The Postcard That Taught the World to Write Less
Between eighteen ninety and nineteen twenty, the picture postcard became the world's first visual mass medium. By forcing personal messages onto a tiny, public surface, it trained a generation in the art of the short-form update—a direct cultural ancestor to the character limits of the modern text and tweet.
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The eighteen ninety-three World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago popularized postcards as a dominant visual mass media.
Postal regulations once forced senders to scrawl messages directly over the illustrations on the front.
The nineteen zero seven adoption of divided backs separated messages from addresses for the first time.
Open postcards caused privacy anxiety because messages were visible to neighbors and postal workers.
The one hundred sixty character limit for SMS was based on the length of postcards and telexes.
Postcards democratized concise communication that was previously reserved for expensive telegraph users.
- 01Intro1 min
- 02The Birth of the Golden Age2 min
- 03Design by Regulation2 min
- 04The Death of Privacy2 min
- 05The Genealogy of the Short-Form3 min
- 06Outro1 min
- Postcard | Facts, History, & Examples | Britannica
- Collecting Picture Postcards of South America - Oxford Academic
- Postcard Eras - Exhibitions - University of Maryland
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- The Postcard a Brief History - Library - University of Alberta
- How Old Is That Postcard
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- Postcard Collection - Appendix C - the New York State Library
- History of Picture Postcards - Old Prague
- Comstock Adirondack Postcard Collection
- Postcard History | Smithsonian Institution Archives
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- Nineteenth-Century Textspeak - The Public Domain Review
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- Chat Txt: An Older form of Writing | A Linguist in the Wild (2.0)
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