July 11, 2018 -
What’s black and white and red all over? So went a riddle from my youth. The answer of course is a “newspaper”. Future generations will not get the joke.
I recently took this picture of someone reading a physical newspaper, a soon-to-be relic that traces its roots to an invention made in the 15th century. Now that technology is being superseded by inventions of the 20th and 21st centuries - the Internet and electronic tablets. Newspapers still exist mind you, but in decreasing numbers that will inevitably be as extinct as T. rex. To give newspapers their due, however, they reigned supreme for several centuries before being dethroned by the new kid on the block.
Sad that. With every couple of steps forward, there is at least one step backward.
I delivered a newspaper on my bicycle every weekday afternoon during my high school years, my first job. I didn’t earn much, but I had to deliver these newspapers to the proper door, bill customers weekly, collect payments, and keep records. For this I was paid a modest sum, can’t recall how much, but whatever it was I felt I had earned it.
Now, as the physical newspaper vanishes so does that first job. Don’t get me wrong. I love my iPad and all the things it allows me to do. But a newspaper doesn’t have pop-up ads; it doesn’t alert me to every social or political hiccup, and it doesn’t talk to me. I have one wife; who needs two?
I now receive my daily “newspaper” electronically. I’m modern. I’m virtuous. I’m saving trees.
I miss my newspaper.