We read the great love stories of the past, letters sent across great distances carrying messages of desire. The tradition of the love letter lives on today: in sappy quotes and online tools for automatically generating an appropriate letter to send [or more likely, email] to a special someone. It is easy to decry the death of literary inclinations in today’s society: the days of the ten page letter hand-written and delivered by post are most certainly in decline. If anything, the potential for this style of communication is derailed by the instantaneous form, as information sent in such a detailed form seems to become dated more quickly than ever before.

The mediums for sexual arousal are familiar with this use of words to inspire passion. Pornography of the written variety is an art as old as the written word itself, and the same literary methods that bring to life the work of the Marquis de Sade in the chronicling of passions of all kinds resonate through these virtual encounters. As Gore Vidal chronicles, pornography of this kind is not about creating an absolute experience; instead, it is reliant on archtypes: "By abstracting character and keeping his human creatures faceless and vague, the pornographer does force his reader to draw upon personal experience in order to fill in the details, thereby achieving one of the ends of all literary art, that of making the reader collaborater" (35). The love letters of the instantaneous technology make the people on each side of the connection involved in shaping the experience, taking part in the construction of their own fantasies.

But until real bodies become involved, perhaps in images or video transmitted as part of a virtual courtship, virtual contact is actually nothing new: it is a return to the day of the love letter. The time that passes between letters in an old fashioned love story is now reduced to an instant. Each sentence or fragment might be transmitted immediately, and the wait time for a response can be instantaneous. Through this contact a new model for connection emerges. Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail represent a new dream for this courtship, where a connection that cannot be formed in physical space can become love in the bodiless realm of words exchanged in chat rooms and emails. The content of these letters might not be in the same world as a traditional love letter: the chats range from explicit to casual, the language can be abbreviated or coarse, and the exchange has none of the permanence of pen and paper—but they are no less words with meaning.