TITLE: The Passing of the Postage Stamp
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: July 10, 2014  3:08 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
In
<A HREF="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/books/james-baldwin-born-90-years-ago-is-fading-in-classrooms.html">
   this New York Times article</A>
on James Baldwin's ninetieth birthday, scholar Henry Louis
Gates laments:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 On one hand, he's on a U.S. postage stamp;
 on the other hand, he's not in the Common Core.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

I'm not qualified to comment on Baldwin and his place in the
Common Core.  In the last few months, I read several articles
about and including Baldwin, and from those I have come to
appreciate better his role in twentieth-century literature.
But I also empathize with anyone trying to create a list of
things that every American should learn in school.

What struck me in Gates's comment was the reference to the
postage stamp.  I'm old enough to have grown up in a world
where the postage stamp held a position of singular importance
in our culture.  It enabled communication at a distance,
whether geographical or personal.  Stamps were a staple of
daily life.

In such a world, appearing on a stamp was an honor.  It
indicated a widespread acknowledgment of a person's (or
organization's, or event's) cultural impact.  In this sense,
the Postal Service's decision to include James Baldwin on a
stamp was a sign of his importance to our culture, and a way
to honor his contributions to our literature.

Alas, this would have been a much more significant and visible
honor in the 1980s or even the 1990s.  In the span of the last
decade or so, the postage stamp has gone from relevant and
essential to archaic.

When I was a boy, I collected stamps.  It was a fun hobby.  I
still have my collection, even if it's many years out of date
now.  Back then, stamp collecting was a popular activity with
a vibrant community of hobbyists.  For all I know, that's
still true.  There's certainly still
<A HREF="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-27890106">
   a vibrant market</A>
for some stamps!

But these days, whenever I use a new stamp, I feel as if I'm
holding an anachronism in my hands.  Computing technology
played a central role in the obsolescence of the stamp, at
least for personal and social communication.

Sometimes people say that we in CS need to a better job
helping potential majors see the ways in which our discipline
can be used to effect change in the world.  We never have to
look far to find examples.  If a young person wants to be able
to participate in how our culture changes in the future, they
can hardly do better than to know a little computer science.
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