My friend-of-30-years, JW, sent me a compelling piece of text this morning. I've searched and searched, to no avail, to try to find the original author of the piece. With each new gadget that Apple or Amazon introduces, I shake my head and wonder, "Why do we need this?" and then "How did we live without this."
Sometimes I long for the days when we were not all instantly available to everyone in the world! Cell phones, text messages, even faxes. What was the world like before we had faxes? I remember hearing the teletype machine delivering the news when I had my first job as a promotion and public service copywriter in a television station. The only way my grandchildren will ever hear a teletype machine is if they find a museum of communications that houses one!
So close your e-mail program, turn off your phone, and read these sobering thoughts. (Thanks, JW!)
1. The Post Office. Get ready to imagine a world without the post office.
They are so deeply in financial trouble that there is probably no way to sustain it long term. Email, Fed Ex, and UPS have just about wiped out the minimum revenue needed to keep the post office alive. Most of your mail every day is junk mail and bills.
2. The Check. Britain is already laying the groundwork to do away with checks by 2018. It costs the financial system billions of dollars a year to process checks. Plastic cards and online transactions will lead to the eventual demise of the check. This plays right into the death of the post
office. If you never paid your bills by mail and never received them by mail, the post office would absolutely go out of business.
3. The Newspaper. The younger generation simply doesn't read the newspaper.
They certainly don't subscribe to a daily delivered print edition. That may go the way of the milkman and the laundry man. As for reading the paper online, get ready to pay for it. The rise in mobile Internet devices and
e-readers has caused all the newspaper and magazine publishers to form an alliance. They have met with Apple, Amazon, and the major cell phone companies to develop a model for paid subscription services.
4. The Book. You say you will never give up the physical book that you hold in your hand and turn the literal pages. I said the same thing about downloading music from iTunes. I wanted my hard copy CD. But I quickly changed my mind when I discovered that I could get albums for half the price
without ever leaving home to get the latest music. The same thing will happen with books. You can browse a bookstore online and even read a preview chapter before you buy. And the price is less than half that of a real book and think of the convenience once you start flicking your fingers
on the screen instead of the book, you find that you are lost in the story,can't wait to see what happens next, and you forget that you're holding a gadget instead of a book.
5. The Land Line Telephone. Unless you have a large family and make a lot of
local calls, you don't need it anymore. Most people keep it simply because
they've always had it. But you are paying double charges for that extra
service. All the cell phone companies will let you call customers using the
same cell provider for no charge against your minutes.
6. Music. This is one of the saddest parts of the change story. The
music industry is dying a slow death. Not just because of illegal
downloading. It's the lack of innovative new music being given a chance to
get to the people who like to hear it. Greed and corruption is the problem.
The record labels and the radio conglomerates simply self-destruction. Over
40% of the music purchased today is "catalog items," meaning traditional
music that the public is familiar with. Older established artists. This is
also true on the live concert circuit. To explore this fascinating and
disturbing topic further, check out the book Appetite for Self-Destruction
by Steve Knopper and the video documentary "Before the Music Dies."
7. Television. Revenues to the networks are down dramatically. Not just because of the economy. People are watching TV and movies streamed from their computers. And they're playing games and doing lots of other things
that take up the time that used to be spent watching TV. Prime time shows
have degenerated to lower than the lowest common denominator. Cable rates
are skyrocketing and commercials run about every 4 minutes and 30 seconds. I
say good riddance to most of it It's time for the cable companies to be put
out of our misery. Let the people choose what they want to watch online and
through Netflix.
8. The "Things" That You Own. Many of the very possessions that we used to
own are still in our lives, but we may not actually own them in the future.
They may simply reside in "the cloud." Today your computer has a hard drive
and you store your pictures, music, movies, and documents. Your software is
on a CD or DVD, and you can always re-install it if need be. But all of that
is changing. Apple, Microsoft, and Google are all finishing up their latest
"cloud services." That means that when you turn on a computer, the Internet
will be built into the operating system.
So, Windows, Google, and the Mac OS will be tied straight into the Internet.
If you click an icon, it will open something in the Internet cloud. If you
save something, it will be saved to the cloud. And you may pay a monthly
subscription fee to the cloud provider. In this virtual world, you can
access your music or your books, or your whatever from any laptop or
handheld device. That's the good news. But, will you actually own any of
this "stuff" or will it all be able to disappear at any moment in a big
"poof"? Will most of the things in our lives be disposable and whimsical? It
makes you want to run to the closet and pull out that photo album, grab a
book from the shelf, or open up a CD case and pull out the insert.
9. Privacy. If there ever was a concept that we can look back on
nostalgically, it would be privacy. That's gone. It's been gone for a long
time anyway. There are cameras on the street, in most of the buildings, and
even built into your computer and cell phone. But you can be sure that 24/7
"They" know who you are and where you are, right down to the GPS
coordinates, and the Google Street View. If you buy something, your habit
is put into a zillion profiles, and your ads will change to reflect those
habits. And "They" will try to get you to buy something else. Again and
again.
All we will have that can't be changed are memories.
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