Postcards, memes, political activism and, yes, cats.
"We've forgotten the density of that early 20th-Century communications network, which postcards were moving through," says Weiss. "You could send a postcard to someone at 10 saying you'll be there at 5:30, if you're going from Manhattan to Jersey City, and you can get the message to them fairly quickly."
"Postcards were seen as so fast," Cure says. "There were lots of complaints about what postcards were going to do to people's reading and writing skills, because if you could just dash off a few lines, why did you need to actually learn grammar and become a good writer?"
People also feared the postcard would lead to more superficial relationships, because instead of writing pages to each other in letters, people were just sending pictures back and forth. The public, unsealed nature of postcards was also frightening to many people, Cure says. The first and earliest proposal for the postcard was actually shot down because "it was just too scary to have something where servants can read your mail".
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240923-100-year-old-cat-memes-that-predate-the-internet
