Item — HN Reader

Activation energy of a letter vs. an email. If you have to handwrite it and it takes ~days to arrive, you write fewer communiques and put more into the ones you do, but a lot goes unsaid.

You see it start to change with the telegraph on down to where we are today.

1 comments

> You see it start to change with the telegraph on down to where we are today.

Telegrams were paid by the word, and were all uppercase by design, they're not an evolution of language. It took more effort to adapt your message to a telegram than to write a proper sentence.