Commentary: Top 5 online resources for stamp collectors
The digital revolution of the 1990s introduced an array of challenges to stamp collecting that the hobby is still grappling with today. In particular, email's displacement of snail mail is universally regarded as the original sin from which all subsequent evils flowed. As snail mail, once the primary gateway into the hobby of stamp collecting, slipped further and further into obsolescence in inverse correlation to email's rise, a generation was born into a reality where the very notion of what a stamp is was already fading into obscurity. In the larger context of collecting generally, snail mail's decline was but one early symptom of the shift undergone in our emotional attachment patterns from physical property to digital property. Whereas prior to the digital revolution memories were preserved in physical form and it was fundamentally the physical form that was valued, the new paradigm sees less and less value in the accumulation of physical mementos when their digit...