Click the link below the picture
.
Postcards may be one of the most obvious examples of Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum, “the medium is the message.” Regardless of what you write on one, a postcard tells someone, hey, I was out and about in the world, and I was thinking of you.
I am an inveterate sender of postcards. For all the instantaneousness of today’s communication options, nothing quite conveys a message the way a postcard does. Another aspect I find McLuhanesque is the gap between when you mail the postcard and when the person receives it. The card is independent of both sender and receiver; third parties carry it to its fate.
I also love email, which I’ve always thought of as the digital equivalent of a postcard.
While email doesn’t have the physical limitations of a postcard (though email is similarly “open” in the sense that anyone with snooping skills can read one in transit), there is a shift in time between sending and receiving in both formats. And I would argue that the best emails follow the same format as a postcard: simple, focused messages.
Not everyone loves email, of course, but I am convinced that much of the dislike we have for email comes from the software we use to interact with it. That is, email clients.
.
Photograph: FotografiaBasica/Getty Images
.
.
Click the link below for the article:
.
__________________________________________
James' World 2 
Leave a Reply