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Post-postal: What did we lose when we stopped writing letters?
What did we lose when we stopped writing letters?
Postal services prior to the eighteenth century were the domain of a literate elites, which was a very small group throughout human history — no society had literacy rates above ten percent in the premodern era, and most were far lower. For instance, take the example of Alan Turing and Christopher Strachey writing an early computer program that auto-generated love letters, which (according to this interesting post by Alban Leveau-Vallier) they would print and leave around their lab as a practical joke. The above message in a bottle (found by a Redditor in 2018) was written in 1924 by someone I came across in my research for Tripping on Utopia — a British traveler and treasure hunter named Hugh Craggs, who sailed to Galapagos with a young Gregory Bateson.
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