Instagrammers are not Pen Pals

I don’t remember exactly when I joined Instagram—sometime before the Covid-19 pandemic. I was originally drawn to the platform to follow feeds from National Geographic, Lonely Planet, Budget Travel, Condé Nast, and the like. They had beautiful pics—Earth porn, in the vernacular of the time.

During the lockdown, Facebook and Instagram were flooded with vitriol. I decided they just weren’t worth my time. I deleted my accounts. I was done forever, I said. I lasted until August 2021. As public lockdowns eased, I started thinking about connecting with people again.

I’ve gone down a lot of rabbit holes since rejoining. I no longer just follow media companies. Content was getting better; some of it was really entertaining. I grew fond of some of the creators I watched regularly and even tried to strike up correspondence. But I have to keep reminding myself that Instagrammers are not pen pals. That’s just not how the medium works.

The History of Pen Pals

The tradition of pen pals spans the ages, no doubt. Catherine the Great carried on a 15-year correspondence with Voltaire. J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis exchanged letters. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir had an extensive correspondence.

The term “pen pal” didn’t show up until 1930 and became an official word in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1931, according to the West Des Moines Historical Society. The practice entered its heyday in the years after World War II. People had developed a global perspective and wanted to know more about others in different countries, both former allies and former enemies.

A driving force behind the growth of pen pals in that era was the International Youth Service (IYS), a Finnish company founded in 1952 to connect teens around the world so they could develop friendships and learn about each other’s cultures. The IYS had a long run—even we hillbillies in Missouri wrote to students in other countries.

The End of Pen Pals

The first blow to the pen pal phenomenon was email in the 1990s. Digital immediacy meant you could communicate with people around the world faster and cheaper—if you had internet access. (You could also get the opportunity of fortunes if you would only help a Nigerian prince get the money that was rightfully his.)

Texting was probably the real death of pen pals. Communication was shortened. Introspective letters gave way to emojis and abbreviations. The emotional and intellectual exchanges were gone.

The IYS closed in 2008. Social media took over. The priority shifted to broad networks of people we hardly know, rather than sharing our true selves. We’ve given in to the performative nature of social media. We post 30 seconds of nonsense and robotically reply with things like “You go, girl.”

So what?

As National Pen Pal Day comes and goes unnoticed on June 1, it’s more than just a quirky holiday slipping by—it’s a small, quiet symbol of a larger shift. We’ve traded thoughtful, deliberate exchanges for rapid-fire reactions. But maybe noticing that trade-off is the first step in rethinking how we connect. We don’t have to go back to letter-writing, but we could stand to remember what made it meaningful.