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# Pneumatic Mail
- URL: https://www.protein.xyz/pneumatic-mail/
- Published: 1997-11-24T07:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2016-06-15T05:44:43.000Z
- Description: Sherry Turkle's most recent book, *Life on the Screen* contains something of a report on a dead medium which has been mentioned…
- Author: Protein
- Tags: SEEDS, #protein, #Import 2024-06-11 13:21

Sherry Turkle's most recent book, \*Life on the Screen\* contains something of a report on a dead medium which has been mentioned before on this list: the French (Parisian) system of pneumatic tubes for letter delivery. "I stayed with a family \[in Paris\] who avoided the telephone for everything but emergency communications. An intimate communication would go by \*pneumatique.\* One brought (or had delivered) a handwritten message to the local post office. There, it was placed in a cannister and sent through a series of underground tubes to another post office. It would then be hand delivered to its destination."I was taught that the \*pneumatique\* was the favored medium for love letters, significant apologies, or requests for an important meeting. Although mediated by significant amounts of technology, the handwritten \*pneumatique\* bore the trace of the physical body of the person who sent it; it was physically taken from that person's hand and put into the hand of the person to whom it was sent. The pneumatique's insistence on physical presence may have ill-prepared me for the lessons of postmodernism, but it has made e-mail seem oddly natural." As we delve into the reasons for a medium's death or disappearance, it would be wise to keep in mind those media which deliver this sense of physical presence and see if that (or something like it) is a factor in media Darwinism.(c) Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet by Sherry Turkle