One Less Day

So the US Postal Service is wanting to end mail delivery on Saturdays. They'll still deliver packages and the post office will still be open, but no mail carriers will be bringing mail to our homes. Congress hasn't exactly approved this yet, but it's probably going to happen. Sigh.

You know, I'm not a conspiracy theorist and I'm not really trying to be one right now, but I have to admit that the idea of this fills me with a bit of trepidation.  The long standing institutions of this nation, like news papers and the USPS, are starting to lose ground and fade away. I love technology and am quite happy with its advancements, but it strikes me as disconcerting that our core and fundamental methods of communication are beginning to fade.

Sure, this is just one less day of mail coming to your house. What if it's not enough? What if the USPS decides to stop delivering on Wednesdays too? What if more and more people begin to opt for online mailing services and eventually we just lose the USPS completely? Yes, yes, I know I'm slippery sloping the situation, but I have to admit, it bothers me. We've already all but lost print media. Now we're limiting our capacity for physical mail service.

I love technology. You know I do. I blog almost every day, so really, the vast majority of my writing and musings exist only in cyberspace. There are no physical copy backups. We lose this technology, my writing is gone. My writing is ONE thing, but what happens when we have almost everything online and the physical copies are harder and harder to locate?

There is something very important in the physicality of knowledge. There is something wonderful about holding a book, something more serious about receiving a bill, something more secure in having a check in your hand. We're losing this, more and more. Every day, the physical security of our documents are slipping out of our grasp. I really do not like that.