Albert Barabasi (2002) describes our world becoming smaller and smaller since the advent of the internet. For example, many of us communicate with friends who live domestically and internationally via email. Whether someone lives across the street, across the nation, or across the world, we have means to send information to these people in virtually the same manner. But what did our world look like 100 years ago? Or more importantly, how did people try to understand or access this world?

One phenomenon which I propose may help answer this question is chain letters. According to the Paper Chain Letter Archive (PCLA) chain letters have been found dating back to the late nineteenth century. Perhaps these chain letters were a way in which people tested out their connections to others, to see if they could receive feedback from distant individuals. For example, maybe the chain letter asked the recipients to send postcards to names on a list, and the goal was to see which far away cities one could recieve post cards from. I decided to investigate paper chain letters to determine if this was the case.

I found a number of chain letters which I would summarize as belonging to the following categories: donation of money/lottery, charity, joke, asking for various items, or participating in the "longest chain letter of all time" being tracked by either the USPS or Guiness Book of World Records. However, very few if any seemed to try to evaluate the size or scope of the world.

What they all had in common, however, was the concept of sending out ONE of something, and getting X amount of things in return. From ten cents turning into 100 dollars, to sending one recipe and getting 2000 in return, each chain letter exponentially predicts a yield for the sender. More often than not is seems like an arbitrary number. And as mathematics has proved, the end result is usually not possible to attain because there simply isn't that many people in the world. For a mathematical explanation of this see the link below.

Overall, just as a social phenomenon it is interesting to read these chain letters to see what items, besides money, people were interested in accumulating. From buttons, coupons, recipes, dog toys, t-shirts, dishtowels, toilet paper, and even panties--people seemed attracted to the idea of receiving hundreds of these items in the mail. Even more interesting is the persuasiveness of these letters, and their attempt to not be seen as a hoax. Furthermore, many of these chain letters insist that they are "not chain letters." One reads, "This is not a chain letter, this is a dishtowel club." Another chain letter which is suposedly being tracked by the USPS on behalf of the Guiness Book of World Records, instructs the participant to write on the outside of the envelope "THIS IS THE OFFICIAL GUINESS BOOK CHAIN LETTER," along with their name and the people they are sending it to.

Out of curiosity, I decided to raise some of these old chain letters from the dead, and send them into circulation again. The results of this experiment will be posted at a future date.