Beside the railroad tracks of Copenhagen’s practice station, proper within the coronary heart of the Danish capital, stands a red-brick constructing with an ornate façade and a copper-clad cupola nonetheless turning inexperienced over time.
When it opened in 1912 because the Central Post Building, its grandeur echoed the booming postal and telegraph companies that crisscrossed Denmark, connecting Danes to each other. A bit of over a century later and that constructing, now a luxurious resort, presides over a metropolis, and a nation, the place the postal service not delivers letters.
Denmark’s state-run postal service, PostNord, will ship its final ever letter on Tuesday, because the digital age brings its 400-year-run to an end. This makes Denmark the primary nation on this planet to resolve that bodily mail is not both important or economically viable.
The precipitous decline of a nationwide postal service is a acquainted story, one echoed elsewhere within the Western world as we rely ever extra closely on digital technique of communication.
Denmark’s postal service delivered greater than 90% fewer letters in 2024 than in 2000. The US Postal Service delivered 50% much less mail in 2024 than in 2006.
And as our correspondence has moved largely on-line – transfiguring into WhatsApp messages, video calls, or simply an alternate of memes – our communication and language have modified accordingly.
Letters themselves “will change status” too, typically coming to signify extra intimate messages than their digital counterparts, stated Dirk van Miert, a professor on the Huygens Institute within the Netherlands who focuses on early fashionable information networks.
The information networks that letters facilitated for hundreds of years are “only expanding” of their on-line kind, expediting each entry to that information in addition to the rise of disinformation, he informed NCS.
PostNord has been eradicating the 1,500 mailboxes scattered throughout Denmark since June. When it offered them off to increase cash for charity on December 10, lots of of 1000’s of Danes tried to purchase one. For every mailbox, they paid both 2,000 ($315) or 1,500 ($236) Danish krone, relying on how worn they have been.
Instead of posting letters, Danes will now have to drop them off at kiosks in retailers, from the place they are going to be couriered by personal firm DAO to each home and worldwide addresses. PostNord will proceed delivering parcels, nonetheless, as on-line buying stays ever fashionable.
Denmark is likely one of the world’s most digital nations; even its public sector makes use of a number of on-line portals, minimizing any bodily authorities correspondence and making it a lot much less reliant on postal companies than many different international locations.
“Almost every Dane is fully digital, meaning physical letters no longer serve the same purpose as previously,” Andreas Brethvad, a spokesperson for PostNord, informed NCS. “Most communication now arrives in our electronic mailboxes, and the reality today is that e-commerce and the parcel market far outweigh traditional mail.”
That could clarify why it’s the first nation to make these adjustments, although it appears probably others will finally observe. Van Miert, who lives within the Netherlands, stated he had to go to a store to put up letters as a result of there are not any mailboxes in his city.
Still, the necessity for bodily correspondence continues world wide, even whether it is diminished. Almost 2.6 billion folks stay offline, in accordance to the UN-affiliated Universal Postal Union, and plenty of extra “lack meaningful connectivity,” thanks to insufficient gadgets, poor protection and restricted digital abilities. Rural communities, girls and people dwelling in poverty are among the many worst affected, it added.
And even in international locations like Denmark, some teams who’re extra reliant on postal companies, like older folks, could also be adversely affected by the adjustments, advocacy teams say.
“It’s very easy for us to access our mail on the phone or a website… but we forgot to give the same possibilities to those who are not digital,” stated Marlene Rishoej Cordes, a spokesperson for the DaneAge Association, which advocates for older folks.
She informed NCS that DAO, the brand new postal courier, has a service the place it’s going to acquire mail at a dwelling deal with however “it still demands you are digital because you have to pay for this service and you can only pay digitally.”
The letter has undergone transformations earlier than, in each medium and magnificence. “It changed formats from papyrus or wax tablets… then paper later on, vellum in the Middle Ages, and now we have electronic devices,” stated Van Miert.
In the seventeenth century, following the traditions laid down by nice philosopher-letter-writers, like Cicero and Erasmus, college students have been taught “how to write a proper letter, a letter of consolation, praise or congratulations,” he added. “For a diplomatic letter, a wholly different style was required than for a personal, or what they called a familiar, letter.”
Letters have come to signify an “element of nostalgia” and a permanence that know-how can not match, Nicole Ellison, a professor on the University of Michigan specializing in computer-mediated communication, informed NCS.
Still, like the scholars who altered their letter-writing types in accordance to totally different contexts, digital communication has advanced to compensate for among the private touches and emotional cues a handwritten letter can convey.
“We have figured out ways to infuse those signals into the stark medium,” Ellison stated, referencing the emojis, GIFs and totally different colours that pepper texts and emails.
And whereas totally different media can convey totally different messages, she cautioned in opposition to ascribing “agency on the part of the technology itself.”
“We’re humans,” she stated. “And at the end of the day, we will do our best to use whatever channel we have to communicate the rich universe of emotions.”
Nonetheless, the demise of the letter is already sparking nostalgia in Denmark.
“Look closely at the picture here,” one Danish person on X said, alongside a photograph of a mailbox. “Now in 5 years I will be able to explain to a 5-year-old what a mailbox was in the old days.”