Does anyone remember what expanding your social network was like before the days of Facebook and Twitter? For those of your born before the *ahem* digital generation, this should be an eye opener for you. Philip Chew nostalgically blogs about the not-so-ancient practice of writing to pen friends.

“During my secondary school days, there was a students’ magazine named Young Malayans. It was first published in 1946 in Kuala Lumpur. The monthly publication was distributed throughout Malaya, British North Borneo (Sabah) and Sarawak. I subscribed to the magazine as there were not only many interesting articles including those contributed by students, especially from Leslie Fong who wrote Chinese stories about filial piety but also a pen pals column. I wrote to many whose names appeared there. Writing to pen pals was my favourite past time and I spent a lot of time and money buying stamps, envelopes, writing pads and taking photos.”

The idea of pen friends is that you would list your name and address on some magazine in the hope that someone would write to you and a friendship-via-correspondence would ensue. It was certainly a more innocent time – these days, one would balk at the idea of putting your email address up on a public forum, much less your own physical address. And of course, spam (not the luncheon meat) hadn’t been invented yet.

I think the most interesting part of Philip’s story was his various attempts to meet up with his pen friends whenever he was up in Malaysia – an endeavour that resulted in varying degrees of success. It’s actually not that much different from today – with email being such a common thing, do you have people that you correspond with on the other side of the world on a regular basis, but haven’t actually met? Perhaps the more things change, the more things really do stay the same.

Check out Philip’s walk down memory lane about penpals – perhaps it’ll inspire you to make some pen (or email) friends of your own.