The Sincerest Forms of Expression

2010-06-16 (수) 12:00:00

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The Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Architecture and Design acquired @ - the “at” sign, a symbol of our technological and social relationships. The Library of Congress, the 210-year-old federal cultural institution in the United States, is archiving the collected works of Twitter, the microblogging service, whose users send out 55 million tweets a day in 140 or fewer characters.

“Taken together, they are likely to be of considerable value to future historians,” wrote The Times. “They contain more observations, recorded at the same times by more people, than ever preserved in any medium before.”

The medium for messages has rapidly changed, many combining the old with the new. Correspondence and communication is full of bursts of information, quick and of-the-moment thoughts, instantaneity, abbreviations and location-centric messages a la Foursquare.

Which means, if you are hand writing a letter, an invitation or a thank-you note, you are already running late. Paper communication is going the way of most things - away. But the nostalgia for it is still strong, and that is the driving force behind the year-old online stationery service, Paperless Post.

Users can design, send and track e-vites on the Web, with virtual stationery that has an elegant feel, from visible paper grain to curlicue handwriting. One can almost smell the cardstock. Click on the hyperreal envelope and a pretty little invitation card pops out. Click it to fill out the reply card.

“The Internet has been kind of a vacuum in terms of aesthetics,” Alexa Hirschfeld, the founder (along with her brother), told The Times.

“We wanted to leverage functionality with design.”

There are others out in the ether who are also taking that route. Remember such niceties as grammar and proper punctuation? On Twitter, there is a subculture of grammar police who patrol people’s tweets that are rife with typos, misspellings and other mistakes, wrote The Times.

People with Twitter accounts like Grammar Fail, Grammar Hero and Word Police often give intense feedback to other users.

“I don’t want to get them worked up,” Tom Voirol, who runs the Twenglish Police from his home in Sydney, Australia, told The Times. “I just want to point things out.”

In the middle of all the digital noise is another bastion of etiquette: a lettered set that lives and breathes by the hand-written and hand-engraved. Some are social aspirants, others just like the feel of an artisan’s hand.

They favor luxury stationery made with hand-cut dies and a variety of fonts and ink shades. Demsey & Carroll, founded in 1878, sells to these stationery aficionados at high prices: $350 for 100 notecards; $500 for tissue-lined envelopes to match.

“I really think about who I’m writing to and what they would appreciate,” Elizabeth Mayhew, a lifestyle expert, told The Times.

“That process is such a different emphasis from writing a quick e-mail.”

Pamela Fiori, formerly the editor of Town & Country magazine, told The Times: “In a world increasingly uncivilized, it’s important that we have some ties to tradition. And I honestly think that what we’re losing with e-mail are our memories.”

But one can always consult the Twitter archive to recover those fleeting thoughts.

ANITA PATIL