Posters, Post-Its, and First Letters

So it has now been just over a week since this little corner in the blog-o-sphere was created. I’ve been busy with school and busy with promoting this web-page. I have created hand written posters and put them up around my school. I’ve also written the site address on a ton of post-it notes and have been putting them up sporadically in an assortment of places. I slipped a couple into some books and around the stationary section in Pages on Queen and the giant Chapters at Richmond & John (areas in downtown Toronto). It’s been fun to try and be inconspicuous, no matter how successful I actually am. I have a full pad of post-its in my pocket, ready to stick anywhere and everywhere.
Friday afternoon is officially check the letterbox time. And I got mail! My first two letters! One of them made mention/pointed out the juxtaposition of this project: the advanced technology of an internet website, available/accessible to almost anyone in the world, to the “old fashion” way of communicating—most popular back when the world was larger, but you knew very little of it. It’s interesting that in order to get people to join me in the letter writing revival, I have to use these new ways of communicating: e-mail, blogs, and Facebook.
In the process of promoting this project/experiment, and explaining it to people, I’ve entered a lot of different and interesting conversations. I’ve realized that this project is more layered than I originally thought, and has a lot of little components to it. Yes, it’s about letter writing as a [dying] art form, but it can also be about new technology vs old technology, ways of communicating, the tonality of hand writing, the uniqueness of our hand writing, the sharing of thoughts on paper/for an individual vs the sharing of typed thoughts for the internet, and almost any other way you want to interpret this. I was actually watching a bit of stand-up (thanks YouTube!) and this one guy that I’m ready into right now (Danny Bhoy) was talking about letter writing vs e-mail. And that with all the instant messaging type communication, you don’t have time to let your answers/response settle. You get your message/thoughts out as soon as you think them, sometimes without actually thinking or censoring/editing yourself. With a written letter it takes time, and maybe by the time you go to post it, you don’t feel that way anymore, or you’ve come to your senses in what you’ve said.
Anyways, I guess I will leave off at that, and kudos to anyone who actually read this entire gab. I’ll try and keep updates more regular, hopefully Friday afternoons, at the very least, after I check my post box.