24-25_Cardsharp.qxp_Layout 1 17/01/2025 12:41 Page 2
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The Birth Of A New Century It’s 2025 for Pete’s sake, and we are a quarter of the way into the 21st Century, so what on earth is Cardsharp going on about with a headline proclaiming the birth of a new century?! Bear with him, he sees 2025 as the year when the 20th Century really ends, and when the 21st Century really commences in earnest, and reflects on how this might or might not affect our greeting card industry in the UK. Cardsharp remembers seeing a phrase on an advertising poster recently that read: ‘The world you were born into no longer exists’, which set him thinking. Perhaps it was the start of the new year, or the second quartile of the 21st Century commencing, or simply Cardsharp’s love of history, but it made him rather philosophical and reflective about 2025. History teaches Cardsharp that century epochs rarely go smoothly from years 00-99. The 18th Century, encompassing the industrial and agricultural revolutions and the Hanoverian reigns, is really an epoch, that starts around 1715 and lasts until 1837 when Victoria became our Queen. The 19th Century, in reality commences then and effectively continued until World War I in 1914. Which brings us to the 20th Century which one could argue continued until the last year or so. After the end of the Second World War in 1945, a new world order emerged. An era, in the main, of good natured, optimistic politics other than a few blips. It was an era of rising prosperity and increasing globalisation; a period of increasing social liberalism, with healthy and robust parliamentary democracies in most of the Western World. And all of this was accompanied by an increasing life
24 PROGRESSIVE GREETINGS WORLDWIDE
expectancy. It was also a time during which literacy - in book reading and writing grew and flourished. Physical newspaper and magazines publishing was buoyant, enjoying huge readerships. And it was the period during which the UK greeting card industry grew from a very low base to the £1.5+ billion industry that it is today.
Above: By Cardsharp’s reckoning, the 19th Century did not really end until the World War I in 1914. Left: This is unlikely to be a common scene at a modern day breakfast table with physical newspaper readers becoming rarer.
But things are changing, now the ‘unofficial’ new century has well and truly commenced, and the greeting card industry will need to be aware of these changes and adapt accordingly. Cardsharp recognises that over the last 25 years, the greeting card industry has continually adapted to new technologies and circumstances. And the next few years will continue this pattern. It is only human to mourn a disappearing world, but it how we react to it that will be vital.
And Cardsharp is not even talking about the wars in the Middle East, Ukraine and Sudan, the rise in populist politics, or the imminent disappearance of the internal combustion engine, or even the fact that life expectancy has stalled in the UK. No, it is more about how we are now using, ‘consuming’ and creating content of all descriptions, whether news, art or indeed greeting cards. But in this new century, literacy is in serious decline. Reading ability is declining around the world – Cardsharp heard somewhere that the average reading age of the UK population is now akin to that of an 11 year old! This is not just result of the