Saturday 12 February 2011

Have we all stopped sending burthrday cards ?

A thought occurred to me today, as I placed a comment on someone's facebook wall wishing them a happy birthday. Does anyone send birthday cards anymore ?

No wonder the Post office is screwed. Not only is everyone busy emailing each other instead of committing their important (and unimportant) messages on a piece of dead tree, but they aren't feeling obliged to send birthday cards to people they barely know or like.

Perhaps this isn't the case, as I haven't seen a rash of redundancies at Birthdays or Celebrations. There are, however more and more operators jumping on the Moonpig model for personalised cards.

The point I wanted to think about was, well, apart from showing what a tight git I am, do people think any less of me for adding some carefully considered words to their facebook page instead of spending over a pound, on a card I'll probably forget to give to them anyway.

Have any of them noticed that I habitually say pretty much the same thing to each person ? IE 'Happy Birthday mate. Hope you have / had a great day !!' (The double exclamation mark is really, really important). Of course there is the other comment 'Happy Birthday. Don't do anything I wouldn't'. Which may not leave them with much of a list of things to avoid, none the less. Hardly original is it ?

Looking by the number of comments from other people, I can only assume that perhaps not all of them would have bothered to buy a birthday card before the advent of social networking. (Internet stalking).

Does this signal a greater level of emotional attachment and well wishing, made easier by the technology, or does it demonstrate the absence of real feeling in a clinical world ?

Do we devalue the sentiment by not having to pay to send it ?

All I'm bothered about is that facebook handily reminds me that it's someone's birthday so that I can write my 'standard birthday comment'.

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