Mourning Mail

The problem with living in a heavily electronic age is that many things are now virtual, rather than actual.

This thought occurred to me today as I checked my mail and all I had was a circular ad for Lowes, a Steak and Shake page of coupons and a leaflet for DirecTV. Yesterday, I had a coupon from Bed, Bath and Beyond. The day before that…I got no mail.

Even a few years ago, I used to get more mail. Even though it was mostly bills, there was something satisfying in opening up the mailbox and seeing a wad of envelopes in there. You never quite knew what you were going to get. Those were the days where I had files folders for my bills, each labeled with the name of the company who was sending the bill. Then, on payday, I’d get my newest bills, my checkbook and my stamps and I’d make an evening of paying bills. Yes, this sounds rather dull but, oddly, I quite liked it. I never liked the spending of the money part of it but there was something satisfying about sitting down, immersed in paperwork, half-watching something on TV and then maybe having a glass of wine as a reward. Then again, I am someone who quite likes to do my taxes too. Yes, I’m weird. However, I liked homework too when I was in school. We could discuss my giant case of pre-college nerdiness but I’ve made no secret of the fact that I was a nerd.

Nowadays, most of my bills are delivered electronically to me. Not only is this easier but it does save trees. I’m not exactly Captain Greenpeace-let’s-live-in-a-tree-to-protest-them-chopping-them-down. I’m not even someone who necessarily buys the green version of cleaning products. Frankly, while I salute the attempt, vinegar and lemon do NOT clean my toilet as well as Lysol Bathroom Cleaner and I’m not going to mess with bathroom germs. However, I do try to be green when I can and if I can save a tree by having my mortgage statements sent to me electronically, I will.

On a side note, I do wish that the credit card companies who are trying to solicit my business were more green. Chase Manhattan, I am TALKING TO YOU. I do NOT need at least three pieces of junk mail in my mailbox per week asking me to become a) a member of your bank, b) a holder of your credit card or c) a low balance transfer. By all means, if you HAVE to, send me one piece of mail sporadically to remind me that you’re out there but your bulk mailing campaigns are ridiculous. Discover card? You’re not far behind. And Citibank? I already have one of your damn credit cards, I don’t want another. I don’t want to swap my reward card for a Disney reward card or a Barnes and Noble reward card. Here’s the thing: By having a general rewards card that gives me cash back, I can spend it anywhere! A novel concept, I know but this means I can use it for Disneyland or Barnes and Noble if I want! I don’t need a specific card!

(please note, I’m making up the Disney/Barnes and Noble thing. I do get these type of offers from Citibank but it may not be those specific companies. Those may come from Chase Manhattan. CHASE? STOP KILLING TREES!).

Back to my original point and, yes, again- I do have one. The actual real mail that’s directed to me personally rather than “Captain Monkeypants or current resident” has declined dramatically in recent years because of technology, particularly the rapid growth of the internet and the ease of paying bills online.

(That last sentence, right there- THESIS STATEMENT! Yup, I learned something in high school English and it still applies. Yes, I am proud. As should Mrs. Studebaker and the other teachers who taught me the value of writing a paper correctly. I can still do the outline, thank you very much. Now, diagramming sentences…that was always a little daft to me and even though I probably still could try, my total lack of desire to ever diagram a sentence again gets in the way.)

I like doing things online. It’s convenient and simple. I have it set up so that I just login to my banking site and I’ve already got all my payees and bill notifications set up. I can just look at what’s due and boom! Payment is delivered within two days. While this is simple, it’s not foolproof. For example, say your direct deposit is delivered at 12:00 a.m. on a Saturday and you don’t think about paying bills until you’re in your office on a Monday. Then you realize that it’s actually the 3rd of the month and your Verizon bill is due today. If you go through the bank, it’ll get paid by the 5th. However, the beauty of a virtual world is that in this case, I can just go directly to my Verizon account, login and then click on “Pay my Bill”. Boom. Instant gratification.

Life is more convenient now. Before the internet, doing that would have involved a series of phone calls and possibly an emergency trip to the post-office. Now, it just requires going to a website, logging in and taking care of business.

Granted, it’s a little more dangerous but if you’re smart about it and you don’t put in “Password” as your password or something equally easy-to-guess, it’s pretty secure.

All in all, it is easier now. It makes it harder to be late with payments. It makes it harder to forget a payment because my bank reminds me when to pay. I also get reminders from the companies in my inbox.

The inbox has replaced the physical mailbox. It’s a little sad.

While it is nice to see fun, personal emails from friends and family and those nifty “Hey it’s your birthday, have a coupon for a free ice-cream” type of things on your birthday, I find that there’s something not quite as gratifying about email as there is with physical mail. Maybe it’s because email is delivered 24 hours a day, seven days a week whereas with physical mail, you have to wait for the mailperson to put it in your box. It is more convenient to have email constantly being delivered but it’s not as fun as real mail.

No matter how many emails I get, it never quite feels the same opening one as it does having a physical envelope in my hand, and trying to open the seal only to tear the paper. When the email opens, it’s so quick, there’s little time to pause in the anticipation of the letter. You can’t lay it aside and pick it up again to reread without having to log back into your email and reopen it.

And the smell of paper and the occasional accidental papercut is missing. I get it. We need to be green. I get as much email as I ever did physical mail, probably a lot more.

Yet, every time I open my mailbox to find it empty, it’s a little sad. I miss real mail.

And Chase Manhattan? You don’t count. Sorry.

Happy Wednesday

Just Because You Can Report it, Doesn’t Mean You Should…

So, I’ve blogged a few times about the speed at which technology moves and how we, as humans, have become far less patient over time because we’ve got used to things moving so fast.

Nowadays, we don’t have to wait for much. In the ‘olden days’ people used to find out their news via word of mouth or, more likely, via the newspaper. Readers used to pour over their newspaper each morning to find out what was going on in the world. Then TV news became popular and people started watching that to find out what was going on. It was a little quicker and the news was freshly reported.

Nowadays, though we still have newspapers and TV news, we also have the internet. You can find what seems to be an infinite number of places to read news online. You can choose the category of news you want to read. It’s a virtual way of thumbing through a newspaper and pulling out only the sections you enjoy reading.

It’s quite useful, really. We no longer have to wait for breaking news to pop on TV with the verdict in a sensational trial or to find out there’s been a mass shooting or natural disaster. All you have to do is click on MSN.com or Yahoo.com or igoogle.com and the headlines can be right there, tempting you to click on the link and read the latest.

It’s a nice feature. It satiates our need for instant gratification. News is posted only seconds after it happens.

Yet, as with so many things in life, here’s a downside. It means that for every useful, worthy piece of news, there’s a lot of junk that goes with it.

For example, let’s just take something current: The Casey Anthony trial. What’s relevant in that news should be the verdict of a trial that’s been going on a while. A little girl died. Her mother was accused. A trial occurred. The jury deliberated. The verdict was reached.

This is the basics of what should be reported. Instead, the internet is saturated with everything from Jay Leno’s bad jokes about the trial to comments from jurors to editorials about why the jurors are idiots, why Casey should get murdered and why her parents are evil.

Today, I was on MSN’s main page. I got there because I sent an email from my Hotmail account and when I log out, this is the default page. I was assaulted by headlines. Yesterday, there was a story focuses on one of the alternate jurors who defended the verdict. Today, there was a story with an actual juror who defended the verdict. Except, they were the exact same article, the lead was different, the headline was different.

Why did I click on it, you ask? Because I couldn’t help it. I was curious. As a human being, it’s interesting to a) form an opinion and then b) have the tools to find out if you’re the only one to have this opinion. In addition, it’s interesting to see what other opinions/news is out there because it’s in my nature to be curious and get all the facts.

Except, the news stories that are popping up aren’t really facts as much as filler. The legal case is hot news so the internet resources are capitalizing on that. Even Entertainment Weekly has a lot of stories on the Casey Anthony case even though, technically, it’s an entertainment magazine and doesn’t really need to focus on current affairs.

What I’m saying is that I think we tend to abuse the instant nature of technology. I confess, I’m an enabler because I do click on a lot of the links because I’m being lured in by the promise of something interesting when, nine times out of ten, there’s nothing new, just more recycled information.

What I think about Casey Anthony doesn’t matter here or anywhere. I’m just using it as an example because it’s new and it’s current.

It’s not just oversaturation of the media with news stories that’s a problem. It’s the fact that some things just aren’t news worthy but they end up getting an article/blog anyway because there’s a precedent to ‘keep up with the joneses” as far as the internet goes.

This means, in short, that there’s a lot of absolute, ridiculous crap that masquerades as news. This is the stuff I don’t click on. For example, today, I saw a headline “Worst Celebrity Sunburns.”

Um, no offense to the poor burned celebrities but, who cares? I’m sure the intention was to show ‘celebrities are just like us’. We get sunburned, they get sunburned. WOW!

Except, again, who cares? Do we really need that? It’s just like an article the other day that I saw on several magazine sites about an actress cutting four-inches off her hair.

Again, who cares? I’m sure it was a big change for the actress but do we really need to know that? Do we really need headlines all over the internet telling how Natalie Portman has finally told the world the name of her baby. I’m happy for Natalie and her boyfriend. I’m more happy for the baby that it has a name because that makes life easier for everyone. Sure, it’s a bit of news, I suppose but does it really rate as many links online as…real news?

Then there’s Charlie Sheen. I find him just ridiculous, honestly. I never thought he was much of an actor and while I find his whole drug-addled meltdown slightly fascinating from a psychological point of view, I think that if the media didn’t report every idiotic thing he said and did, he might stop doing them and get some help for his drug problem.

Generally speaking, most celebrities thrive in the spotlight. They like attention. They do silly things for attention. Sometimes, because of the blur between reality and slanted media coverage, we tend to forget they’re human beings. Take Lindsay Lohan. Everything that girl does is covered by the media whether genuine news or paparazzi-fueled rubbish. I think she’s made some terrible choices. She’s got terrible parents. Frankly, she sort of makes me want to take a shower because, well, she has that effect.

Yet, she has a problem. She’s clearly an alcoholic. Her attempts at rehab have all been spotlighted in the constant presence of the internet news/paparazzi sites. How can she ever attempt to get real help for her problem when she can’t do it in private? She likes the attention, I’m sure that’s part of the reason she’s always doing silly things. Yet she doesn’t seem to have anyone sensible around her to tell her to drop out the public eye, get some real help and work on reconstructing her life.

I’m soapboxing, I know. I apologize. My real point is this: Just because it could be news doesn’t mean it should be. I think every site online that reports news should be forced to run their stories through a filter consisting of the following questions:

1) Is it really news?
2) If it is really news, what is the who, why, what, when, where and how of it?
3) If those five W’s and the H aren’t there, it’s not news. It might be a feature article.
4) If they are there, have they been the same for a story of the same topic in recent days/hours/minutes?
5) If it’s a feature article, is it something that people NEED to know? Will it benefit their life at all to see, for example, Jennifer Anniston with a sunburn?

I’m sure there are more questions but that’ll do for a start. Of course, I can help contribute to the cleaning up of internet news junk by not bothering to read it.

Which is why I refuse to read about sunburns, haircuts, jilted celebrities and who said what about Casey Anthony.

You have to start somewhere, right?

Thanks for letting me rant.

Happy Friday and have a great weekend!

Living in a Virtual World...

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again but sometimes, I forget what life was like before the internet came along.

Even though my earlier years of life were spent in the dark ages of having to use typewriters, having to go to the library to look things up using, gasp, one of those old-fashioned card catalogue systems and actually physically gathering around a water cooler to have a water cooler discussion, I’ve almost forgotten what those days are like.

It’s so easy to satisfy our need for instant gratification. You can google anything these days. You want to know what other movies that guy you recognize but can’t identify has been in? Look him up on IMDB. Want to know mostly-correct historical facts about something? Look it up on Wikipedia. Want to talk about a TV episode you just watched but no one you know watches it? Go to EW.com or Television Without Pity and join in the discussions there.

The list goes on and on. If you want a certain recipe, there’s a place to find it online. If you are trying to use up an ingredient in your fridge but don’t know what to make with it? Go to allrecipes.com and type in the ingredients you have. Voila! Instant recipe suggestions.

Want to see what the weather is going to really do because you know your meteorologist will inevitably be proven wrong? Go online and look at a radar map. Want to know what the time is in Slovakia? Google it.

You get my point. We no longer have to wait to find out anything anymore as long as an internet connection can be found. Even then, the power of smartphones allows us to have Google at our fingertips.

It’s spoiled me. If I’m out and about and suddenly I decide I want to go somewhere else but don’ t know the location, I just google it and then enter the address into my GPS.

We never really have to wait for much anymore. We can make appointments with our doctor online, make appointments at the car dealership, track packages to see when they’ll arrive at home. We can do all our banking from home without having to ever go to a bank. We can order groceries. We can order contact lenses. We can order anything.

In fact, the only thing that the internet can’t do is spit out the item you just ordered from amazon.com instantaneously and I don’t see that happening in the near future. Also, while you can make travel arrangements, you still have to physically go to an airport and fly on a plane. Maybe in a few centuries teleportation will be an option and thus, the internet WILL be able to do everything but, for now, we do still have to do some things ourselves.

The problem is that I’ve found I get used to things the way they are online. I read a lot of news stories, reviews and TV recaps online. I always enjoy reading the comments below because you get to see if people had the same reaction as you did. For example, after watching “True Blood” last night, I was a little surprised at exactly how far the story on the show now differs from the books on which it was based. It’s not all bad- “True Blood” is not intended to be quality TV but, rather, a fun, quite trashy entertainment experience. However, while I think it’s still pretty entertaining, I’m a little sad that they’re doing some things so very differently from the things that happened in the books. I know, I know…books and movies/TV are never the same and the books are always better but, well, I like them to at least have some things in common. The way “True Blood” is going, all that will be the same are the character names and the fact that it’s a world where vampires, fairies, werewolves and other supernatural creatures coexist.

So, it was cathartic to read other people’s comments on the internet this morning and find out that I wasn’t alone in my opinions. I don’t know why it’s so nice to find out that other people share your mindset but it’s oddly comforting. It’s the same thing as when I read a book and I don’t like it. It’s cathartic to go to Amazon.com and read some of the less positive reviews of the book and find comfort in the fact that you’re not the only person who wishes he/she hadn’t wasted the time on reading the silly thing.

The trouble with doing this type of thing online is that you get used to it- even though you’re not really having a conversation as much as ‘listening’ to other people’s opinions, it still feels like you’ve had a conversation and catharsis is reached.

The problem lies in the fact that I still read books and magazines in hard copy form. When I read an article, I’ve started automatically looking for the comments at the end of an article. This is not good because, well, magazines don’t have comment sections the way online publications do.

It’s a similar situation when I read a couple of books on my Amazon Kindle and then I switch back to reading hard copies of books. It feels weird not to have a button to flip pages and it’s a lot harder to read one-handed.

Technology has spoiled me. I don’t think there’s any other way of putting it. It’s not always a bad thing but I do confess, there are times when I go to a library and I miss that silent thrill that they used to hold. Libraries are never as silent as they used to be because there’s always the ever-present tap-tap-tap sound so keyboards clicking because that’s how you look up books in a library nowadays. I miss those wax-smelling wooden libraries with the heavy drawers crammed full of hand-typed index cards that told you what books the library held. Sure, it’s quicker to look things up online but there was more ceremony involved in the old way. It made it seem more of an ‘event’ to go to the library. I used to hold my breath, hoping that a certain book I wanted would be there on the shelf. Now, I can look it up online and not have to spend the time going to the library.

Libraries aren’t the only place that have been changed by the internet but, for some reason, they come to mind as one of the major places that have undergone a technological transformation in the past 20 years. I’m sure it’s the same for hospitals, schools, banks and other institutions.

It’s not a bad thing. As Bob Dylan sang, “The Times They Are a-Changing…” It’s just that with technology moving at the speeds they are now, they’re changing so rapidly we don’t have time to catch up before they’ve changed again. Life is more convenient with the internet. It moves a lot faster. We get more done. We get more answers. We learn more.

It’s just that once in a while, when I find myself googling something like, “does mulch really stop weeds” when I already really know the answer, I realize that I’m spoiled rotten and I don’t really need to look it up just because I can.

Granted, I do anyway because I’m an internet junkie but at least I know I probably shouldn’t.

And knowing is half the battle…right?

Happy Tuesday!