When is Electronic Greetings Day?
November 29th is Electronic Greetings Day
What is Electronic Greetings Day?
The internet in its infancy was a clumsy thing, but it needed to bumble around a bit to become the agile fox it is today. Electronic Greetings Day celebrates the communications advances of the last century as seen through the evolution of E-cards.
With the advent of email, E-cards were inevitable. They are more economical than their paper cousins, though their entertainment value differs categorically. Some are cute, some are funny, and some linger in that strange twilight between the absurd and the hilarious.
These days, social media slideshows and video cards have replaced most E-cards, but electronic greeting card sites aren’t dead. If you want a blast from the past, use Electronic Greetings Day to check out modern E-cards. They’re higher resolution now, and many still have the classic cheese-factor as the E-cards of yore.
Fun facts about Electronic Greetings Day!
- Judith Donath (MIT Media Lab) created the first E-card site, The Electric Postcard. The award-winning site eventually became open source.
- Traditional greeting cards became common in the late 1800s.
- The brothers who later founded Hallmark created the folded greeting card around 1910.
- June 2007 saw a wave of emails with the subject “You’ve received a postcard from a family member!” and links to exploitive malware sites.
How to celebrate Electronic Greetings Day:
Track down a digital greeting card site, and send out some holiday cheer. If you want to spice it up, dispatch something retro to your bestie’s email. A singing Christmas tree, a dancing and singing turkey, or a snowman playing a saxophone would certainly fit the bill.
What’s the hashtag for Electronic Greetings Day?
On social media, use #ElectronicGreetingsDay to marvel at how far we’ve come.