In our contemporary online world, we receive short electronic messages on a wide variety of topics, some of genuine interest to us, others of no interest at all. Sometimes we know the people sending the messages, but more often than not, we have never met them and probably will never know them personally. The messages range in subject matter from the trivial and social to the tragic and intimate. What might such messages from the same spectrum of people have looked like in the past when postcards were a common form of communicating brief messages?
