Family telegram, 1926. View larger version

A telegram from my great-grandfather to his sister: You or Queenie better come home Mother has the grippe. Dated 1926, the language bristles with eerie nostalgia: the cold formality of mother, referring to the flu as the grippe, and the brevity of one commanding sentence with neither salutation nor valediction. 

Reading a few telegrams will quickly kill any romantic notion of a golden age when people communicated solely through thoughtfully composed letters filled with good manners, sparkling prose, and beautiful penmanship. No, telegrams look an awful lot like text messages. But they stick around. I have this one framed on my wall.

Today we talk through email, text messages, instant messages, status updates, and tweets. These are skimmed, filtered, and sometimes filed into imaginary folders before they disappear under the next wave of data. Has anybody framed an email or printed a text message and pinned it to their wall?

When somebody falls ill or some other calamity strikes me, how will I notify the people in my life? Surely there’s a benefit to holding dramatic news in your hand rather than stumbling across it on a screen.

Twenty million telegrams were sent in 1929. Nearly one trillion emails were sent per day in 2008 – roughly 10% of this was spam. Western Union sent its last telegram on January 31, 2006.

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Seefeel – Signals
from Quique. Too Pure, 1993 | buy the mp3s
Perhaps the most understated track from Seefeel’s 1993 ambient-rock masterpiece, ‘Signals’ drifts and hums just outside of earshot like a haunting song buried underneath the blankets. 

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Claro Intelecto – Signals
from Warehouse Sessions. Modern Love, 2009 | buy the mp3s
Skeletal techno made for dark concrete rooms. These tracks pound and shake and I can’t recommend them highly enough. See also “Only Yesterday” and “Post”.