Regardless of where they end up, the media is not dead, they are still very much living, changing, and evolving.
Examples of residual media include film cameras and film, record players and LP records, radio, letters, and postcards, etc.
The term itself stems from Raymond Williams' study of culture’s dominant, emergent, and residual forms.
The residual forms, Williams says, are “experiences, meanings and values which cannot be expressed in terms of the dominant culture,” but “are nevertheless lived and practiced on the basis of residue—cultural as well as social—of some previous social formation”.
Williams’s definition of the residual is also important because it emphasizes that these old forms of media are “still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present”.