Another Lost Form Of Communication

One of the frequent threads of this blog has revolved around the dying art of commercial radio. That only makes sense, considering it has been my career for my entire life. However, in recent days, I have been reminded of another dead form of communication. And while radio has at least a statistical chance of resurrection, this form is already pushing daisies.

I'm speaking, of course, of the memorandum. Like radio, the written memo has been been killed off by technology - in this case, the e-mail. I'm not exactly mourning the loss of the memo or the mundane business letter... it's probably not worth mourning over. And just think about how much space has been saved in filing cabinets!


A few days ago, my college choir director sent me a big box of stuff that he had squirrelled away from his years at Syracuse, including many pieces of correspondence documenting the humdrum business of running a college choir. I've been busy adding some of this material to my choir alumni site.

The letters themselves were at once, both unremarkable and fascinating. There was definitely a certain elegance and formality that no longer exists in email. Memos, for example, were typed on dedicated Memo paper...


The paper itself was more formal... heavier and more textured than the common paper we all use in printers today. Some of it was printed with the manufacturer's watermark, with elaborate letterheads on top and bottom. And on this paper, in many cases, was completely mundane information. Can you imagine, in 2008, writing and mailing a formal letter to confirm a date for an appointment?




And with the death of the written letter, there is the corresponding death of the practiced signature, written with panache by a fine ink pen.



One other thing that's not really gone... It lives on in spirit through letters from insurance companies and whatnot - the form letter. However - even most form letters today are done on word processors, leaving out the massive gaps of old typewritten notes:



With email taking over the world, is it any wonder that the U.S. Postal Service is reporting record losses? According to the Washington Post, the USPS is in danger of folding altogether...

Just like the memo.

How's This For Retro? I'm Making Mix Tapes!

Regular readers of "Life On The Beach" know that I drive a 1997 Honda Civic that recently passed the 100,000 mile mark. I love that car.... It gets me where I want to go, and in the $4.00 a gallon era, it gets nearly 30 miles to the gallon, so I love that too! However - there is one drawback. Because of its vintage, the Honda has a cassette deck, and NOT a CD player.

This creates a problem. As also previously discussed on this blog, I recently launched an alumni website for my college choir. The reason I launched that website was because my single old choir cassette had finally gone to the magnetic media graveyard, and I needed to reach out to my old school mates to save the music we recorded on analog tape thirty years ago from meeting the same fate.

For the past several days, my fellow choir alums have generously donated their cassettes to me, which I have been lovingly transferring to my hard drive and editing into individual tracks, which folks could then listen to online, or download and turn into their own CD's. No more worries of their analog cassette sound gradually devolving into mud!

Except for me. I could burn a CD or two to put in the family minivan, but do you think my wife is going to let me play "memory lane" in HER car? Think again. No - if I want to hear this recently-saved-from-certain-time-erosion-death music, I need to play the splendidly digitized files on my computer, and record them back onto cassette! Yes, I'm down to the point of creating mix tapes again!

Maybe I should put together some Bread and Dan Fogelberg cuts, create a make-out cassette and slip it under the Missus' pillow... then we could really go back to the 70's!

R.I.P. Radio

Recently, my former colleague, Chris Core weighed in on the reason he (and I) were let go at WMAL... And now, the Washington Post's Marc Fisher is offering an expanded obituary for the radio business. I wish I could say I believe Fisher is being overly pessimistic, but from my current seat, he seems pretty darn on point to me!

You can read the entire article here, but here are a couple of passages that pass awfully close to my heart:

In the easy decades of a tightly constricted mass media, there were three TV networks, monopoly newspapers and a handful of radio stations in each place. That lack of choice meant that much of popular culture was middle-brow in ambition and middling in quality. But the nation was guaranteed a common conversation about music, politics and nearly every other aspect of life.

The challenge for all media now is to find a path back to mass, while retaining as much as possible of the freedom and access that the infinite range of the Internet promises.

The programming on the radio these days does not light a way toward that goal. Music radio seems superfluous -- a selection of tunes nowhere near as varied as what iPod users choose for themselves, and without the added value that knowledgeable and entertaining DJs once provided. With the strong exception of public radio and a handful of all-news local stations such as Washington's WTOP, radio has largely gotten out of the news business -- too expensive. And the local talk programs that once made it easy for a traveler to figure out his location without ever glancing at a road sign have largely given way to Rush Limbaugh and a legion of imitators.

And there's more...

The next decade or more will be a transitional time, as radio, like newspapers and television networks, forswears allegiance to any one means of distribution and declares itself platform-agnostic. Those media that, like the record industry, cling to old technology and a collapsed business model will see their futures crumble before their eyes.

Radio, shedding talent as fast as it loses audience, is rapidly becoming irrelevant to the younger generation. Yet most Americans still listen to something for much of the day. Radio could be the way into those ears, but only if it invests in creating compelling reasons to be there, only if it grabs hold of us the way the voices of past decades connected to the loves, pains and dreams of young listeners. As always, the future lies in the past.

The future lies in the past? Maybe THAT's why I've been obsessed with my college choir lately! Is there any money in singing four-part harmony?