By Avery<\/a><\/span> <\/p>\n

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A few years ago, Google started their \u201cdoodle\u201d division, tasked with memorializing important days in history by transforming the Google logo into a cartoon. A huge amount of web traffic goes through Google’s search engine, so the doodle program has broad reach. Today, for U.S. web users, Google’s doodle team memorialized the anniversary of the founding of the Pony Express, a new mail service promising speedy delivery between California and Missouri<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The Pony Express doodle presents American Google users with a particular imagined history of the mail service and the time period. The artists’ at Google set up this doodle as a game; web surfers use their arrow keys to navigate mail pickup in the face of various natural obstacles. The character they control is a cowboy-hat-wearing male on horseback. He rides past cacti and barren rocks, eventually going through snow fields if you get far enough in the game. From the modern player’s perspective, the Pony Express is solitary, fast-paced, and adventurous.<\/p>\n

While this version of history makes for a fun game, it focuses solely on the mail carrier, leaving out the other half of the story: those receiving the mail. We’ve talked in class about how transportation infrastructure completely refined how everyday Americans perceived space and time. For example, as Cordelia notes<\/a>, new transportation technologies went hand-in-hand with new business systems; the train’s impact didn’t stop at the track, but trickled down through local merchants and consumers. When consumers in California could expect to get a book from Missouri, the scale of commerce greatly expanded. Google’s memorializing the journey between, without noting the people whose lives were transformed at the beginning and end of the rider’s trip.<\/p>\n

<\/a>  <\/a>  <\/a>  <\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Avery A few years ago, Google started their \u201cdoodle\u201d division, tasked with memorializing important days in history by transforming the Google logo into a cartoon. A huge amount of web traffic goes through Google’s search engine, so the doodle program has broad reach. Today, for U.S. web users, Google’s doodle team memorialized the anniversary […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1512","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-private","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1512"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1512\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}