It’s 2020, not 1920. You have already dropped your landline phone, so why haven’t you reduced as much of your paper mail as you can?
We are in the digital age, and there is no turning back. Going forward means the end of everything from paper newspapers to invoices and other hard-mail items, and all but a few legal paper notices, which will probably become digital in the next year or two. That sounds a little off the wall, but 10 years ago when someone said landline telephones would be phased out, I’ll bet you didn’t think they would disappear so quickly.
But let’s face reality, and reality is what is flooding over us in terms of digital information. We are demanding up-to-the-second data from all information services, and you can’t get that from paper mail. Technology is doubling every five years, according to one study, and trying to stay current is causing even some teenagers to fall behind.
Just the thought of that makes my head spin, as I think back to when everything was a hands-on experience.
When we spent two years in Benghazi, Libya, in the mid-1960s, I remember having to wait until the weekend International Herald Tribune newspaper came out on the following Tuesday to find out if Arkansas had beaten Texas that previous Saturday. The score wasn’t in the paper, but the rankings were. Just think of how much has changed since then. Today, I could watch the Hogs play on my iPad from the middle of the Sahara Desert.
Tomorrow is becoming easier to see as more and more advertisers and utility companies are switching to all digital. They call it “going paperless,” but what they are saying is: Stop using paper mail to pay bills, and stop using paper money. Just do it digitally. The reasons are varied, but it boils down to saving money and doing daily tasks easier and more efficiently.
I’m certainly not leading the charge to get rid of paper mail, but am just being swept along with the changes to digital. I haven’t read a hard copy of this newspaper for a long time, and as strange as that may sound to some who are reading this holding a paper newspaper, I probably won’t ever read the Democrat-Gazette any other way.
Getting used to having the paper on an iPad is so easy and convenient that once you start doing it, you wouldn’t even think of picking up a hard copy. But the daily newspaper is just the tip of the iceberg if we consider the overwhelming potential advantages that digital transmission of data, money, and news have over traditional paper mail.
The digital age is perfect for Americans because we want it now, and now isn’t three days down the road. Doing business that once was at best overnight or longer is now almost instantaneous; even contracts with minute legal changes that used to wind their way back and forth in the mail are routinely handled in minutes via digital transmissions.
I’m an oil and gas exploration geologist, and my job is to select drilling locations. However, my job is not over until I evaluate the surveys we call logs, which we use to determine if the hole we drilled contains oil or gas. Before the digital age,…
Read More: Welcome to tomorrow
