Post-postal - by Benjamin Breen - Res Obscura

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the world that my two daughters — both under the age of three— will inhabit when they’re adults. Last night, I was surprised to find that my older daughter Yara was able to recognize a 1980s-style tape deck in a picture book we were reading (“this… a… music box,” she said, after studying it intently). And she certainly knows what the mail is — in fact, one of her favorite books is called The Jolly Postman.

But will the adult Yara personally write out and mail letters? Perhaps about as frequently as she will play cassette tapes. Which is to say: not never, but almost never.

What I am writing right now is, of course, a letter of a sort. (One that, incidentally, I’ve just turned on optional paid subscriptions for — though all regular posts are and will remain free, as they have since Res Obscura began as a blog over 14 years ago).

The ‘letter’ part of ‘digital newsletter’ is more than just a linguistic fossil. It’s a reminder of how communication technologies evolve not by replacement but by layering, with older forms becoming decontextualized rather than disappearing entirely. Newsletters were once handwritten notes distributed by medieval merchant families to share market-making news. Already by the 17th century, the advent of print had removed this personalized element. Now the entire concept of mail — not just physical mail, but the overall genre of “the letter” as a form of writing, even in electronic form — seems to me to be heading toward extinction, too.

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