the mailed letter... yea. but post offices overall are at least equally significant today, as they are the last-mile for a massive chunk of online orders.
Could electronic mail undermine conventional post? – archive, 1 December 1983
Submitted 1 year ago by Fontasia@feddit.nl to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/dec/01/could-email-undermine-conventional-post-1983
Comments
ares35@kbin.social 1 year ago
slumberlust@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Don’t forget the adverts that you can’t stop them from delivering…shit drives me crazy
BigDaddySlim@lemmy.world 1 year ago
We hate delivering them just as much as you hate getting them. Your best bet is to call the companies sending them and have them remove your address from their mailing list.
You could also go to the full extreme of just removing your mailbox and getting nothing, but sadly that also includes any packages sent through the USPS. They’ll get returned as No Mail Receptacle.
NotSteve_@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Can you not where you are? In Canada, you can just tell Canada Post to not deliver them and they’ll stop within a couple weeks
TootSweet@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Generation X killing the letter industry.
tsonfeir@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Finally, they get blamed for something!!
WHYAREWEALLCAPS@kbin.social 1 year ago
Fuck yeah! Finally we won't be the overlooked generation...just like how our parents overlooked us...
PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee 1 year ago
This just reminds me about how the USPS wanted to give every US citizen an official email address to get in on the rise of email
Sanyanov@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Even in 1983 they were worried about being constantly remotely bugged about work…they were goddamn right.
trash80@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
David Allen is the editor of the BBC Computer Literacy Project. He was using a Tandy TRS Model 100 portable computer with a Sendata Series 700 acoustic computer.
Heh.
GiddyGap@lemm.ee 1 year ago
They’ve just gone from carrying letters to carrying packages.
mPony@kbin.social 1 year ago
did 1983 predict the rise of "catalog shopping"? because I sure didn't :)
ares35@kbin.social 1 year ago
catalog shopping had been popular for decades prior to the 1980s. it's online shopping that some didn't predict or believe would 'take off', including sears--the king of catalog sales prior to the rise of the internet.
Hyperreality@kbin.social 1 year ago
The technology wasn't the hurdle though. It was customers feeling safe enough entering bank details online and the whole thing being sufficiently secure. Which isn't an irrational thing to worry about.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Sears flubbed the transition to online catalog shopping in such a spectacular manner that it really was the complete (im)perfect storm for them. In the late 1980’s Sears already had their fingers in so many related pies that they could have easily tolerated falling flat on their faces in at least one of the required aspects and still probably succeeded, but instead they whiffed every single one of them.
Remember CompuServe? The early online platform that fought for dominance in the dawn of the dial-up era along with the likes of AOL and Prodigy? It was started as a joint venture between IBM and Sears. The Discover credit card? Launched by Sears. Catalog shopping with a nationwide logistics network? You guessed it, already famously pioneered by Sears.
All they had to do was put these things together: Put the Sears catalog, already a household name at that point, on the computer. Accept credit cards over the network. Ship the stuff to people’s homes easily, cheaply, conveniently. They could have made themselves the undisputed king of general merchandise online shopping before anyone else even had a hope of gaining a foothold in that arena via an established catalog and logistics operation. And they didn’t.
But I think the real problem Sears had was refusing even after the writing was already on the wall to let go of the brick-and-mortar-first retail model, including allowing their in store selection and pricing to comprise the entirety of their online catalog for way too long, which enabled other online retailers to either offer a wider selection of stuff to buy or the same stuff at a lower price. Or both.
This is especially ironic considering that the Sears and Roebuck was a century old meme that was synonymous with being able to order any damn fool ridiculous thing and have it shipped to your homestead. You want a house? A snowblower? A pocketwatch? A case of light bulbs? A shotgun? Order it from Sears! But Sears steadfastly spent the early 2000’s hawking basically only their in store selection – apparently consisting largely of Eddie Bauer sweaters and out of date consumer electronics by that time – at full in-store MSRP on their web site. Thereupon Amazon, Wal Mart, Best Buy, and to some extent Target stepped in and ate their lunch.
And Sears didn’t allow third party sellers to participate on their web site (and thus expand their merchandise selection) until 2010. Amazon, meanwhile, had already been doing it for a decade at that point.
There were other systemic issues behind the scenes in Sears management brewing even before then. But cratering so hard right at the start line of the online shopping era certainly didn’t help. By the time even the random man on the street could see that Sears was now fucked, it would have taken way more money than they actually had to turn the ship around.
notoftenthat@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Maybe 1883 had some ideas?
Buffalox@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Cool article that is spot on already in 1983.
Conventional mail is all but dead here, there are several months between we receive letters. I only remember getting 3 letter this year, and they are pretty rare, so it’s something you notice.WeirdGoesPro@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
How do you avoid the endless onslaught of junk mail?
Buffalox@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I live in Denmark, and you can register to not get avertissements in your mail. I must admit I’m surprised it works so well.
That wasn’t even what I meant when I wrote we don’t get mail. Because it’s been about 10 years since we last received an advertisement in the mail.
When you register you also get a sticker, and I can’t even recall if that’s still on the mail box. 😋
We do get 2 local “free” papers once a week that are paid by advertisements. Those used to be excluded too, but apparently they changed that.
If an advertiser wants to send us mail, they have to send a real letter with name and address, and that today is about 2.5-3 Euro, and requires the advertiser to have that information. I don’t recall getting one of those for like maybe 15 years, from a company I used to do business with.
With µblock on my Firefox browser on Linux, and no TV commercials, I live a near 100% advertisement free life. 😀nudnyekscentryk@szmer.info 1 year ago
Junk mail is not a thing outside US. We do get flyers though, but usually sticking a piece of paper on your mailbox saying “no flyers” is enough to never get them.
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 1 year ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Electronic mail isn’t new – large companies have linked distant offices with computerised messaging services for some years.
Apart from the fact that it is the only system where you pay to receive “mail” from someone else, it has some intriguing advantages – and disadvantages – in what the jargon would call “asynchronous communication.”
Hook your micro computer up to the telephone with a suitable form of “acoustic coupler” – a device with rubber cups which fit over the earpiece and mouthpiece.
This encourages those who wouldn’t dare to say something direct to your face (and who don’t have anything serious enough to say to commit it to a formal, written memo) to send you “brazen” messages.
It reduces the constant distraction of the telephone – unless something’s urgent and needs a discussion, you send an electronic note and the recipient can read it – or ignore it – at his leisure.
This is relatively cheaper than using the ordinary international telephone lines because the host computers only use fractions of a second to send your message once it has “reached” the nearby exchange, interweaving it with hundreds of others.
The original article contains 1,004 words, the summary contains 190 words. Saved 81%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Buffalox@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yeah it kind of leaves out the article is from 1983.
MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 1 year ago
It did for me. Mostly. If only we could legally sign pdf…
Daqu@feddit.de 1 year ago
Electronic signatures exist. You can legally sign pdf. But it costs money.
averyfalken@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
You cab for some documents. Some documents legally still require a wet signature
Demdaru@lemmy.world 1 year ago
In my country we have goverment-approved way of signing for free. It’s essentialy a stamp with code in it pointing to database record containing data about the sign - date, document hash or whatever it’s called etc.
tsonfeir@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Even back in 1983 the internet made you an asshole haha
Daxtron2@startrek.website 1 year ago
Anonymity has always done that
jballs@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
With as much as the article mentioned costs, I wouldn’t have been surprised to read “In order to keep electronic mail smaller, one may use abbreviated written speech. It is not uncommon to send a message simply stating ‘ey bby wan sum fuk?’”
tsonfeir@lemm.ee 1 year ago
8====D
funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
oh yes please