Obsoletion Societal Overhaul

Let's discuss obsoletion. Obsoletion is the act of becoming or condition of being obsolete. Being obsolete, for the stupid, means that someone or something is either no longer in use or no longer useful.

From the standpoint of a fairly young 20-something living in America, it seems to me that a lot of things are rapidly becoming obsolete.

However, not all of these things rapidly losing their usefulness SHOULD be losing their usefulness. Here is the breakdown from my perspective.

Cash
Tangible dollars and coins are rapidly going to the wayside in favor of electronic funds and debit cards. People would much rather carry around a single card represents all of their accumulated wealth instead of, well, their accumulated wealth. It's gotten to the point where going into a store that only accepts cash is a severe inconvenience to most individuals.

This isn't necessarily a good thing. It isn't necessarily a bad thing either. What I mean is that cashless money is both convenient and quick. As long as someone keeps track of their money and their card, a trip to the bank is never needed. However, if one were to lose that card (as I've done many times in my past), one suddenly finds themselves cut off entirely from their own money until a replacement arrives. This proves quite inconvenient oftentimes.

Whether the switch to cashless money is a good or bad thing is truly up to the reader. I, personally, am on the fence about this. I don't carry cash myself in most cases and use my debit card in pretty much all circumstances, but I can recognize the flaws in the system.

Cash in and of itself is a flawed concept considering that we're putting value into, essentially, bits of paper and scraps of metal. However, that's a discussion for another day.

School System
I actually had a brief discussion about this topic just this morning with a coworker. The school systems were designed, from what I understand, to work within the standards of a post-industrial society. The structure in which we organize our education systems and curriculums are as little as 60 years old and as much as over 100 years old, depending on the grade level.

One would think that, after a period of time as great as 60 years, that they'd change some things fundamentally. I say this because, as I've stated many times previously in my articles, that society is an ever-changing thing that requires that the various aspects of it also change to accomodate and adapt for better integration.

The school system, specifically the grade schools, haven't changed at all, for over half a century, as far as structure is concerned. The effects are becoming more and more prevalent as it seems the children become more and more bored or distracted with school to do the work. And this is having a FURTHER effect of producing students of poorer learning.

Colleges are under their own weight of useless at this point. This is not because of a poorly structured, outdated system, but rather the fact that someone has to spend thousands of dollars on a "higher" education with no guarantee of a career or even a good job after their graduation. I have a friend that graduated college to be a teacher. What she does now? She works at a 7-11. Terrible.

Books
Now, I won't discuss this much. I've already commented a great deal about the travesty of the digital book. All I'll say is that this is one of the format changes that I entirely disagree with.

Fax Machines
I'm fairly certain that the wildly unfunny Carlos Mencia made a joke about this. For those of you that have never seen Carlos Mencia or, for some reason, didn't read the first sentence in this paragraph, the joke wasn't funny.

However, he made a good point. For some inexplicable reason people are still using fax machines. In an age of scanners and email and instant transference of data, I have such a difficult time wrapping my head around why anyone would choose to use a machine that sounds like its murdering and raping R2-D2.

It seems wasteful, annoying, time-consuming considering that we have much faster means of sending the information and storing them. Why are we even using paper documents anymore? Why am I getting a fucking paper memo from my manager about some new fucking policy or update? Why can't you tell me in an email?!

I know this one seems rather trivial, but in this wondrous age of technology that we find ourselves in, it seems that the fax machine should've gone the way of the beeper and HASN'T yet.


So, what are we to do about these problems (I'm sure there are more examples but these are the most prevalent)? Well, I believe society is suffering whilst being caught in either the in-between stages of transition from one format to another, such as with money, or is suffering from being still caught in the past, such as with the schools.

I believe a nationwide reform is in order. And I know such a thing isn't going to happen (or, as some would say, not possible) because of things like time, money, effort, etc etc. but for godssake people, look at the shit we accomplished in the past! We integrated school systems! We fixed our economy! We did all of these things within a set period of years! Have we lost our ability to plan and fix things in the long-term? Does everything have to be right here and right now? I know that would be nice....but seriously?

Seriously?