The Colombian writer and later Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez became famous with his 1950s novel “El coronel no tiene quien le escriba”, whose English title is “No One Writes to the Colonel”. It is about civil war in Columbia and about a retired colonel who is waiting in vain for a letter confirming his pension entitlement.

The title emphasised the deviation from a norm. Something that was expected didn’t happen. No letter arrived. Today, the younger generation needs an explanation of this title, because its members don’t receive letters anyway and don’t expect one. They also don’t expect that “the postman always rings twice” for the personal delivery of letters before mailboxes at private homes became commonplace. That was the title of a 1981 film by Bob Rafelson based on a 1934 novel by James Cain. A long, long time ago.

Who still writes letters these days?! It’s tedious, time-consuming, expensive, and unnecessary. After all, there are alternatives. The number of New Year’s greetings sent by mail in Japan – traditionally thought to be important for social cohesion and therefor always meticulously crafted – declined by 33 percent in 2025 compared to the previous year. In 2024, the average was six per person; by 2025 it had dropped to just four.

And the Danes, for whom New Year’s mail is perhaps not all that important, have just learnt that the delivery of postal letters will be discontinued at the end of the year, meaning that in the future there will be no more letters to anyone.

A sign of the times. Hans Christian Andersen’s estate includes not only his world-famous fairy tales, but also thousands of letters, which are kept in the Royal Danish Library. Like the letters of Shakespeare, Voltaire, and Karl Marx, they are now doubly museum-worthy; for they are not only old and worth preserving because of the fame of their authors, but they also embody a form of writing that is facing extinction.

The art of letter writing on paper, perhaps with a personal letterhead, is dying out. We can chat, can’t we, meaning: send and receive text, image, video, or audio files, or all in one. This is perhaps not happening at the same time and at the same speed – Denmark is far advanced – but there is no denying that we are observing a side effect of the global digital transformation.

As part of this, new literary forms are emerging. Nowadays, Jane Austen’s “Lady Susan” would no longer be told as an epistolary novel, but as an email novel. Digital poetry, blog fiction incorporating AI-generated verses and other forms of combing imagination and technology circulate on the internet, the vast majority of which will never be available in print. For they represent the transition from the print culture that developed (in Europe) over the last half millennium to the digital culture that is replacing it worldwide.

The increase in e-books produced by publishers, as well as the decrease in the number of bookstores, is as much part of the ongoing digitalisation process as the fact that I no longer need to go to the library to read a magazine. Almost everything is accessible online.

Cultures are always changing; however, the breakneck pace of change we are experiencing, which has led the Danes to move all their personal correspondence online, is unusual and not to everyone’s liking.

Attempts to get a grip on this change are difficult, however, given its all-encompassing effects. Hardly any area of life remains untouched; and even beyond that. Recently I received an email whose sender wished me well and informed me that he passed away yesterday. He was a pioneer of happiness research, and that was perhaps why he was often occupied with the inevitable. When he knew that it was his turn, he was well prepared for one last surprise. In the given context, it consisted mainly in saving himself and his relatives with a click the postage as well as the trouble of designing, printing, and mailing a death notice.

No one writes to – his colleagues and friends.

Literature, Philosophy