was there all along, it got overlooked.


QED


[Continued, in a way, at: http://unofficialcambridgefilmfestival.blogspot.com/2012/02/eric-morecambe-and-evils-of-e-mail-2.html]



End-notes


* As Eric retorted in that crazy Egyptian skit (I think that it was Glenda Jackson as Cleopatra) to Ernie's question 'Have you got the scrolls?', 'No, I always walk like that!'.


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