I still remember my first shiny new 8-Track player. The picture at the right is from the 1979 Sears Catalog and looks a lot like my dads machine. Funny how almost everything displayed on this 1979 stereo is gone now: record player, 8-Track, cassette, all gone.
Some years ago, I remember laughing at that old technology as I went into the record store and bought the latest CD recordings. Now this is it, I thought, music has reached perfection. And less than ten years after that I ripped my closet full of CDs to my iPod and carted those now old fashioned things out the door. How amazingly fungible our technology and culture has become. And while a little fascination is understandable at something new, we do well to remember its all passing away.
I ran across this list of Nine Things That will Disappear in Our Life. Let me give you the list and make some comments. I am less convinced as the list goes on, I must say, but here they are.
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. E-mail, Fed Ex, and UPS have just about wiped out the minimum revenue needed to keep the post office alive. Most of your mail everyday is junk mail and bills. Yes, and the bills are fast going away too, I am doing more on line. In fact almost none of my bills do I pay by check. I do all my major bills online and even many of the one-time bills. Only Charitable donations get the paper check these days. Even my parish tithe is taken right out of my account. The parish bills are another matter. We, are still using the old paper heavy approach to paying them. Accountants are slow to change their ways and auditors still want to see tons of paper when they make their triennial visit. There will continue to be some need and ability to post a paper letter, but there is no reason to have a whole Postal Service to do this.
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. This is already largely true for me, as Ive said. However, I currently have no way to get funds to another person. Lets say I wanted to send $100 to my nephew, how would I do it with out a paper check. If the check really is going to disappear as early as 2018 in England, I think well have to have a pretty convenient way to transfer funds electronically, person to person. I would also add that cash itself will be greatly reduced as a daily reality. Right now, I carry almost no cash. And when I run out, it may take me days to notice and days more to replenish it. I pretty much live off my debit card. I can see that in the next 10 years even smaller scale venders (like hotdog sellers at the corner) will be expected to take plastic. There are already devices the size of a cell phone that let you swipe a card and send the transaction. Of course we may wonder what will happen to beggars if we go increasingly cashless.
3. The Newspaper
