The Birth of Cheap Communication (and Junk Mail)

Such is the title of an article by Randall Stross in the NY Times (February 2010) where he describes the emergence of the post, and "cheap posting" in England and in the US (after a postal reform in the 1839 in England and a few years later in the US).
Stross highlights how many of the practices developed at the time can be compared to today's practices with emails and other media. He cites in particular the great book by Catherine Golden, Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writting (2009) who was a great resource for us as we worked on The Power of Writing in Organizations. Among other things, one learns reading this book how frequent was the postal service with people in London complaining if a letter was not arriving in a couple of hours. "And, not unlike us, most Victorian letter writers seemed more concerned about getting a rapid response than a long one", notes Stross.
In this article, Stross notes that people were often forwarding newspapers rather than sending letters: it reminded me of the times where I forward an article, a call for a conference, an interesting piece of information with only a few words "maybe of interest", "FYI". One could also think of it as the ancestor of the attachment in particular when you read that "the  Victorians mailed all sorts of things besides words: tree cuttings, leeches, mosses and even manure, Ms. Golden writes."
Stross to conclude that "the only thing left for the modern correspondent to invent was the completely empty envelope — the Facebook “poke,” the sending of a greeting without saying so much as “hi.”
When one Facebook member clicks to “poke” another, of course, the receiver can poke back, returning the wordless greeting. Compared with a poke, even a brief e-mail message seems impressively articulate."
This article not only highlights how much one can learn from taking a historical perspective and realizing how some practices have been enacted in other times and with other media. It also stresses the diversity of the type of writing, reminding us that letter writing in the 19th century was a multiple genre as email writing is today.