One-way Dialogs

Jun 28th, 2006 | By CJ | Category: Journal

Being a writer, I write a lot (as you might well imagine). Not just on my projects, or web pages, but to friends, family, elected officials, and scores of others. I write emails, letters, text messages, whatever. For me, it’s a joyous thing. I truly love to write…at least I love to write when my hands aren’t giving me grief because of all the writing I do. Most people now use the phone as their out-person medium of choice. While it’s nice at times, and certainly worthwhile, it just doesn’t capture the romance of communication that writing does.

There is one down side that I don’t like about writing: the uncertainty of whether or not a reply is coming. The plus of a phone conversation is that it’s live, voz-a-voz; but with writing you never know if you will see something subsequent to your own effort. On the other hand, it’s always like a little touch of Christmas when someone does take the time to respond, comment, or otherwise continue the dialog. In that way, the mystery actually adds something to the medium.

I seem to go through patches when I don’t get anything back. While I don’t expect answers to everything I send out (most people aren’t nearly as prolific at the keyboard as I am), I figure that somewhere in the ballpark of 33-50% isn’t too unreasonable. This is also assuming that a conversation hasn’t reached a natural ending, or is ambiguous enough to seem so. Even I sometimes have trouble knowing if I should send a reply.

But it’s these dead patches that confound me. It’s almost like everyone I write to gets together and conspires not to respond for a period of time just to screw with my head and make me wonder if I did something grievously wrong. But then the dam opens and people start replying again. It’s weird.

I’m sort of in one of those patches at the moment. Fortunately, I don’t expect this web page to reply to me, so all of the stress is off.

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