Special delivery: new technology!

On the news tonight I saw a story about Australia Post and its declining numbers of paper mail, particularly letters. I found it quite thought-provoking, especially in a metaphorical sense. Now, God knows the digital communication age has well and truly set in, and it has provided many new conveniences. But for all of us, or just some?

New technologies and trends have always superseded their predecessors. That's basically the point of them. But we must never lose sight of what they should not supersede: human capability. Just consider the Industrial Revolution. That caused great things for invention and productivity, but it also put a whole generation across Europe out of work. They then had to risk being imprisoned just to feed and clothe their families, which led to convict resettlement overseas (although as a white Australian I am naturally descended from some of these convicts).



But now back to the Australia Post situation. Thanks to email (and likely also social media), according to their records the number of letters and postcards et cetera has halved in the last four years. Now, I use online communication quite a lot, and it may be faster and possibly more ecologically friendly (?), but it's still just not quite as intimate and meaningful (in the sense that the sender doesn't physically go out to buy the card et cetera and then handwritten their message on it for you) as before. Nor is it really as tangible: you can't open it and put it back in the envelope repeatedly and so on. And once your power or Internet bill arrives, that earlier method isn't so much dearer.

One aspect of postage online communication thankfully hasn't suppressed, however, is parcels. That I don't see fading, certainly not in my lifetime, and that's nice. And nor will paper mail between older generations and those in remote areas without Internet access. But maybe the rest of us should reacquire the habit a bit more.

Call me a Luddite here, but today I find technology can move so fast there's often not much point even trying to keep up with its latest trends. I'm not saying anybody with it can or should always avoid the Internet; I need it often for social and professional reasons, and hell, I can find surfing it often just fun. But everybody must stay logged into the real world at least equally.

I'm a dyed-in-the-wool liberal. I'm proud of that. But some things. just don't need to change or disappear. Least of all, any of our methods of communication. Especially non-electronic ones.