Here is a disturbing list of nine things that will likely disappear in our lifetime.
We have been unable to establish who originally compiled this list, but Sharon Gill has updated it for the South African market …
While we bewail the ignorance of youth who have never seen a vinyl record or a typewriter ribbon, maybe we should make the most of the things on this list while we still have them.
Nine things that will disappear in our lifetime:
The Post Office: This institution is in such financial trouble that there is 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.
The cheque: The UK is already laying the groundwork to do away with cheques by 2018. It costs the financial system billions of dollars a 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 unaddressed junk mail.
The newspaper: The younger generation rarely bothers to read printed newspapers. They go online to read the news. 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.
The book: 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.
The landline telephone: Really, do you still need it? As long as Telkom retains its monopoly of the market, a landline service will remain expensive and unreliable. But we all have one, 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, the landline will be obsolete.
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 airing decent programmes 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 programmes, online advert-free pay-per-view is the way to go.
Things that you own: We own most of our possessions, provided we’ve paid for them. In future, we might not actually “own” them; they may simply reside in “the cloud.” Today your computer has a hard drive and you store your pictures, music, movies, and documents on it. Your software is on a CD or DVD, and you can always re-install it if necessary. But the times they are a-changing. 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, that ship has already sailed. Our privacy disappeared a long time ago. 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 GPS 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 and what you’ve been doing.