The New Fossils

In my role as technical writer, I was drafting some instructions for a new application when it struck me that the Save icon on so many applications is still a line drawing of a floppy disk. And that there are a lot of people using computers today (like my nieces and nephew, for example) who have never actually used a floppy disk, but who know this image means “Save.” Which means it took about 20 years from being invented to becoming ubiquitous, to reaching the point where it only lingers as a symbol whose origins are already half lost in the mists of time.

I think a lot about the things that have gone extinct in my lifetime. I don’t mean big things like the Western Black Rhinoceros or the country called Czechoslovakia. Plenty of other people think about things like that. I mean little things, like the Thistle-colored Crayola crayons I used to love (now “retired”), and the idea that the plot of a story could hang on a missed phone call. Extinctions of idea and artifact are part of the flow of civilizations. It just happens so much more rapidly since the last quarter of the 20th Century.

So I’ve decided to start writing things down as they occur to me. And I hope you’ll join me. Think about the things we’ve already lost, and things that are surviving only through conscious preservation (either sincerely, or as some kind of ironic retro style statement).

Here are a few to start with. I’m posting this as a blog today, but as the list grows, I’ll make a page for it somewhere else on this site:

Speaking of missed phone calls, as I was doing earlier, when was the last time you used a telephone to have a real conversation? It’s all texting now, which is another reason land lines are dying out. And when they finally do, how dated will all those films and books seem when they mention “the phone rang” or “give me a ring?”

Which reminds me: When was the last time you got a personal letter? I mean on paper, though with everyone communicating almost exclusively on social media, emails of any length are just as endangered.  There’s a poignantly hilarious moment in Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress where a character moons over the only written relic she has of her ex-boyfriend, a mis-spelled “be back soon” note he left on his way to a beer run. Along the same lines, photo postcards from vacation spots are probably living on borrowed time. As are paper greeting cards, which are turning to increasingly desperate measures to stay alive (Hallmark has opted for sound chips and pop-cultural tie-ins, while Papyrus favors glitter and other embellishments that self-consciously reference hand made). After that, you won’t be surprised that I’ve got greeting card shops and the post office/mail carriers on my list of endangered businesses and occupations.

Once upon a time, as those over 45 and Mad Men viewers know, even small offices had highly trained professional secretarial staff.   Chicken vs. Egg conundrum: Did the decline of correspondence and telephone communications cause the end of this profession? Or, in a world where nearly everyone holds an MBA and has to be their own secretary because few companies can afford all those MBAs and still have have money to hire support staff, did the lack of these professionals help to cause the decline in communications?

Okay, here’s an obvious one.  A coworker’s son found a NYC subway token in the loose change jar and wanted to know what kind of foreign currency it was.  It just occurred to me that the punch-style can opener falls into the same category of “huh?!” for his generation.

Another thing I took for granted that this boy will never know: every town once supported an entire range of specialized repair shops. It’s ironic that now that we’re all “green” and determined to recycle, no one can make a living doing this anymore. People who can still fix a television or a blender seems to only be doing it in the basement, as a hobby.  The man who re-heels those of my shoes that can still be re-heeled (so many shoes are now made to be worn out and tossed) is pushing 90 and when he dies, his shop dies with him.

Question: do you “turn the page” of an ebook? Oh, the interface can make it look that way, and probably will continue to do so until everyone’s made the transition away from paper. But what are you actually “turning?” And can we refer to “liner notes” when music is no longer purveyed via anything than can be lined? This is probably the appropriate place to note the passing of the disk jockey (not just the disk), that professional class of taste arbiters and educators who made listening to music an  interactive experience. And don’t forget dedicated “record stores,” which primarily continue to exist (even electronically) only as departments in stores that retail electronics or books. The brief lifespan of the video store (almost equivalent to that of the floppy disk) also bears mention.

All the talk of books makes me think about typesetting, a profession reaching back to Gutenberg. I had a lovely conversation with a third generation typesetter, a man who’d started his own apprenticeship at age 16 and spent his life working at his venerable calling. Until one day it simply didn’t exist any more. Now, at age 61, he was driving cabs to the airport, because his newspaper’s print shop had closed.  When I was in school (and I’m thinking of a college life-sketching class, not just kindergarten fingerpainting), we used newsprint for art projects. You can still buy large blocks in the art supply stores, but as newspapers disappear, will newsprint? And all that keeps it in production is the needs of art students, will we still call it “newsprint”?

hmm