It's Unwieldy Spinneret

My parents grew up in an era where they had to dial an operator to reach another person on the telephone. My father recently upgraded his cell phone from the thirty dollar special of five years ago (one in which the LCD screen was simply a slightly more advanced version of a digital watch or pocket calculator) for that productive replacement for all businessmen - the BlackBerry. While I grew up, I feasted on low budget scifi movies and television series that depicted a future where our primary communication devices were still landlines, but now (meaning in the future) they had video cameras! How wholly inaccurate a prediction prognosticating writers of cinema had for our World of the Future...



Today, we have camera phones, but not for seeing each others' faces as we walk and talk. We post mobile images on profile sites with them, depicting our amusement at real world objects. All of our ridicule of the insane became witty observation as bluetooth users ramble on in one way conversations to passersby. Someone seeming to listen to their ipod stops mid gait and answers to voices only they can hear. We want communication incognito, so we text each other, our thumbs pounding out misspelled words to form sentences of atrocious grammar. Communication has become as passive as the billboard signs along the side of the road that no one really pays attention to anyway. So here we are in a new era of information streams wide and deep, able to post and peruse in a matter of seconds, and what do we do? We tweet. We follow celebrity gossip in 140 character snip-its because we can't settle for the thirty minutes of TMZ that comes on twice a day, or turn the channel every other half-hour to find another infotainment program attempting to one-up their rivals through teases of indecency - depicting celeb-u-tants in underage sex videos.



The adoption of new media by market forces is a predictable enough trend - as well as those forces catering to our prurient interests in the absence of regulatory forces. What doesn't pass for porn makes it to the tabloids, and our desire to know the depravity of others in order to measure that debasement against our own id is fed. The narratives that make sense of our world act similarly. Conservative or Liberal, the world is cut down into dualities because prismatic perspectives lack the tightness of logic these ideologies espouse. It is easier for us to accept that a man with the middle name of a dictator shares ideals with that dictator because of word association than to understand the history of a culture whose prevalence in another part of the world somehow infiltrated this one.



But moving from non-sequitur into my sequestering of these inter-tubes, the point of this blog is simple enough: Post observations of interests and comings across from the interweb to the interweb. A novel idea? No, that's something else entirely. This is less an experiment than an expression of aggravation, elation, or ennui.