Mom wrote a letter to Grandmother when I was nine months old, thanking her for baby clothes. [Gotta love the AIR MAIL: despite the trials and tribulations of the United States Postal Service, it’s expected that regular letters and bills arrive within a few days, whereas then mail was still transported via rail.]
Hey – and about you being afraid to send clothes for Scoot – I love it! If it weren’t for the clothes you chose for him in September he’d be naked ’cause just a few weeks after that he outgrew everything he owned. They looked so big when you bought them – or HE looked so little. Anyway, they’re wonderful. PLEASE don’t be afraid that I won’t like them – I just hope you have as much fun picking things out for him as I do. It’s more fun shopping for him that anyone – even Mike enjoys it!!
Though the letter’s content is somewhat interesting, more interesting that it exists at all: modern-day luddites aside, letter writing has been replaced by texts and emails, constructed quickly – often with questionable spelling, grammar, punctuation – and sent just as quickly before moving on to your next task. I can’t say when I last received or sent a letters, I also just dash off something digital. And this is not just a local phenomena: Denmark’s postal service stopped letter delivery at the end of 2025. Wedding announcements, event invitations, congratulations, letters-to-the-editors, and more are all digital now.
The United States Copyright Office enforces the mandatory deposit provision of copyright law: every publisher of books, magazines, pamphlets, instruction manuals, maps, artwork, etc. must provide a copy to the copyright office. The digital equivalent is difficult to define, much less enforce. How does the Washington Post ensure that it story published online – which may or may not make it to its physical version – is accounted for, versioned, and submitted to the Copyright Office. Does the mandatory deposit clause apply to newspapers that are read online in the United States? And most certainty the millions of personal blogs written by US citizens are not being submitted (I know mine isn’t).
Is it reasonable or even possible for the Copyright Office to receive, catalog, evaluate, and manage the hundreds of millions of digital submissions created each year to fulfill mandatory deposit? I consider myself well organized and yet still stumble on the unexpected stored locally. Though I know this issue is being discussed and though I am not an expert in this field, it is impossible to manage the exabytes of data required to maintain a universal wayback machine. The necessary storage technologies don’t yet exist (or are new and too unknown). Understanding and interpreting our current era by historians may present the same problems as understanding/interpreting pre-historic or pre-written eras: lack of source material, in our case caused by faulty hard drives and inadvertent deletions.
The irony was Mom was just about to receive letters: each Christmas, Mom sent my grandchildren an Amazon gift card, and my daughters planned for each child to write a thank you letter. And then Mom died early January 2025 and it didn’t matter. Big bummer.
