The days of paper and pen had a number of uses, not the least being the composition of a "hot letter" which could be put aside till the emotion had cooled. Today we can use "track changes" on Microsoft Word, and then remove them when we do the final edit, since an editor always puts in a little "time space" before the last edit check.
While the paper and pen did not have any other options, we, now, have many options to indulge in "public shaming with an escape hatch," such as tweets, threads on reddit, or sites like Thought Catalog. Of course there is also the chance that we can get entangled in our safety net.
Whether it was to write an "appropriate response" or shrug it off on second thought, the pen and paper style offered a cooling off period. A period that tends to get blurred in our digital age.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/opinion/sunday/the-lost-art-of-the-unsent-angry-letter.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0
