"Art of Communications" Guest Response

One reader of the blog responded in a thoughtful way. It follows for your consideration:

I come out on the side of progress, but always with the reservation and the question I ask myself....Will my life be better or worse with the “new” product...because a product it is, and one that we must buy or rent . Economies need an endless supply of new products to keep the consumer spending and happy, and the wheels of economies well oiled....
That is the western way of life...
I will just relate an experience I had a week ago regarding communications...
I went to the post box and retrieved a genuine lettre, with lovely foreign stamps, addressed to me (my full name spelled out), street address, city and country, all there....I cannot tell you the pleasant sensation that washed over me as I held this unfamiliar object in my hand....
I rushed upstairs so that I could discover its content and it’s author...
Well, it was a two page lettre from a dear old friend who teaches at Harvard, and certainly works with technology. The lettre so beautifully written on linen stationary from a hotel in the Italian Alps, and so wonderfully composed that I was deliriously happy and so inspired that I sat down immediately to respond in kind. It took approximately an hour or so of my time to compose and carefully pen my response. That too made me feel....well wonderful??? I took it to the post office the very next day to send it on its journey across the sea, with the hopes that my friend will have the same enjoyment when she receives my post.
I have an entire file box filled with correspondence of the past. When I say correspondence, I do mean those lettres that could qualify as prose, as short stories and poetry....So inspired are their contents, that I could never bear to just toss them away....I began reading some of them, and I can say unequivocally, that I enjoyed reading them as much as I did when I first opened them., they are in a way history, my history..I expressed a little “Ahhh,” and then returned to answering e-mails on the computer, thinking about the publication of lettres between famous and accomplished persons that we, even anonymously, love to read.
I think all of the above is to say that yes, resoundingly, progress should never be ignored, but embraced and refined, but not necessarily at the cost of losing, forgetting or obliterating that which has merit and keeps us in touch with human feelings and emotions.