My understanding of the word
音沙汰【おとさた】(news, letter) is that in terms of usage, it functions the same way that
連絡【れんらく】(contact, communication) does. It refers to modes of communication between people.
The context in which I read it was a book, written recently, where the author spoke about communication from a girlfriend at that time. The author seemed to deliberately choose
連絡 to convey a different feeling of how communication was in the sixties, when the relationship happened.
So you could say:
... and they would have the same essential meaning, but the former says, "there was no contact by phone or letter," and the latter says "there was no contact by phone, letter, email, text, etc..."
So my question is, does
音沙汰 mean communication in a sense of writing letters and making phone calls, and therefor has a
昭和【しょうわ】 era (or earlier) feel to it?
音沙汰 been more or less entirely replaced in modern Japanese by
連絡 because now we use email and text messaging and a wider variety of more immediate communication technologies?
Or am I just totally off base about the meaning and usage of