Obsolete thanks to technology

While we bewail the ignorance of youth who have never seen a vinyl record or a typewriter ribbon, and have never had to get off their arses to change the TV channel, maybe we should make the most of the things on this list before they disappear forever.

I haven’t managed to establish who originally compiled this list, but I’ve updated it for the South African market …

Nine things that will disappear in our lifetime:

Post Offices: This institution is in such financial trouble that there’s little likelihood of finding a sustainable business model for it. A preference for the immediacy of e-mail and the reliability of courier services has eaten a sizable chunk out of the Post Office’s main source of revenue. Most of our daily snail-mail is junk mail and bills.

Cheques: The UK is already laying the groundwork to eliminate cheques by 2018. It costs the financial system a small fortune every year to process cheques. Plastic cards and online transactions will lead to the eventual demise of the chequebook. This adds to the woes of the Post Office. With more and more companies sending out monthly accounts by email, and more and more consumers paying their bills online, the Post Office will soon have nothing to deliver but junk mail. And a lot of that is already delivered by private companies specialising in the delivery of “unaddressed mail”.

Newspapers: The younger generation rarely bothers to read printed newspapers. If they want to read the news, they find it online. The home-delivered newspaper will probably meet the same fate as the milkman. But the newspaper companies aren’t likely to go out of business. Most of them publish online versions already; they’ll just start charging you to access it.

Books: Most of us vow we’ll never give up the physical book in favour of reading it online. Not so long ago we said the same thing about music. We wanted the actual CD, with the cover and booklet. But budget dictates, and we can download albums for half the price of a CD. Printed books are likely to become collectors’ items.

Landline telephones: Really, do you still need it? As long as Telkom retains its monopoly of the market, its fixed-line service will remain expensive and unreliable. But most of us have landlines – probably out of sheer habit. Cell phone calls are becoming cheaper all the time, and you can do so much more with a cell phone than a landline. Once data rates in this country are brought even vaguely in line with those in overseas markets, Telkom will be able to shove its landline service where the sun has never shone.

Music: This is the most depressing part of this list. The recorded music industry is dying a slow but inevitable death. While the industry likes to blame illegal downloading and piracy for its plummeting profits, it’s the industry that is shooting itself in the foot with a bullet called “greed”. The record labels want their pound of flesh, the artists earn a pittance from album sales, and consumers are tired of paying inflated prices for complete CDs when they can legally download individual tracks of their choice for a fraction of the cost. Unfortunately, it’s the artists who suffer. If they can’t make a living on album sales, they’re forced to survive on gigs and concerts. Which is good for the live music industry: as long as we’d rather be at the actual event than watch a DVD or YouTube footage of the concert, the live music industry will survive.

Television: The TV networks’ revenues are reportedly suffering. If they started showing decent programs and cut back a bit on the re-runs that are aired with monotonous regularity, we might watch TV more often. The more viewers, the better the ratings, the more they can charge advertisers. More and more people are watching TV programs and movies streamed from their computers. Instead of paying a fixed fee for a bundle that includes unwanted channels and programs, online advert-free pay-per-view is the way to go.

Things that you own: Provided we’ve paid for them, we own most of our possessions. Your computer has a hard drive on which you store your pictures, music, movies and documents. Your software is on a CD or DVD, and you can always re-install it if necessary. But the times they are a-changing. In future, we might not actually “own” these things; they may simply reside in “the cloud.” Apple, Microsoft and Google are all into “cloud services.” In the not too distant future, when you turn on your computer, the Internet will be built into the operating system. 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’ll probably pay a monthly subscription fee to the cloud provider. In this virtual world, you can access your music or your books or your images or documents 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? Will most of the things in our lives be disposable and whimsical? Makes you want to haul out that photo album, grab a book or pull out the insert from a CD case, doesn’t it?

Privacy: To all intents and purposes, this ship sailed a long time ago. With CCTV cameras on streets and in buildings, the webcam in your computer, every man and his dog with a camera in his cell phone, not to mention the GPS chip in your own cell phone or the tracking unit in your car, and the personal information that’s collected every time you buy something online – somebody somewhere knows exactly where you are, where you were, and what you’ve been doing.

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#newspapers #postoffice #Telkom #musicindustry #television #cloud #landline