“Young guys” here means millennials, although I would assume Gen Xers and Zers probably enjoy record players and film cameras too. But suffice to say, sitting down with a pen and paper is the same sort of “old-guy shit” that some “young guys” tend to love. Even when I had an hour-long radio show, that topic proved too expansive. I’m not going to attempt to answer that question here because I have other things to do this month. In fact, one of the first notes in my “Media Are Plural ideas” file eloquently reads, “why do young guys love old-guy shit?” Similar storylines played out for film photography, cassette tapes, fountain pens, vintage computers, retro video games, and just about anything old school. And last year, vinyl records outsold CDs. It was thanks in part to that infrastructure that the medium could have such a resurgence. Some artists kept printing vinyl records, and their fans kept buying them. CDs were widely attributed with killing vinyl, but the medium never went away. I’m envisioning something like the vinyl revival of the early 2010s. ![]() When I say we need to bring back pen pals, I really mean we need to give the medium new life. Pen pals are also a common way to boost your writing skills when learning a new language. After all, the practice never died out and it’s easy to find resources to help you start writing letters. ![]() Still, I think the idea of pen pals has potential, and I’d like to see it widely adopted by a new generation of letter writers. In a surprise to no one, my pen-pal relationships that fared best and lasted longest were those based on email. Unfortunately, that fizzled out after a few letters. It wasn’t until university when a couple of my friends from the internet and I decided to write letters to one another. Instead, emails rendered letter writing obsolete in all but the most formal circumstances. It seemed back then that writing letters would be a big part of my adult life. In elementary school, we were told to write letters to fellow students from across the province on two occasions. Without autocorrect, message history, or any other innovations beyond the technology of the late 19th century. I’m calling for the return of hard-copy, pen-on-paper letters here. And not necessarily email pen pals, where we just write long messages to one another. Okay hear me out: we should bring back pen pals.
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