Email began as async correspondence, had a stint as a status symbol, gave way to instant messaging and birthed the newsletter boom. Now we're circling back to mail worth waiting for.
I remember when I first came across the Dancing Baby. Fellow millennials certainly remember him, he used to show up in our inbox behind some of the most articulate subject lines of the time, something like Re:fwd:Fwd:fwd:re:FWD:fuNNybAby!
I watched the video in complete awe, and as I saw this creature dance to the rhythm of that primal chant, I couldn’t help but wonder: how did this land in my inbox? I was, after all, a teenage boy living in the Caribbean permitted no more than thirty minutes of internet per day, and somehow there I was contemplating an uncanny baby in a diaper performing a very stiff cha-cha-cha. I looked at the forward chain and saw hundreds of addresses of which I recognised none, so, as it was the polite thing to do back then, I immediately forwarded it to everyone I knew.
While chain emails might not be making a comeback anytime soon, email as a form of correspondence feels particularly special in today’s overwhelmingly “connected” world. It’s (comparatively) slow speed one step removed from letter writing. Letter writing – which humans have been partaking in for at least 4,000 years – puts us in a different state of mind: the sender writes not knowing if the letter will arrive or if it will be answered.
The early days of email were much like this: people sometimes spent weeks without checking their inbox, with little urgency involved. As Joe Muggs observes in SEED CLUB, just like the revival of vinyl, books and physical media, there's something about email that feels akin to this and primed for a reboot. As the well-reported Substack newsletter boom demonstrates, there’s an appetite for steadier, more selective forms of communication. Short-form isn’t king.
