Letters, Postcards, Email

In this original study, Milne moves between close readings of letters, postcards and emails, and investigations of the material, technological infrastructures of these forms, to answer the question: How does presence function as an aesthetic and rhetorical strategy within networked communication practices?

Esther Milne is Lecturer, Department of Media and Communications, Faculty of Life and Social Sciences, Swinburne University, Melbourne, Australia.

List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction 1: "The Conscious Presence of a Central Intellect": British Postal History 2: "The simple transcripts of natural feeling": Signifiers of Presence in Epistolary Practice 3: "The ghosts of all my impertinent letters": Presence in Crisis 4: "The Self-conscious air of the reproduced": Postcard History 5: "A photo of the ship that I am now on": Signifiers of Presence, Intimacy and Privacy in Postcard Correspondence 6: A Brief History of Electronic Mail 7: "In my sickness": Constructing Presence on the Cybermind Discussion Group Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index