I received a letter today from my parents. The post office canceled the stamp by printing a quotation from John Adams over it: “Let us dare to read, think, speak, and debate.” Below was a link to poweroftheletter.com 
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So I went to the site. It’s a promotion for an HBO biopic of the second president. Huh? Hey, if HBO wants to pay some money to keep postage down for the rest of us, I guess that’s okay.
At the site, there was some prose talking about how much we know about John Adams thanks to his letters, implying that we should all write more letters:
In his prolific correspondence, John Adams left us a remarkable first-person account of the birth of our nation, as well as a candid portrait of his life and personal relationships. John and his wife Abigail’s letters offer a window to our past; we can be inspired to revive this tradition, to return to the enduring power of the written word, and leave a legacy for future generations.
The (implied) argument is that we should write more (hard-copy) letters as a gift to future historians. This argument is incorrect, though. True, we know more about Adams and his wife than about most people from that period because of their letters. But these days, it’s easier to know about people if they write blogs and emails instead of letters, since those are so easy to archive, search, and distribute. Today, people who rely on paper correspondence actually make themselves less visible to the world, not more.
My, how things change.