In this week’s blog post, I will be talking about Mark Nunes’ Cyberspaces of Everyday Life. In one particular chapter called Email, the Letter, and the Post, he talks about how people have adapted from writing letters to email. I agree with his point. In today’s society, people email each other all the time. We as a society has moved from writing to typing. Nunes explains this by saying “In this regard, electronic mail, with its (ap)proximate immediacy, appears as the telos of “tele-graphe”: now the letter can be “here” and “there” at the same time”(Nunes, 2006). I believe people are more in favor of sending emails because it’s faster than sending a physical letter. It will probably remain as the main mode of online communication for people. Most likely in the future when technology has fully taken over, letters would become an ancient thing. Post offices will probably still be around but not a lot. E-communication would be the way people from many distances communicate with others. Nunes also wrote “With the emergence of electronic discourse, the point-to-point can and still does exist, but only to the extent that it can perpetuate a simulation of this postal representation of space”(Nunes, 2006). This further explains that lettering and the post can only go so far in this world of emailing.

For this weeks blog I will be reflecting on  “The Coming of the Microcomputer”, While I was reading all I could think about was the change computers have gone through over the years. I remember when I was little we had an HP desktop computer. It was big and has the huge piece in the back. I was born in 1994, we still had the old computers that when you turned them on the computer would take forever to load and all the codes would come up, loading, and reloading. If it didnt work you would have to turn it off, wait 30 seconds to turn it on again. Years go by and we save our entire lives in iphones and samsungs. Every year iphone comes out with new phones that doesnt really have any new features. It is just the thought of having the new phone with a better camera, a better program or new feature. Computers have down sized making it more convenient to carry it around. Technology has changed the world drastically through the use of cell phones and computers. They have completely revolutionized today’s society making life more convenient. Communication has changed because of the advancement that technology has made in todays day and age.

For week #7 I will be refelcting on “Email, The Letter, And The Post” by Mark Nunes. This article was basically about how writing letters turned into sending emails. We think that sending an email is just opening the computer logging into your email and typing away, what we dont understand is the process in which it takes to send the email.” The sender composes a message using the email client on their computer. When the user sends the message, the email text and attachments are uploaded to the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server as outgoing mail. All outgoing messages wait in the outgoing mail queue while the SMTP server communicates with the DNS (Domain Name Server–like a phone book for domain names and server IP addresses) to find out where the recipient’s email server is located. If the SMTP server finds the recipient’s email server,  it will transfer the message and attachments. If the recipient’s server can’t be found, the sender will get a “Mail Failure” notification in their inbox. The next time the recipient clicks “Send & Receive,” their email client will download all new messages from their own email server. You’ve got mail!” All of this work does not compare to actually hand writting a letter. I remember when I was in 4th grade and I had to write a letter to a penpal. I thought it was the most amazing experience ever. I got to write a thoughtful message with my own hand writting and then draw pictures around it to show how excited I was to meet my pal. I believe it is more thoughtful when you take the time to write something out in a letter rather then an email.

In “Email, Letters, Post” Mark Nunes writes about the concept of writing an email and a letter. As I was reading, one quote that stood out to me was “The traditional post treats the letter as a material singularity, one that (hopefully) remains passive in its transport from point of dispatch to point of destination. It assumes, and asks its users to assume, that the letter maintains its integrity, neither mutilated nor unsealed during its journey from A to B”. I read this out loud and my little cousin asked me “How do you send out a letter?” I looked at her as if she was joking but she wasn’t. My cousin is in the 4th grade and she was never taught how to send a letter but she knows how to send an email. Although this might not be a big deal, I found it so interesting because back then I was only taught how to write a letter and now she was just taught how to send out an email. This quote that was mentioned before writes about how the person who received the letter expects that what was written in the letter is still true. Back then the whole process of sending out a letter would take much longer than it does now. I also think that sending out letters is very rare now because of the majority people that use email as communicating with one another since it is instant. One thing that hasn’t changed about letters and emails all these years is that once it is sent out, there is no way to unsend it nor change what was already sent. 

 

Nunes, Mark. “The Email, The Letter, and The Post.” from Cyberspaces of Everyday Life. University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

We don’t ever think too much in how an email is constructed today. We focus on just sending it out and receiving. Not understanding how the concept of emailing came about. The thought of transporting communication through a telegraph and through out time turning telegraphs into emails. Understand that your able to construct  an email in personally and professionally  and the person on the other end can receive it instantly and have an option to reconstruct your message on their end.

It started with a thought/Idea

Someone idea turned into a physical form of communication

a physical form of communication turned into a virtual idea / concept for communication

 

 

The idea of Society not being able to function without email today is hilarious. We work off of emails, School emails, Personal Emails, Entertainment emails, Spam emails, We even need our emails to get discounts ! It’s a concept that allows to us to function.

Website: Giphy.com https://giphy.com/gifs/bublywater-neil-patrick-harris-email-1APaaUc09xFSGHXECL/links