Opinion | It’s time to return to 19th century friendship practices

It all began in a small, dusty room in the back of the National Library of Scotland. Yellowed parchment spanned the large oak table in the center of the room, ink bleeding from the papers. Here lay the archive of iconic Scottish author, Muriel Spark. Hand-penned letters, newspaper clippings and manuscripts made up the tangible legacy of a truly great woman, and every person in my Scottish Literature course pervaded the silence with a palpable sense of awe. 

Then, suddenly, from the corner of the room, a voice pipes up, posing a question to the Head of the Muriel Spark Archive — “Has the library started collecting digital archives since everything is online now?” The question was a valid one, but somewhere deep inside me, I felt a little part of my heart sigh. When I’m gone, will the archive of my life be entirely in the cloud? Will people only ever know a digital footprint of the girl who once was? I want my children to hold papers penned by my hand. I want friends in different hemispheres to feel something that I have touched and know that it has passed from my hands to theirs. That my thoughts have traveled miles, not just seconds.

I am not a hater of technology, I promise you. I love seeing photos from friends I don’t speak to anymore on Instagram. I love that I can call my mom every day and see her face and hear her laugh. I love that I can Whatsapp my brother while he’s sailing in the Mediterranean. But, I do think that something is lost when all of our communication is mediated through a screen. We need to take a step back from the ease and convenience of technological communication and balance our interactions with other ways of connecting, such as letter writing and, believe it or not, face-to-face conversations.

My generation has already begun this process of stepping back from the technology that consumes so much of our modern world, and has consumed so much of our adolescence. The 20-year trend cycle shows how certain styles of fashion return to popularity after 20 years. Anyone who is interested in Generation Z’s fashion can attest to the return of Y2K style — but this doesn’t just apply to clothes. We’ve seen the return of Polaroid cameras, film cameras and digital cameras as means of documenting moments with our friends. By using early-2000s methods of photo-taking, we don’t have to always be on our phones when we’re spending time with friends.

This doesn’t mean we have to replace technology. In fact, in many ways, technology is what helps us achieve these changes. Posting digital camera photos of a night out on Instagram popularized returning to those cameras and photo styles. People are reading more physical books because of influences such as BookTok. These things can go hand in hand, we just have to learn how to balance them.

While I enjoy the return of Y2K trends — that was my childhood, after all — I think the next step is to go back more than 20 years. Try 200. I want to create a tangible archive of myself, and to do so, I’m returning to letter writing. As college students, we have friends across the country, and maybe across the world. Writing them letters is one way you can vary your communication with them and express your thoughts and feelings without the mediation of a screen. It opens up new ways of talking with your friends, and maybe it will encourage you to talk about things you never talked about with them before. Plus, getting a letter in the mail is so much more exciting than hearing the ding of a text message.

One of the other people standing in that room in the National Library of Scotland with me that fateful day was my good friend, Francesc. We became friends quickly during my month in Scotland, and when the time came for me to return to Pittsburgh and him to return to Barcelona, we made a pact to keep in touch. Francesc is an old soul — he has no social media, and he bought the cheapest phone he could find because he “doesn’t really need one.” So when it comes to keeping in touch, our options were limited. We Whatsapp every now and then, but our main agreement was that we were going to write letters to each other. Today, my very first international letter to Spain is traveling across the ocean. I was able to pour out my thoughts and feelings in that letter that I would never have been able to say over text — the form would have diminished the content. And, when it all ends, he will have a little box of my words and I will have a little box of his, and little parts of ourselves will be spread throughout the world. There’s something beautiful about that.

Of course, technology is efficient, and we should take advantage of that efficiency. But there are some aspects of the human experience that simply shouldn’t be conveyed in the most efficient manner, but in the most meaningful. I still text my friends and call my family and scroll through Instagram Reels, but by incorporating these other means of communication in my life, I’m making space for those thoughts and interactions that will never be the same on a screen. I encourage everyone to start making space for those interactions and building your tangible archives. If you need a pen pal, you can always write to me.

Francesc hasn’t read this article — don’t worry, I got permission to talk about him — because it exists in the web world of The Pitt News’ online archive. But maybe one day, I’ll write it out by hand, slip it into an envelope and send this column on an adventure.

Anna Fischer writes about female empowerment, literature and art. She’s really into bagels. Write to her at ajf132@pitt.edu.