The depth of passionate emotion was astounding and stirring in equal measure. When Liz Taylor released the letters from her twice ex-husband (they divorced twice) Richard Burton to Vanity Fair last week, you couldn't help but clasp something imaginary to your chest and dream of a romantic time gone by.

"One of these days I will wake up and realise to myself that I really do love. I find it very difficult to allow my whole life to rest on the existence of another creature. I find it equally difficult, because of my innate arrogance, to believe in the idea of love... Who invented that concept? I have wracked my shabby brains and can find no answer," he wrote. And on another occasion: "If you leave me I shall have to kill myself. There is no life without you." Swoon!

Burton died in Switzerland in 1984 from a brain haemorrhage. His final letter to Taylor was delivered when she returned home to California after his funeral.

Letters are easy to miss because they are so nice. But communication has changed. What used to be a tangible, private exchange of depth between two people has become a watered-down, individualistic, series of exchanges that values brevity. Online communication encourages us to reprioritise information from the important to the inane and go down cul-de-sacs like those on the newish social network Formspring, where you set up a profile and people ask you questions about yourself. Ugh. We can confuse ourselves into thinking that we are more connected than ever. But many weak connections don't equal a few strong ones.

Like most nerds, I was a furious letter writer before email and Facebook dulled communication beyond recognition. (Twitter is different: I find it quite entertaining and useful. Its snappiness is part of its charm. Although ask me again in a year.) But does anyone write anymore? I wrote a letter on a typewriter last week to a friend who has moved to Spain. After typing a rather structureless, meandering but nevertheless cathartic mess of three A4 pages, I realised I couldn't remember the last time I had written one.

Most of the letters I receive these days prompt angry phone calls to so-called 'customer service' helplines. Others – the ones that look really important – with bank logos and what-not on the envelopes, I don't even open and just shove underneath the coffee table in the hope they'll be "accidentally" thrown out.

Our relationship with letters has changed. Most of the letters we interact with are scary letters: endless bank statements because once upon a time you ticked a box on some application requesting a printed review of your depleting finances every two days, a crooked organisation asking you to hand over all of your worldly possessions in a black bag which they will collect and dispense "to countries like Africa and Ukraine", or maybe a postcard from some (soon to be ex) friend who's whooping it up in Sydney while you're crying on the phone to an electricity company.

Brevity is currency in the exchange of information and general communication today. Sure nobody has any time to be reading wads of writing paper. A simple text message, something like "u r hot", is enough to sustain written romance in relationships, right? Maybe writing something longer on your partner's Facebook wall, perhaps "u r hot" accompanied by a YouTube video of Snoop Doggy Dog's 'Drop It Like It's Hot', or a kitten doing something cute, for example. These are not recommendations, just examples, so don't blame me if you get dumped (via text message, probably).

It's remarkably touching how passionately Burton wrote. What is also touching is how Taylor kept his letters for all these years.

Our own personal archives of communication and correspondence are rapidly depleting in their tangibility.

That said, one of Burton's letter nicknames for Taylor was 'Twit Twaddle' which is quite Twitter-esque, but that's just an accident, and you can't put all your emails and Facebook messages in a box in the attic to be rediscovered years later.

I was in Amsterdam last weekend and paid a visit to the house where Anne Frank and her family hid during World War II. Her diaries are displayed in the museum; notebooks and notebooks of letters to her diary 'Kitty' in perfectly neat writing, all kept as a record of her rather monotonous time in the annexe. What was a simple exercise for her turned into a remarkable book that changed the world. Think about it – what will we have to show for ourselves?

umullally@tribune.ie