Dorothy Wordsworth

While I was reading Dorothy Wordsworth’s diary entries I was reminded of the terrible fact that people are no longer writers. There was a time when people were addicted to the written word, which made them avid readers and writers. People would read anything they could get their hands on, but they also kept private diaries and journals and wrote lengthy and beautiful letters. This is not true any more. In the place of the beautiful letters written of old, we now have cold and impersonal e-mails that mean absolutely nothing, and in the place of private diaries that used to reveal a persons inner most feelings, we have public Blogs that are often filled with nothing but mindless chatter. Words have lost their meaning with the advent of advanced technology
An e-mail does not require the same amount of time and care that went into letters. People are now able to send an e-mail half way across the world in a matter of seconds. It is not the speed of the technology that upsets me. It is instead the amount of time that goes into creating the e-mails and people’s complete apathy towards them. No one is overjoyed to receive an e-mail, as people used to feel about receiving a letter. Readers can hear the excitement Dorothy Wordsworth expresses in her journal entries when she says things like “Oh! that I had a letter from William!” (295). She also infers this eagerness for letters in another one of her diary entries when she says “we went towards Rydale for letters” (295). Rydale was about a mile away from the Wordsworth home, and they traveled this often to collect something which today would be perceived as archaic.
Blogs are also destroying people’s ability to write. People cannot keep their inner most feelings on a Blog, because they are accessible to the public, and once again because of the instant nature of a Blog, people do not often really think about their postings. Blogs are filled with mindless ramblings of angsty teenagers and lonely individuals, but often what they say has no meaning. No one writes as Dorothy Wordsworth did when she said, “My heart was so full that I could hardly speak to W when I gave him his farewell kiss. I sate a long time upon a stone at the margin of the lake, & after a flood of tears my heart was easier” (294). No one talks like this anymore. I have never read a Blog entry that was filled with this kind of passion and beauty. As a society we are losing our ability to be poetic because of the instant nature of technology that often requires brevity and acuteness.