youthful idealism: lying dormant, or gone the way of the paperless office?

it's 2009 and we don't have flying cars or world peace, and C, X and Q are still included in the alphabet (see #16). but for most people our (my) age, the first action in the morning is checking something computer- or internet-related. when i wake up in the morning, before i'm capable of speech or fully opening my eyes, i can still type my laptop password (which is upwards of 10 characters) in about a second. and i'm not exactly a technology person.

i was shown a different version of this at a conference a few months ago. most of these things don't really surprise me -- a fact that decisively places me in a certain age group -- but it's kind of intense to see them all in sequence. (there's sound, but it's just background music.)



maybe this is bad (?) but i'm less interested in the question -- what does this all mean? you know -- than the facts themselves. i don't know that it all has to mean anything. i just want to know what's coming next. or what effects the reality of these facts have on people now: ones that now or soon will feel disconnected, and ones that are being born into this culture. because this isn't exactly a cultural shift. the culture shift already happened. i think the culture in which we exist now is one of continuing shift itself. so instead of saying we are at a moment of transition, i think we can now say we're a culture of transition itself. with so much connectedness and communication and increased speed and numbers of people, maybe "developed nations" don't have the time or space for stages anymore. that's the ultimate form of individualism, really: if everything is constantly changing and moving and transitioning, one person can only ever be at the same stage as him or herself. alone in a crowd, as it were. which also makes all the communication and connectedness both increasingly important and increasingly moot.

[i'm resisting the urge to make a pitch for summer camp here. suffice it to say that this kind of spiralling mental logic is one of the major reasons i enjoy closing my laptop for the summer and having no cell phone service.]

i think this is also why "our" generation (whatever that is) has so very much difficulty with rebellion. a lot of us grew up in a sort of, i'm sorry to say this, fight club mentality: that whole bit about having no great war, no great depression, no scars. nothing in which to participate or against which to rebel. the early-mid 90s suffered from severe 60s envy, but by the time the shit hit the fan (lots of it, and a very big fan*), it was a new millenium and we had become too jaded to carpe that particular diem. at least most members of our parents' generation waited until their mid-30s to sell out. we barely made it through high school.

* see: 9/11, war on terror, iraq, afghanistan, energy resource depletion, global warming, economic crisis, gay rights, the entire middle east, etc.

and on that note, i'm leaving my computer and going outside to frolic in the sunshine.