Jun
13
Change of Address
June 13, 2008 |
My son, Peter, has a summer job and is living away from home. The other day he asked me to mail him something. He tells me the address is 514 5th and Main St. “That doesn’t sound right “, I tell him. He insists that the apartment is on the corner of 5th and Main and “why wouldn’t that be the address?”
I understand his logic. He has much more experience with web addresses than he does with U.S. Postal protocol. If Pete’s address was a url it might be something like http://pete.city.us/5th/main/514 All the elements appear in a logical sequence. Postal addresses don’t follow the same logic.
Those of us with years of snail mail experience will understand that the ‘514′ in the street number indicates that his apartment is in the 500 block of Main St. It is unnecessary, and potentially confusing to postal employees, to include both streets in the address. A trip to the post office confirmed this. The postmaster asserted that the proper address was 514 Main St. and proceeded to cross out the extra street reference.
“Why is this interesting?”, you might ask. It is another indication of the influence the Internet is having on the most basic aspects of everyday life. We use less and less snail mail and input more and more web addresses. The logic of web addresses begins to influence how people (particularly younger people) conceive addresses. How else does it influence how we perceive locations in space?
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