As is mostly normally the case, the picture has no relation to the subject of today’s post. This is a picture of the river at Littlehampton, which it turns out is actually, quite a nice place.
I had quite a conversation yesterday with my Father-in-Law, about a love of his life, which it’s probably not unreasonable to say, he turned into a second career after his retirement. That is Philately, or Stamp collecting.
One of the questions I asked was what impact has the Internet had on the hobby. His response aligned with my much briefer experience in one of my main hobbies (amateur radio) in that the internet has had both positive and negative impacts.
The most obvious impact has been that it is much more difficult to get young blood interested. It does happen, but on nowhere near the scale that existed in the past. This is because the internet offers services which appear to be a much more attractive offer. There are also some social attitude changes that make it more difficult for young people to become involved.
Those two factors alone have served to almost kill these and other hobbies. But, not quite. Because we can now talk about the positive impact; not least of which is the global reach. I have thoroughly enjoyed watching programmes like Downton Abbey, it brought out how people would communicate using small notes sent through the post. We have our own version of this, the key exception is that ours is global and pretty much instantaneous. Being able to communicate with text, voice and video with anyone almost anywhere in the world, has served to really bring about the global village.
Then of course, there is the capacity of the Internet as a research and information repository tool, which really is superb. Of course, sometimes you might have to filter out a bit of guff, but undoubtedly, the internet has done wonders for research.
It’s like anything, the Internet is a tool for both good and bad. It’s down to people like to ensure that the good side prevails. I wonder how many other hobbies have been impacted both positively and negatively by this wonderful tool that we have been given?
Bills Posts 