No address
by Bob on June 13, 2007
I was looking through a journal and then a magazine today. That's not unusual. Then I looked through a National Geographic magazine from the early 1970s. And I noticed something. There were real addresses of the companies advertising in the magazine. Not P.O. boxes. Not websites. Not toll-free phone numbers. The real address of the company where they were located. One could write to them or even visit.
Now there is a paucity or even no addresses given at all in advertisements by companies. I should say corporations rather than companies these days. They are almost anonymous. They have websites. One wonders if they exist anywhere on this planet. Or at all in the universe. And if you happen to call any of them you get a telephone screening robot and no human being. The late Dr. Alan Turing would have had some fun with his Turing Test all around it.
I decided I liked the old advertisements, and the nice postal addresses and that the companies really had factories and were proud of where they were located.
One gets a different impression these days.
I wonder, as Francois Villon did in the 15th century, if the snows of yesteryear will ever return again. One wonders and then seriously doubts it in this case. That's a pity.
Multinational corporations have very little presence on the ground soil. They are seemingly abstractions in which we are to believe blindly. Perhaps they don't even have any allegiance to any locality anywhere.
Ah, one yearns for the snows of yesteryear, admittedly, likely in vain, in this particular case. Of course, realising that nostalgia is a steel trap.
So it goes.