I am sitting here in Malmo, about to complete the second of my three part speaking leg as a keynote with the Swedish Post Office.
Interesting that their messgae is Smart Communication, and are embracing in a positive way the debate about where the near future may take us.
In my travelling bag is another snippet of paper, in fact an article entitled The Last Post I shared this with Postens CEO, and it prompted an interesting conversation, especially how to be proactive with powerful unions in negotiating a way forward, as traditional workforces inevitably decline in this industry.
For anyone whose wellbeing depends on the daily arrival of what some people call snail-mail, the past two weeks' postal strikes will have brought disquieting auguries of the future. Some people have probably welcomed a respite from junkmail and bills, but there are thousands who will have been troubled by more painful absences - chiefly, the people who still write and receive letters, postcards and notelets, and cling to a cherished means of personal contact.
Swedish Posten are actively engaged with their unions, and the point one person made to me was, that everyone has to be realistic to the fact that postal services no longer live in the world that they once did.
Of course I am no expert or insider to the arbitration between the UK's post office and the unions, but has been it seems at time, acrimonious. And the strikes have come at times that does the Postal Service no favours,
Earlier this week, the postal economist Ian Senior appeared on Radio Four and highlighted the likely effect of the strikes on this supposedly dwindling hardcore. What he said was hardly revelatory, but sobering all the same: "Most people, once they have email, prefer never to send a physical letter ever again, if they can avoid it. When there are no letters being posted and received, that will encourage those people who don't have email to get it. That simply hastens the decline of the letter as a method of communication."Sharpening one's understanding of all this is not easy. For the past decade or so, the decline of personal letter-writing has been masked by a huge growth of junk mail, so annual falls in the total volume of letters have been a matter of increment. At the last count, the figure was down 1.6% year on year, though nosediving returns from the letters market probably said a great deal more: between 2004-5 and 2005-6, Royal Mail's profits from letters fell by a third.
Kate Moss burns Pete Doherty's Love Letters, adieu to the wonderful world of letter writing
Author DJ Taylor says
Letters give you distance. They give you the chance to present yourself - to perform
And so an Ode to letter writing
There is perhaps no better example of all this than the role played by the letter in the bohemian subcultures that stretch from the English Romantics, through Rimbaud and Verlaine and the American Beats, and on in turn to the kind of neurotic outsiders who have recurrently kicked along postwar pop culture. In the hands of the latter, the archetypal letter became a mixture of stream of consciousness and confessional - there in the letters of figures as diverse as Jack Kerouac, John Lennon and Kurt Cobain. The latter's posthumous book, Journals, was littered with letters to friends, colleagues and lovers (e.g. "Dave, a band needs to practice in our opinion at least 5 times a week if the band ever expects to accomplish anything"). By way of linking him to this heritage, the demise of that doomed romantic Pete Doherty's most celebrated relationship with Kate Moss was commemorated by the Sun headline "Kate Moss burns Pete Doherty's love letters".
And it was Guardian Editor Alan Rushbridger, who famously siad that the presses they had just invested millions in for the new Guardian newspaper format would be the last they ever owned
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