Human Feedreaders and Dinosaur Tech

A while back I received an newspaper article in the mail from my father’s secretary.  It was an article about that remarkably non-dinosaurblog-esque speech Rupert Murdoch made a while back.  I thought it was cool that my dad sent it to me and I appreciated it.  What was weird about it was how it got to me and the process by which it was chosen to be sent to me.

My uncle saw the article and thought it was worth sending to me and the rest of the family.  So he had his secretary in Calgary fax the article to my dad’s secretary in Ottawa and then she snail mailed it to my siblings in LA Toronto Montreal and to me in Vancouver.  So we received the article like two weeks after it was published.

What they didn’t know was that I had already read the speech and the article in my RSS aggregator within hours of their publication on the interweebs.  So it was kind of novel receiving it so much later in snail mail format.  I guess I just thought it was funny that my dad and his brother were using such horse and buggy technology to share information with me when I had already read and digested the speech and the article way before they did.

Whats also funny is how my dad and his brother use their assistant as like human RSS aggregators.  They tell their assistants "hey my son is interested in computers, kiteboarding, etc.  So clip out articles on those subjects and send them in the mail."  It seems so quaint/so analog to think about how they share information with me given all the digital filters, alerts, and feedreaders I have setup to seek out the information that I’m interested in.

What’s even more antiquated is seeing my father receiving an international overnight FedEx of a burned CD with a couple audio tracks from one of his radio stations.  Like hello pops!?  What was the inkernets invented for?  Cough, sending ones and zeros around the world, cough, ftp, cough cough, email, cough, you could have had like three years of fat (with a PH) web hosting for the cost of that FedEx…