Rituals
Letter writing did not die, it changed genre
Personal correspondence declined, but the deeper change is what happened to the record it used to leave behind.
Maren Solberg
Contributing writer, What People Miss
Maren writes about memory, archives and how quickly the recent past becomes unverifiable.
Contact Maren through our contact page — mark your message for their attention and it will be passed on.
16 articles
Sound & Signal
Church bells, factory horns and the acoustic clock
Before everyone carried a clock, time was distributed through sound. The infrastructure for that is mostly silent now.
Rituals
Waving from the platform and the goodbyes that got shorter
Non-travelling companions once came all the way to the train, the ship or the gate. Security and ticketing pushed the farewell back…
Rituals
Cheap rate and the hour when the family phoned
Telephone calls were priced by time of day, and households scheduled their affections around the tariff.
Rituals
Asking a stranger for directions and the transactions that stopped happening
Being lost used to require speaking to someone. Removing that requirement removed thousands of small encounters nobody had counted.
Sound & Signal
The office that sounded like machinery
Typewriters, teleprinters and adding machines made offices loud, and the noise was information about who was working on what.
Sound & Signal
From one bell in the hall to a sound that means only you
A ringing telephone once summoned a household. Personal ringtones turned the same signal into a private address, then made it…
Sound & Signal
The shutter sound that is now a file the phone plays on purpose
A camera click was the sound of a mechanism moving. On a phone it is a recording, kept partly for reasons of law.
Sound & Signal
Piped music and the sound that was designed not to be listened to
Background music in shops and offices was engineered with specific psychological intentions. It has largely been replaced by…
Sound & Signal
The till, the coins and the sound money used to make
Payment was audible: a drawer, a bell, coins counted onto a counter. Cashless transactions are silent, and the silence is doing…
Rituals
Calling round unannounced and the door that was answered anyway
Visiting without warning was normal because there was no way to warn anybody. Cheap messaging made the notice possible and then…
Rituals
Reading a newspaper you could actually finish
A bounded stack of paper contained everything you were going to read that day. The feed replaced the boundary with a supply that…
Sound & Signal
The school bell and the day divided into fixed portions
An electric bell cut the day into intervals nobody had to watch a clock for. Where it has been switched off, something has to…
Sound & Signal
The siren tested on a fixed day and the warning nobody expects now
Public warning sirens were once tested on a schedule, so entire populations knew a sound that meant stop and listen. Most of that…
Sound & Signal
Street cries and the trades that had to be shouted
For most of urban history goods and services were sold by voice. The calls were a working technology, and they were documented as…
Sound & Signal
Hiss, crackle and the silence recordings never used to have
Every recording medium added a noise floor of its own. Digital removed it, and listeners discovered that the noise had been…