Society Before and After Telecommunication

Society before and after Telecommunication

By: Richard D. Ramirez

Hist-410

Professor: Alan Renga

Society has changed so much when telecommunication was able to have telephones and internet to communicate with people much faster and easier. Before the technology age people had to write letters to family members and friends to communicate with one another. In the year 1775 Benjamin Franklin appointed the first Postmaster General by the Continental Congress. For many years just about 231 years the mail system has strengthened the bods of friendship, family and community. In this new century we have so much technology available to us and in our palm of our hand. The 21st century technology has evolved so much in a few years with faster ways of connecting people closer and faster.

In early colonial times, correspondents depended on friends, merchants, and Native Americans to carry messages among the colonies. However, most correspondence ran between the colonists and England, the Netherlands, or Sweden — their mother countries. It was largely to handle this mail that, in 1639, the first official notice of mail service in the colonies appeared. The General Court of Massachusetts designated Richard Fairbanks’ tavern in Boston as the official repository of mail brought from or sent overseas, in line with the European practice of using coffee houses and taverns as mail stations. Franklin made important and lasting improvements in the colonial posts. He began to reorganize the service, setting out on a long tour to inspect Post Offices in the North and as far south as Virginia. New surveys were made, milestones were placed on principal roads, and new and shorter routes were laid out. For the first time, post riders carried mail at night to speed service between Philadelphia and New York. Here is a map of the 18th Century Post Route Map. It shows how far the post master rides frequently.

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These are the shipping routes many years ago from country to countr...