Lonely -- within our crowd?

Politikos 7

April 20, 2012

Harvey Glickman

Lonely—in our crowd?

        This is adapted from a communication from my college classmate, Charlie Schaefer, with edits by me and additions by me.  This is printed with his permission. Charlie is not responsible for the implications I draw or the musings and the policy “conclusions” I suggest.

Nine Things That Will Disappear In Our Lifetime:

1. The Post Office

Imagine a world without the post office. Its financial troubles probably mean that there is no way to sustain it in its present form.   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 Cheque

Britain is laying the groundwork to eliminate the paper cheque by 2018. It costs the financial system billions of dollars a year to process cheques. Plastic cards and online transactions are leading to its demise. This dovetails with the death of the post office. If you never paid your bills by mail and never received them by mail, the post office would go out of business.

3. The Newspaper

The younger generation does not read newspapers except pieces of it online. They certainly don't subscribe to a daily delivered print edition. Papers on your doorstep may go the way of the milkman and the diaper service.  As for reading the paper online, we are already paying for it. The rise in mobile internet devices and e-readers has caused 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 Printed Book

Perhaps you believe you will never give up the physical book that you hold in your hand and turn the paper pages.  Some people  said the same thing about downloading music from iTunes. They wanted a hard copy CD.  But people  change their minds when they discover that they can get albums for half the price without ever leaving home.  The same thing will probably happen with books. You can browse a bookstore online and even read a preview chapter before you buy. And the price of a book on Kindle or Nook is less than half that of a paper book. Contemplate the convenience!  Once you  flick your fingers on the screen, instead of the book, you find that you are lost in the story, you 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 many local calls, you don't need it any more . 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.  Most of your kids live without land lines.

6. Music

For many of us, this may be the saddest part of this story. The music industry is dying.  Not just because of illegal downloading. It's the lack of innovative new music being given a chance to get to the people who would like to hear it.  The record labels and the radio conglomerates are simply self-destructing. Over 40% of the music purchased today are "catalogue items," meaning traditional music that the public is familiar with: older established artists. This is also true on the live concert circuit.  Both classical and popular music concerts increasingly rely on special events and gimmicks to bring people into concert halls.

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. Probably good riddance to most of it.  Maybe 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, and connected to their TV screen.

8. The "Things" That You Own

Many of the 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 where 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 completing their latest "cloud service." 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 me want to run to the closet and pull out that photo album, or 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, on which we can nostalgically look back, it would be privacy. That's already gone. It's been gone for a long time. There are cameras on the street, and in most of the office buildings…even in my elevator in my condo residence. Cameras are built into your computer and cell phone.  24/7, probably, someone can find out 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 on your computer screen change to reflect those habits. Companies will try to get you to buy something else. Again and again.

         Thank you Charlie.  This is amusing…and scary.  For anyone, like Politikos, interested in creating and maintaining communities, not just crowds, in which dialogue continues over time, in order to develop issues, agreements and commitments, we need to figure out ways to restore human interaction.   Because some of these developments are simply more isolating:

1.    Putting things in the mail often means a trip to the post office, a destination in every community, where you met neighbors and got to know the long-term post office clerks.  Even in apartment houses, people get to know their mailman.

2.    Keeping a checking account means occasional trips to the bank.  People used to have a personal branch, where they opened the account, and had occasional conversations with a bank branch executive.

3.    When everyone depended on print newspapers, you could be sure that conversations began on the same platform—what the papers printed that day. (Newspapers and magazines in Philadelphia used to print an advertisement showing every passenger but one on a bus or train reading a newspaper: “Nearly everyone in Philadelphia reads the Bulletin.”)

4.    The individuation of music listening deprives people of the testing experience of programs prepared by musical groups in a concert hall…and of the thrill of discovering a new piece.  Not to speak of the thrill of a communal appreciation in a standing ovation or mass applause.

5.    Television undermined the group experience of movie houses…of course, at one time it brought the family together on certain evenings to watch hugely popular TV shows. Sports on TV now preserves something like that effect.  But streaming movies and TV shows on laptops would seem to push toward radical individuation and pull toward the familiar…How many times have you seen a group of people at the same table in a restaurant, each one peering intently at their I-phones? 

6.    The “cloud” as the repository of our stuff—photos, documents, CDs—plunges us into a great unknown.  People still preserve stuff: look at “Antiques Roadshow” on public television!  What would our homes look like without most of their books, filing cabinets and CDs?  Already people seem glued to their hand-held devices even in the midst of meetings, in their autos, on trains and planes…and in auditoriums unless asked to turn them off.

7.    The issue of privacy is tricky.  We probably feel safer in public places knowing that a camera is recording our activities, although probably annoyed when we are detected traveling over the speed limit on a highway (!)  Cameras in phones are fun when they enable instant records of our children’s parties and newborn babies.  But what is the limit of those ads on computer screens?  Shopping on the internet also means more e-mail advertising in your in-box.  And if much of our time is spent deleting e-mails, when do we ever get to do something?