There’s even a software version of the notes that allows you to "stick" them to your various computer files. But, of course, it’s the paper version that captures our collective imagination. In an increasingly automated world, Post-it Notes are vivid emblems of the personal: the messages they bear are hand-written and informal. This quality makes them a favorite tool of direct marketers, who use them in an extremely effective campaign known as the "Letter from J." Typically, the "Letter from J." arrives in a plain white envelope and contains an "article" about some remarkable product or service. This article, however, is actually just ad copy, designed to look like a page from Time or Forbes or some other authoritative publication. To complete the charade, a Post-it note is stuck to the article; the note features a message like "Try this. It works! – J." Endorsement from a trusted source is the key to success in the direct marketing industry – what better way to simulate acquaintance than with a Post-it Note, which literally requires a personal touch (or at least, a very sensitive machine) to attach it to the junk mail missive?

The Post-it Note’s tactile simplicity is misleading in another way as well. While it often stands in counterpoint to the digital office, a throwback to the days of paper clips, staplers, and typewriters, the Post-it Note is actually postmodernism writ on a square of yellow paper. Unlike its predecessor, the memo, which functions as a self-contained message, the Post-it Note is an analog forebear to hypertext; it acknowledges in its very construction that what’s most important is context – and that context is where you make it, achievable with glue as much as any organic cohesion of ideas. Whereas a memo generally includes such information as who it’s from, to whom it’s directed, what its purpose is, and what sort of response it expects to generate, a Post-it Note is usually spontaneous, associative, and fragmentary. Its message often has meaning only in relation to the object or document to which it’s been attached; detach it and it becomes a mystery.

And, thus, the Post-it Note is very much a product of its age, even if it sometimes seems as if it isn’t. Had someone invented it thirty years earlier, say, it’s likely it would have been a failure; people weren’t ready to communicate like that. But in the age of channel-surfing, metamedia reflexiveness, sampling, multitasking, and hypertext, the Post-it Note fits right in.

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