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September 20, 2004
TT: Scratch one ostrich
From the Washington Post:For years, postal officials denied that e-mail would change their world. Now, faced with declining letter volume -- in 2003, first-class mail dropped by 3.3 billion pieces -- the Postal Service has finally realized that its right to a monopoly on first-class letters probably isn't worth the paper the Congress wrote it on in 1794. "All types of correspondence mail have declined over time," said a recently released household mail survey by the Postal Service. "Most notable, however, is the decline in personal correspondence between households."...
First-class letters...have underwritten the Postal Service's hefty institutional costs for decades.
Trouble is, as the President's Commission on the U.S. Postal Service reported last year, Aunt Minnie isn't writing that many letters these days. Indeed, letter writers are a dying breed. Younger families are writing even less than their parents did, the Postal Service says. They probably depend on the Internet for communications that used to be part of the postal monopoly. More troublesome for the Postal Service's bottom line, business-to-business mail is also falling....
It doesn't take much analysis to realize, as the presidential commission did, that the Postal Service is facing a crisis unlike any since its founding in 1775 by the Second Continental Congress. Mail volume is likely to keep declining, the panel said, while the big agency's costs, most of them directly linked to 700,000 employees who handle the mail, will continue to soar.
As I read this story, I thought, Boy, does this have a familiar ring. Which, of course, it did: it's also the story of the classical recording industry, and the heart of the matter can be found in the very first sentence. Deny, deny, deny--while the economic basis of your old-fashioned way of doing business crumbles beneath your feet.
Such is the way in which countless industries have quietly rotted away over the centuries. The difference is that in the information age, the rot spreads infinitely faster.
Now that CBS is finally admitting that Dan Rather was suckered by badly forged documents, long after that fact was incontrovertibly established by bloggers, you can see the process thrown into uniquely high relief. In this particular case, it played out over a period of less than two weeks, which doesn't sound like much--but if you were following the story at all closely, it felt as if CBS had been denying the obvious for months, to painful and devastating effect.
This is a classic example of what Mickey Kaus has dubbed "the Feiler Faster Thesis":
The news cycle is much faster these days, thanks to 24-hour cable, the Web, a metastasized pundit caste constantly searching for new angles, etc. As a result, politics is able to move much faster, too, as our democracy learns to process more information in a shorter period and to process it comfortably at this faster pace. Charges and countercharges fly faster, candidates' fortunes rise and fall faster, etc.
The fly in the ointment is that older, more cautious institutions unwilling or unable to adjust to the faster pace made possible by digital information technology are likely to get stampeded. That means old media--but it also means cultural institutions that refuse to think through the implications of new technologies, much less embrace them wholeheartedly. I watched the classical recording industry implode, predicting in print at regular intervals that it would do so. Now I'm wondering when the next column will fall.
Here's something from today's Wall Street Journal (no free link, alas) that caught my eye. It's the latest "Real Time" column by Tim Hanrahan and Jason Fry:
As the digital age marches on, we find ourselves asking a question we never imagined: What will happen to all our stuff?
The music CD is already disappearing from our lives. Years ago Jace ripped his large CD collection into MP3s and banished the physical CDs to boxes now cluttering up a closet. (Having a baby son who loved hurtling CDs onto the floor accelerated this move.) Today he buys music online whenever he can – reading liner notes in those little CD booklets is no fun anyway. Tim hasn't started buying music online, but won't buy new CDs because they seem a technological dead end, like buying a record in the mid-1990s. And we know we're not alone – ride the subway in Manhattan and you'll find the various flavors of iPods far outnumbering Discmen. (To say nothing of the once-ubiquitous, now-vanished cassette player.)
This got us thinking: Once we subtract CDs – and goofy CD towers and shelves – from our wide-ranging collections of stuff, will books, newspapers and other physical things follow? What about the oppressive tonnage of all the other old media?...
Hanrahan and Fry point to DVDs, newspapers, and photos on paper as examples of physical "stuff" likely to disappear fairly shortly. Interestingly, though, they take a conservative line on books:
Ebooks have been nonstarters for a host of reasons. There have been format woes and troubles with "form factor," which is a complicated way of saying that it's nicer to curl up in a big chair with a paperback than with a PalmPilot or a plastic reader gadget....
Also, to many people, books have value beyond the information they contain. Unlike music or movies, books haven't undergone a real format change in centuries – a book from 1968 is still obviously a book and can be read instantly like any other book: not so, in most cases, for an eight-track tape, a reel of film or a box of slides. Unlike newspapers, they have value beyond a few days – books are things to be kept.
As regular readers know, I don't agree. I think the days of the printed book are numbered, though the number is probably higher than many futurologists think:
I'm open, at least in theory, to the possibility of abandoning the book-as-art-object, just as I've already taken the first step toward abandoning the album-as-art-object. Other people may not be so open to either possibility. I have a number of over-50 friends who say they don't read "About Last Night" because they "can't" read text on a screen--which means, of course, that they find it inconvenient. Not me. I don't read books on my iBook, but I do read virtually all magazine and newspaper articles that way, as well as the blogs that now occupy a fast-growing part of my reading time. It would never occur to me to print out an article (or a blog entry) and read it in the bathtub....
Yes, the printed book is a beautiful object, "elegant" in both the aesthetic and mathematical senses, and its invention was a pivotal moment in the history of Western culture. But it is also a technology--a means, not an end.
Of course I may be wrong. But the point is that if you aren't willing even to contemplate the possibility that the way you do what you do may be rendered obsolete by technology, you're a sitting duck for somebody else in the same line of work who, like it or not, is prepared to think about the unthinkable.
People often ask me why I go to the trouble of blogging, given the fact that I have access to blue-chip traditional print media outlets. I always give a variation on the same answer: I concluded a number of years ago that serious arts coverage and commentary were destined over time to migrate to the Web, which is a more cost-effective way of servicing niche markets, and that I wanted to establish a beachhead in the blogosphere early enough to be seen as a new-media pioneer rather than just another middle-aged print-media writer who got caught in the stampede to the Web.
A lot of middle-aged writers I know think I'm wasting my time blogging, especially since I don't get paid for it. Of course they may be right. But the U.S. Postal Service thought Aunt Minnie would live forever--and now it's going down the drain. The major classical labels thought they could ignore the long-term implications of digital recording--and now they're reduced to making crossover albums, the classical equivalent of smooth jazz. A septuagenarian anchorman thought he could ignore the sniping of the blogosphere--and now he's being forced to spend the twilight of a long, prestigious career eating rancid crow in an election year.
That's not my idea of fun. This is.
P.S. Alex Ross has a highly relevant discussion of the Web sites of American symphony orchestras--and what they tell us about the comparative ability of those orchestras to adapt to the new cultural landscape. And Jeff Jarvis considers the Rather fiasco from a similar point of view.
Posted September 20, 2004 9:57 AM
