Correspondence Is Making A Comeback
I was thinking of making a broader point in my “quill pen” post yesterday but ran out of time so I decided to do that with today's post. — Before the telephone came along, correspondence mostly consisted of letter writing, like the Adams/Jefferson letters I mentioned in yesterday's post.
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2008-era reflection on the revival of written correspondence sits inside a long-running thread about how communication formats cycle rather than disappear. As early as 2005, research noted that email and letter writing share a fundamental structural pattern, suggesting the letter never really left — it just changed medium.
Writing at the height of the real-time web boom, the author reaches back to the [[entity/adams/jefferson|Adams–Jefferson letters]] to argue that deliberate, asynchronous writing has durable value that synchronous voice displaced only temporarily.
First-order effects
- Readers and builders in 2008 get a framing for why email, blogs, and other written formats persist despite the push toward always-on synchronous channels — the format's value is deliberateness, not nostalgia.
Second-order effects
- The pattern this post anticipates shows up downstream: by 2012 voice mail was in decline as text rose and patience shrank, confirming that users were re-choosing asynchronous written exchange over live conversation.
- Product strategy follows the same arc — a decade later, startups like Front were explicitly pitching an asynchronous version of Slack, productizing exactly the correspondence-over-realtime shift this post gestures at.
Third-order effects
- If the cycle holds, communication markets keep oscillating between synchronous and asynchronous modes, with each 'comeback' arriving in a new technical wrapper — letters to email to structured async messaging — meaning the durable opportunity is in the rhythm of communication, not any single channel.
- It also suggests a recurring trap for new media: tools dismissed early as having no commercial use can reshape communication habits once they align with this deeper preference for considered, written exchange.
The trend: Communication keeps cycling between real-time voice and deliberate asynchronous writing, with each generation rebuilding the letter in a new medium.