I have often felt as though the diction and formalities of texting culture—or lack thereof—should emulate that of email correspondence. Emails preserve a level of linguistic intentionality that contemporary messaging platforms have largely flattened.
My affinity for emails began rather early. At the age of nine or ten, my school provided each student with a personalized institutional-domain Gmail address. As a child without a phone, this ‘brand-new’ mode of communication became my lifeline.
This early exposure positioned email as more than a communicative tool; it became a formative space through which I learned the rhythms and nuances of written exchange. Email correspondence required a new level of intention, and through repeated engagement, I came to understand this attentiveness as intrinsic to the act of communication itself.
Electronic mail, as a hybrid epistolary form, preserves the intimacy and kinship of letter-writing whilst adapting correspondence to modern temporality, thereby sustaining the kind of relational exchange fundamental to human flourishing.
As I grew up, my inbox became intertwined with moments of personal and academic development. It was through this electronic correspondence that I learned of scholastic achievements, opportunities, and acknowledgements that continue to shape my being. Beyond these moments, email also functioned as a consistent means of interaction, facilitating friendships in my adolescent years and professional relationships later on.
The Aristotelian notion of human flourishing, or eudaimonia, indicates that to live well is to participate in rational activity enacted through reflection, deliberation, and the sustained cultivation of virtue. Such activities unfold temporally and require the gradual shaping of one’s ethical and intellectual character through collective discourse. One comes to know one’s own reasoning through encounters with others and being respected within shared intellectual life.
Central to this is philia, a form of friendship rooted in mutual recognition and ongoing participation in one another’s intellectual and virtuous becoming. Aristotle positions such friendship as necessary to life itself because human beings do not actualize their capacities in isolation. Within this companionship, one’s thinking is both a sacred and social affair.
To live well, then, requires communicative companionship. The sharing of reflections, deliberations, and affirmations in sustained intellectual discourse becomes constitutive of the flourishing life insofar as it situates rational activity within lived relational practice.
It becomes difficult not to situate email within this relational structure. The exchange of drafts and written feedback sustains a form of intellectual companionship across distance. One participates in another’s thought process; one’s own thinking is received and built upon. Through such correspondence, thought becomes a joint venture. Where letters historically carried friendship across geographies, email preserves this epistolary nature within a temporality adapted to contemporary life.
The significance of the email does not lie simply in its ability to sustain intellectual companionship; it also permits one’s voice to circulate in its authored form. One writes oneself into presence, without needing to worry about an incoming message interrupting the cadence of thought before it has been completed: The email is composed in full before it is sent. There is something especially resonant in encountering one’s voice intact, given how often Black articulation has been historically mediated by white third parties. But with emails, diction remains one’s own. Cadence remains one’s own. Online correspondence is entangled with autonomous self-authorship.
To look back on these threads is to encounter evidence of one’s becoming. Words once offered outward return and bear witness to intellectual growth, kinship, and authored presence across time. The inbox comes to function as a personal archive assembled unintentionally through the quiet accumulation of correspondence, preserving one’s exchanges and accomplishments.
If the medium through which we communicate shapes the emotional and relational experience it carries, then email’s hybrid form produces a communicative intimacy distinct from both handwritten letters and instantaneous direct-messaging. Emails are the beautiful halfway point, the love child of letters merged with direct messages and texts. They inherit the intentionality and reflective nature of handwritten missives whilst retaining the immediacy of digital delivery.
I fail to understand why one would deny oneself the opportunity to participate in this form of communication through the vessel of online mail. What a beautiful way to adapt to the times whilst still respecting the sacred passion of epistolary tradition.