I read in the news today that post offices in Denmark will deliver their last letters this year and will thenceforth focus instead on packages. Blaming the changing system of communication and the increasing "digitalisation of society," the Danish postal service, PostNord, also announced that it would cut 1,500 jobs and remove a similar number of postboxes from street corners. These measures were necessitated by a 90% decline in the number of letters posted, Kim Pederson, the chief executive officer of PostNord Denmark, said.
Many of the world's postal services are currently struggling because of the advent of the Internet and of social networking. The German postal service, Deutsche Post, announced on Thursday that it would cut 8,000 jobs to reduce cost. I cannot say with certainty what the condition of the Nigerian Postal Service is, but I can say with some degree of certitude that I haven't posted a letter in the past five years.
For some of us digital immigrants (people who were born before the age of the ubiquitous Internet), the slow death of the post office is a not-sufficiently-lamented tragedy. We look back with nostalgia to some great experiences of receiving what digital natives now derisively call "snail mail." Members of Gen Z and Gen Alpha will never understand what pen pals are, nor will they appreciate the thrill -- to say nothing of the hypnotic suspense -- of waiting for and finally opening that long-awaited letter from your paramour. What is a text message or a WhatsApp chat compared to the physical, palpable and personal materiality of a handwritten love letter?
Apart from the tangibility of a letter, think about the aesthetics of a beautiful handwriting. What will happen to the cursive style of writing that we spent hours imitating in primary school or the D'Nealian technique that some of us grew up to covet? What will we do with those memories of the past, those special occasions when people customarily sent greeting cards? Who else yearns for those yuletides of yore when living rooms were bedizened with beautiful Christmas cards? Tell me whether today's off-the-rack digital Christmas stock images carry the same weight as an old-fangled card.
Admittedly, some will dismiss this post as an unprofitable romanticization of a long-gone past. Perhaps they are right. Nostalgia, they say, is the sin of the aged. It makes us blind to the bad and reminds us only of the good.
But reminiscence is not necessarily reverence. That something was good does not mean it will last forever. As a matter of fact, my take from the obsolescence of traditional post offices is that everything in life is temporary. If something is good, enjoy it while you can. If someone is having a difficult time, don't write them off; their time might soon come. Post offices had their day. The world is now in the digital era, the age of social media. Who knows the technologies that are coming tomorrow? Perhaps robotics and augmented reality will alchemise our lives into something entirely different. Or perhaps we will return to post offices!
Many years ago, when Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian media scholar, proposed his theory of technological determinism, he spoke of a world that moved from one age to another (tribal, literate, print, electronic). Having reached the apogee of that quadrigeminal evolution, who knows whether we are returning to square one?
