Research indicates that tweeting has been going on since the early 1900s. Seemingly compulsive communicators, the Edwardians exchanged almost six billion postcards – an average of 200 per person – between 1901 and 1910.
With an image on one side, the old-fashioned picture postcard only allowed a small space for the written message. In an interesting parallel with contemporary ‘text-speak’, postcard writers sometimes adopted ungrammatical abbreviations causing consternation in liteary circles at the time.
Unlike today, when so much communication is online, there were up to 10 postal deliveries a day in the major cities leading to a flurry of back-and-forth postcard writing. Reseachers at the Lancaster and Manchester Metropolitcan universities believe that the speed and low price of the Edwardian postcard communication represents an early form of micro-blogging.
Wouldn’t it be lovely if amid our busy, screen-based, e-enabled lives we made time to rediscover the joy of the humble postcard, pen, ink and stamp. Now it’s such a lost art, I wish I had hung onto all those picture postcards sent by holidaymaking friends from sunny spots around the globe. All those pictures of bullfighting, jugs of sangria, donkeys in straw hats…
