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Notes on the Death of the Postscript

On Monday, I had the pleasure of being contacted somewhat out of the blue by the Wall Street Journal’s Katherine Rosman for a piece she was working on, dealing with the decline of the Postscript (P.S.) in the age of the email.

Rosman’s piece is great, and I highly recommend checking it out. It’s well-written, fun, and quick– and obviously very well-researched. Some of the examples she pulls out are just brilliant.

As is often the case when someone who has spent too much time immersed in the world of academia is interviewed for the media, however, it only contained a bit of the long-ranging (and one-sided and probably overly-long) conversation that we had during the interview. This is an inevitability, not in any way a criticism.

If anything, it’s a positive comment on Rosman’s discernment and ability to mill down into a whole lot of rambling academic geekery to get a nugget of substance out of it.

However, since I’ve neglected this blog for far too long, I thought it might be fun to put up the notes I typed up in preparation for the interview. Just because I do have more to say on the topic, and I already have it written down.

Those with an interest in communications history will probably note that I am deeply indebted to David Henkin’s The Postal Age, and that I come off far more of a technological determinist than I really should feel comfortable being. These are just some hastily typed up notes, with basicly no editing, but I figure there’s no harm in putting it out there, as I don’t know when I’ll have opportunity to revisit the topic, which I started to find more and more fascinating the more I thought about it in preparation for the interview.

Postscripts date back pretty far– I don’t know how far. The OED has some examples that go back to the 1500s and 1600s. I know that they were not uncommon in the 1700s. I asked a couple early Americanist friends, and there’s good examples from the founding fathers, definitely.

But the postscript as we think of it today probably is more properly dated a little later. It gained wide usage as non-business letters became a wide-spread practice in the 19th century– especially after the postal reforms of 1845 and 1851, which greatly reduced the price of letter mail, thus opening up the postal system to much more personal communication for those not of the highest classes.

Most letters before that were letters of business, and brevity and precision were highly valued. But as more people were writing letters, there became a tradition of epistolatory intimacy– people began to write friends and family that were separated by space in a nation where people were more and more frequently uprooted. This also meant that letters became much more a providence of women. Women had already been key to the ties of sociability that kept culture coherent.

Women were very much associated with PS’s– even (especially?) multiple PS’s, in which most of the real substance of the letter could be found. In old business-like letters, the PS’s were reserved for either afterthoughts or emphatic points– things people wanted to highlight the importance of. This continues in epistolatory intimacy, but the INTIMACY was the most important thing. It makes sense in the context of the time that it would be seen as feminine.

These letters were of a script, formulaic. Most personal letters from the mid-19th century started the same way– “Dearest ____, I have taken a moment to take pen in hand and let you know that I am well, and hope that you are enjoying the same blessing.”

Formulas like this let people know what kind of letter they’re reading. They let the reader orient themselves, and give them a guide to how to interpret. Many people, especially older folks, tend to wish they still had the old letter-writing signposts in emails.

But emails were conceived differently.

They were created for scientific and military communication as much as anything else. For this reason they follow the format of the business memorandum, rather than the personal letter. As they were mass-adopted in the 90s for personal communication, people at first tended to borrow the rhetoric of the personal letter, as it was familiar. But different media are biased to different types of communication– look at the way that Neitzche’s writing changed toward epigraphs as he began working on a typewriter, as Freidrich Kittler points out.

Using email to maintain connection and reinforce social ties has a different shape and feel than letters. In the most obvious sense, immediacy replaces length. It is no longer necessary to ramble on about daily goings-on, and no longer feels un-intimate to write brief communications, because we can email back and forth multiple times in the time that a letter would take to get to the recipient, even though the USPS is the most efficient it has ever been at getting from point a to point b. Immediacy is the new length– I know you care not because your email is long, but because it comes quickly. If I get a fast reply from an email, I know that means we are close. I’ve even heard teachers talking about never responding to emails under a certain amount of time, so that students don’t assume the right to instantaneous communication.

I’m also wondering if the fact that signature lines were always present during the time of email’s mass popularization might have something to do with it, although I’m not sure.

There’s something else, too, about the medium– it’s word-processing, rather than typewriting or manuscript. Even in a brief email like the one I sent you this morning, I edit as I compose. I never send out a first draft– that’s for SMS. Writing is shaped by the tools, and I wonder if this might not be in part the fact that a postscript, an afterthought, seems sloppy or lazy in an email. Find the appropriate place to put it in the body of the email! As someone who was first put in front of a word processor in 1986 or so, while still in elementary school, and whose writing level shot up grade levels almost overnight, I would argue that it’s important not to underestimate the effect of word processing on the writer.

Also, as the internet gives us different ways to correspond, different levels of information become appropriate in our emails. I wouldn’t bore most friends with my doings of late in an email, because most of the people I’m close with would know what i am up to because I show up in their Facebook newsfeed or Twitter feed. Thus this sort of information does less to build bonds, and seems more unnecessary– it switches from signal to noise.

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Live-Tweeting the War of 1812

I’m fascinated by Andrew Smith‘s just-beginning @Warof1812Live Twitter project. If you’re not familiar, check out the “About” page for the project’s accompanying blog. Real-Time WWII was a fascinating project, and I think that this stream’s focus on primary sources means that it will be a great tool for both teachers and more casual learners.

As someone who studies communications history, I was immediately struck by the dichotomy of live-tweeting historical events in a time when it still took over a week to get mail from Washington, D.C. to Nashville. There’s a disconnect between our near-instantaneous communication and the slowness with which information moved in the Early Republic. For this reason, I was elated to see that one of the project’s guiding principles is “To show how the slow communications systems of the era affected the diplomatic and military history of this conflict.”

Which brings me to the image to the left, which I found on the project’s About page– a 1910 painting of the Battle of New Orleans by Edward Percy Moran, from the collections of the Library of Congress.

Allow me to engage in a bit of   counterfactual history: if communications technologies had been roughly a hundred years more advance, or even less, the Battle of New Orleans could have been avoided. Twice.

Next week, followers of @Warof1812Live will “witness” the British government’s repeal of the Orders in Council. The Orders in Council were issued as a response to the Napoleonic Wars, and forbade British, allied, and neutral ships from trading with France. The British stopping neutral American trade vessels from getting to France was, in turn, one of the major precipitating factors in the United States declaring war on Britain.

The repeal of the Orders was a good-faith effort on the part of England, but it unfortunately came too late. While the Orders were repealed on June 16, Madison signed the declaration of war on June 18th. The news of the repeal would not reach America for some time, nor would Robert Stewart, the British Secretary of State, who sailed for America in advance of the repeal he had advocated for in an attempt to avoid hostilities. By the time Madison learned of the repeal, he would not stop hostilities because he did not know how the British would react to the declaration of war.

Later, on Christmas Eve, 1814, the United States and Britain signed the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the war of 1812 and re-established prewar relations between the two nations. This news had not yet reached Generals Andrew Jackson or Edward Pakenham when they fought the Battle of New Orleans on January 8.

Information traveled faster and more efficiently than ever before in the time of the War of 1812, but it did not travel fast enough to avoid these decisive moments. That would change very quickly, however. In the years between 1845 and 1860, commercial telegraphy sprung up around the United States, and information moved so much more quickly that the effect can only be described as transformative. By 1866, a little more than fifty years after the war, there was a functional transatlantic telegraph cable capable of transmitting at such a rate that news of the Repeal or the Treaty could have reached DC and New Orleans respectively in time.

By 1907, less than 100 years after the war, there was a regular transatlantic radio-telegram service connecting America and Europe, and by 1926, there was a commercial service providing reliable shortwave radio contact between the continents.

Of course, like all counterfactual history, it’s highly speculative to say for certain that a few years’ communication technology advancement would have decisively stopped the Battle of New Orleans. While the British blockage of trade between the US and France was one of the major factors that encouraged the move to war, it was not the only one. The repeal of the Orders of Council was a strong diplomatic move for peace between the two nations, but it might not have been enough.

Likewise, when dealing with Andrew Jackson, historians always have to take force of personality into account as well as force of history. Jackson was deeply bellicose man who used his military exploits strategically to advance himself. The Battle of New Orleans was a follow-up to hostilities that began a day before Ghent. It’s possible that he might have moved up his battle plans and conveniently missed the news of the treaty, or continued with the understanding that while it was signed it was not yet ratified.

Nevertheless, as a thought experiment, I think it’s a good one– it really points out the import of communications technology and the speed with which information travels. It is also a powerful illustration of just how much communications technologies advanced in the 19th century.

I’m looking forward to following the @Warof1812Live feed, and seeing how they use primary sources to illustrate the import of communications in that conflict.

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Communications History, Part 2

This Monday, over Twitter, I received an unexpected bit of feedback to last week’s post on Communications History from the Henry Ford Museum‘s Suzanne Fischer:

@retius Just read your comm history call to arms--I'm a little confused why you don't situate your work/interests/methods w/i hist of tech.

In writing the post, doing some pre-writing for a field statement I’m working on for school. I wanted to try to express in words why I choose to privilege communications, and to define what I meant when I said I was doing so. While I had hoped the post would be read and that feedback would be offered, it was a pleasant surprise to have it come days later over Twitter. I had several initial reactions to Dr. Fischer’s feedback:

  • First, I was a bit embarrassed that I had so underplayed the importance of the  history of technology to my thinking on the topic. A very large number of the books on my bookshelves fall under the history of tech rubric. The exhibit that I recently helped curate, on postal systems technology, is very much informed by a history of technology viewpoint– I was interviewing engineers and even had machine schematics hanging over my desk. And I would very much also argue the story that it tells is part of communications history. I think I had thought that the connections between the kind of communications history I’m advocating and the field of history of technology were more implicitly obvious than they actually are, upon re-reading the post.
  • I also felt that, in my experience, historians of technology tend to privilege the science community, business concerns, and legal issues that shape technological development– sometimes to the expense of users. I recalled going to several telecommunications-related panels at a SHOT conference where I heard a lot about Bell Labs, packet switching, and the like, but almost nothing on customers or users.
  • Finally, I just felt there was an ineffable difference between the two. Certainly communications technology deserve to be part of the literature of a history of technology, but to me there just seemed some hard-to-identify difference, something special about communications that made it somehow a little unique, a special case within technology. This was the hardest reaction to express and impossible to defend, but it was also the deepest-felt.

As is often the case on Twitter, the question quickly sparked a lively and very helpful conversation. Dr. Fischer and myself were quickly joined by Shiela Brennan of RRCHNM and Trevor Owens of NDIIPP.

I had expressed concern that people might not consider things like early nineteenth century mail systems “technology” per se, and that much of postal history is written by postal historians (something I regretted while researching for the above-mentioned exhibit.) But I was actually told that there had been several postal presentations at the most recent SHOT conference— something I was encouraged and excited to hear.

It was also pointed out to me that there is much more of a literature on users than I had been aware of within the history of technology community, and I was recommended several very interesting books on the topic that I look forward to reading. And yet that feeling that there was an ineffable difference persisted– while historians of technology may indeed deal with users, surely there must be a significant qualitative difference between, say, users of electric razors or polio vaccines, and participants in the republic of letters? Of course, it was then pointed out to me that the written word itself is a technology, and must be thought of as such, and not falsely naturalized.

As the conversation wound down, I was still not satisfied that communications history should be seen as necessarily a subset of the history of technology– there was that can’t-put-my-finger-on-it feeling still there. But I did have a lot of new ideas to explore about the intersection of the two, lots to read, and lots to mull over. (When Twitter is collegial and helpful it’s truly an amazing thing.)

Ultimately, I ended up simply asserting that, to my mind, it was an issue of tent size, so to speak.  The history of communications is a very large topic, even if it fits within the auspices of the history of technology. While it is imperative that communications history draws from history of technology, and while there is certainly a place for communications media within the history of technology, it is a large enough and important enough topic to warrant discussion as a discrete thing. Similarly, the advent of gender studies didn’t obviate the need for women’s studies. Every square is a rectangle, but not every rectangle is a square.

And yet, even that answer didn’t fully satisfy me. I still felt there was some fundamental difference. I still suspected that ultimately, it wasn’t like women’s studies. It was intersectional. Historians who study African-American women can’t be satisfied to draw just from women’s history, or from black history. They have to draw from both, because their subjects lived within both experiences. African-American women aren’t off-limits to historians who focus on women’s history or black history– they just have to be mindful of that intersectionality and not be reductionist.

I’ve been trying to figure out why I felt that way, trying to justify this suspicion, ever since. And after a few day’s thought, I think I’ve figured it out.

The issue, as I’m coming to see it, is that there are a whole host of comunicative cultural practices that are difficult to shoehorn into the category of “technology” that are nonetheless very much a part of communications history as I’m conceiving it. (It is also important to remember that the point of these posts is not to prescriptively assert subdisciplines as discrete items, but for me as a PhD student to better articulate the scope and shape of my own specialization. Communications history as I conceive it is essentially all that matters, ’cause I’m trying to hone my own conception, here.)

To give some examples of such phenomena from works that engage with what I think of as having a place in the historiography of communications history:

  • Parades, toasts, and parties. David Waldstreicher’s In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes discusses the use of parades, toasts, and parties as communicative acts that helped to reinforce national unity and identity in the early republic. Of course, the utility of doing so is deeply contingent upon use of these events to shape discourse within the emerging news media, which was growing precipitously at this time, but while communications technologies were used to broadcast the events and reinforce their import, I would feel uncomfortable describing a toast or a parade as a “technology.” They are social practices with deeply communicative intent.
  • Blackface and racial melodrama. Beyond the “technology” of using burnt cork as make-up, blackface is not a technology. It’s a mode of cultural expression– a deeply problematic and revealing one, and one that WT Lhamon Jr. argues ably in his Raising Cain has proven quite good at bridging genre, media, and time. Likewise, Linda Williams’s Playing the Race Card demonstrates that racial melodrama– an understanding of racial relations and identity deeply entrenched in the narrative conventions of melodrama– is a “wonderful, ‘jumping’ fish,” one that has bridged media and been a dominant narrative in American entertainment since Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This is a coupling of a dramatic/narrative mode with a set of cultural constructions– not a technology. While both blackface and racial melodrama play through media, they are not in and of themselves technology or media.
  • Stand-up comedy. In Revel with a Cause, Stephen Kercher provides a challenging, fascinating history of liberal satire during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. While the book is almost encyclopedic in its scope, two figures who definitely stand out are (unsurprisingly) Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce. Both men’s careers must be framed in terms of communications technology– Bruce’s career was largely built on records, at a time when censorship of “blue” recordings had only recently decreased, and he dealt with the media ecosystem of his time– from the news media and contemporary politics to jazz. Sahl, even moreso, was a product of mass media, in that he was a direct and vocal critic of it. He read the paper as part of his routine, and gave commentary. Stand up itself was forever changed by the advent of electric amplification. But a man joking and telling stories on a stage? Decidedly low-tech stuff. But due to cultural impact, these comedians are important to understanding the media environment of their times.

…I’m sure there are debates, quibbles, and questions one could bring up with these examples and others. But ultimately, I think they demonstrate the reason for my discomfort with seeing communications history as simply a subset of the history of technology. To me, communications history is– or should be– history at the intersection of cultural and media studies on one side, and the history of technology on another. 

Of course, this is still a dramatic simplification. The history of communications also intersects with aspects of legal history, social history, economic history, and countless other subdisciplines. Every breed of historian borrows liberally from others. But I see the intersection of communicative cultural acts and the technology that mediates communication as key.

We’re also all the products of our experiences, and I’ll be the first to admit that this conviction may be the result of my education– my concentration on drama and cinema in college, my intense interest in media studies and cultural theory while getting my MA in American Studies, and finally, coming to George Mason, with the prevalence of technology in its History department.

That said, I think what I’m identifying here is a fertile little niche for historical scholarship. And my dissertation, still in the early stages of research, definitely fits within it. At the core of what I’ve been saying in these two blog posts is something I think is pretty uncontroversial– Communications is a very important aspect of the modern world. And I would like to see even more scholarship on it.

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