Brynn and I went poking around Alemeda this weekend and stumbled into Pauline’s Antiques, the kind of place where you can find thick-walled whiskey glasses that were once sipped from by people who wore yellow sweaters unironically. Of course, you can find such yellow sweaters too, but what caught our attention were the unremarkable postcards scattered around the store reminiscent of a simpler time.
But one must ask himself: was it really so different then?
Superficially of course it certainly seems to like things are quite different from back then: faster, bigger, and more connected for starters.
The hallmark of this change, it would seem, is the simple status update. As more people have taken to publishing online, we the group formerly known as the audience has invariably gravitated to consuming smaller and smaller bits of content, leading to a culture of snack-sized sociality. For many of us, the status update seems distinctly modern — a sign of the times, cut from the networked medium of the age:
But hold on. Take a closer look there.
That tweet above? It’s a fake. It’s photoshopped. I took that content from one of those postcards I found in Pauline’s shop. It was post stamped in 1940:
Just goes to show that the more things appear to change, the more we prove what habitual creatures we are.
…Though I don’t doubt Miss Phyllis Epstein’s reply was terse, I reckon she was ever able to reply quite so immediately:
So maybe the drive to communicate, coordinate, and group hasn’t changed much, but perhaps our ability to do so quickly, cheaply, and at an unprecedented scale has? It’s surely no surprise, but only time will tell.
8 Comments
Trippy.
Hi Chris – thanks for posting that image – it definitely made the post!
A number of people have posted previously about the derivation of the 140 character limit on Twitter – i.e it was derived from SMS > telegrams? > textile looms? (that’s totally made up, I’m sure – I really don’t remember).
I actually think that at some level it points to what we (at least the English-speaking ‘we’, but perhaps all of us) perceive as a base unit of conversation. If you were to take a survey of naturally-occurring sentences, I wonder if they might average out to about 140 characters.
Maybe there’s nothing particularly snack-sized about now vs. then?
According to http://www.westegg.com/inflation/,
one cent in 1940 equals ~16 cents in 2008. Add to that the cost of the postcard itself. Let’s say add another 84 current cents there to make a dollar for the message.
I wonder if a tweet cost a buck how that would that change the way we communicate.
*love this* — i had a very similar experience last week.. http://socialsoftware.org/ka9etp/
HI,
I think it’s important not to be too ahistorical here. In London in the middle to late 19th century, for example, it was possible to post a letter in the morning and know that the recipient would be able to read it the same day and pen a reply. In mayn ways, electronic communications have brought to many, many more people, the ability to communicate quickly in writing that used to be the privilege of only a few.
Human behavior has remained fairly constant throughout time. What has changed are the tools that facilitate this behavior. With all the fancy social networking tools we’ve got now, we’re really just doing the same things we’ve always done. The innovation is in the efficiency with which we do those things.
Very original post!