The Death of the Social E-mail

Remember the good old days when you had to actually write a letter, on paper, put a stamp on the envelope and wait a week just to send a friendly 'hello' to someone you haven't heard from in a while?  No?  Good, then you were born some time after the invention of the telephone.  Writing letters for more than formal announcements made a come-back with the advent of e-mail.  Being free and instantaneous meant people could frivolously spend their time personally catching up with old friends on a one by one basis.  Then came blogs, and social networking sites and microblogs (ie. twitter).  I'll admit that I'm somewhat behind for commenting on this now (after all, even Led Zeppelin is still pretty new to me), but I see the death of social e-mail even affecting my own interactions now.  Some of my best friends are people I talk to a couple of times a year.  If our daily activities don't overlap, odds are we don't have any banalities to sit around and talk about.  Since it's the banalities that tend to lead into the bigger topics, I just end up talking about whatever big events have happened.  For the rest of the time, I can just check your status, mood, interests (new and old) and catch up via your archives.  People just don't have an excuse to ask 'So, what's going on with you' any more.  Therefore, e-mail, just like postal mail, shall be relegated to formal announcements to select groups of people or else the highly personal stuff that people are too afraid to say either in person or over the phone.