When I first started using email in November 1994, almost nobody among my friends and acquaintances used it. Some of them even hadn't heard of it. But ironically, I remember having meaningful written dialogs with what few fellow early adopters of email.
In the meanwhile written communication has become identical to written digital communication though quite ridiculously, I'm finding myself forced to revert to snail mail in the year 2024 - three decades since I started using email - as the only way to contact one governmental authority in Israel, whose bureaucracy and system of digital communication are Kafkaesque.
These three decades have seen the rise and fall of email. Until around ten years ago email was still the most preferred means of digital communication. But since then more and more people, including myself, have switched to instant messengers for written digital communication. There are even enough people who have skipped email in their adoption of digital communication.
Theoretically, I know few people among my friends and acquaintances who have no means of digital communication. But again ironically, I have less and less meaningful written dialogs with them.
When I left Israel at the end of last September, I started to try to remain in touch with those with whom I had some kind of face-to-face communication in Jerusalem - about 50 in number - by sending them monthly updates of my personal mission in this new place. I stopped bothering about 20 of them, who never responded to me in the first six months or so. On the following months a few of them responded interchangeably, but this seldom lead to any meaningful dialog simply because they seldom or never answered my follow-up questions. I've decided to stop sending these public monthly updates as I've been feeling as if I were talking to the wall.
I wish I could say that my written digital communication in this new place is better. Unfortunately, the situation is more or less the same. I already have about 40 people living here, but I have meaningful written dialogs on a regular basis with only a few of them. They've told me that they have the same problem as I. I even have an impression that many people don't feel any need for any meaningful dialog, whether written or oral. I wish I were wrong. Some of them may even have a more serious problem of having lost the ability to express their (spontaneous) thoughts and feelings in writing.
I don't know how the situation is in other countries, but I wouldn't be surprised if I were told that it's more or less the same everywhere in the world. If so, meaningful written dialogs must be almost extinct. I'm still struggling as one of the remaining members of this "endangered species".