It's weird how a few entries this week have been about things I saw as a kid vs now. This one's kind of general, though, as opposed to one little nitpicky thing. This could just as easily be an entry about driving though...that's a whole rant and a half waiting to happen.
But that's not what this is. Today I read an article posted on GDC (Green Day Community) about how CDs are (supposedly) going to actually die in the next two years. That's completely devestating to me, as a connoisseur of jewel cases and a frequenter of the Record & Tape Traders up the street from my college (in fact I fought a Misfits album there on Monday). Ironically, I'm doing a speech on the very subject, and I'll be persuading people to buy physical. Hey, sounds like I just got some free evidence.
Scanning another thread, however, I realized that whatever this is is so much bigger than CDs. In ten years, my whole LIFE could be digital. The point I want to make is that ten years ago, in 2001, Game Boys were just starting to display more than 12 colors, my computer could only display something like 256, and there were absolutely no images of me on the internet anywhere. We might have gotten a DVD player the previous Christmas and our TV was this big assed wooden beast that sat on the floor. I might have JUST gotten a CD player, and if so, the only CD I owned was the Baja Men. CDs were the shit, and downloading was evil. Yeah, Napster. Hell, we'd JUST moved past those blocky polygonal models in video games.
2001 was an interesting year...a lot of things were beginning that are now a million times better and more advanced. Back then, I spent maybe an hour on the computer a day. The rest I spent watching cartoons and playing with action figures...or occasionally I'd go ride bikes on my dead end street with the neighbor kid. It's hard to look at how things have changed when you yourself spent the last ten years changing. When I was 9, I was a badass. I didn't give a shit what anyone thought of me because I told myself I was absolutely awesome no matter what. I was the leader. Not only was I going to follow in my sister's well behaved footsteps, I was going to surpass her...only I didn't call it that at all. Back then I was your textbook example of genius. What this means is that in ten years I managed to have my self esteem stolen and shattered, my head mixed in a kitchen aid, and...well, you get the idea. Safe to say I wasn''t always a Social Ninja striving for acceptance.
Still, at 19, I can take an hour to stop and look back, and then look ahead. Goddamn, a lot has changed in me and the world. It's impossible to put into words really, and lord knows if I were 19 in 2001, I'd have to find another way to do so. Lord knows I've done a good portion of them by now, so I guess you might call that "keeping up." One thing I know now is that ten years is a long time.
I'm living as part of a tweener generation. We're a bunch of kids that don't know what the hell to do, thanks to everyone else. I'm not the only one who's seen things these ten years. As I see it, we are a people who can only struggle through the years as the human race is figuring out what to do with itself. I like to think that there will come a point when people will figure out how to consolidate technology and...real life. Until then, no one knows what right is. There is no right. People make their own ways, none of which are proven to truly work and many of which will lead down paths unknown into less than pleasant fates. It's fate anarchy out there. Parents, teachers and counselors try to give us advice that has been proven to work for them, but the fact that it's not working here shows the rules have changed.
This topic is really too big for me to tackle in one blog post so I'm not going to try. As has been typical of this week, I'm just going to say what's on my mind. Looking at the last ten years, the next ten years are scary as hell. What the hell are we going to have then? Imagine that Skyping is just the BEGINNING of something. In 2021 we might have that sort of thing built in to everything and in very good quality. I think we'll have even more than that, but it's impossible to say what. Looking back gives me certainty that I can't know what I'm looking at looking forward. My generation's visions of the future are old and outdated...based on visions of the future from the past. Who in 1980 predicted iPods? Who predicted that in 2011 games would me controlled with a moveable remote and not a visor and gloves? Who knew that there could be discussion about HANDWRITING becoming obsolete?
That's what scares me. I'm a fairly smart guy, but I feel like all that might be lost on the world just a little later on because I spent my whole life keeping up with the times. On the Internet, there's already way more information than I can handle. i could spend several lifetimes looking at it all. I've spent years already and a good portion of it I've found interesting. In that though, i've missed out on a lot. Social activities and life experiences that other people had, and certainly my parents and their peers had. Or did I miss out? Today it's entirely possibly that I did not miss out on those things. Those things might be obsolete. I might be perfectly in line with an upcoming generation.
Look at it: kids are being taught by video games and tablets and electronics. They learn to use a computer before they learn much else. These things come naturally to them. They have cell phones...cell phones that are better than MINE. They are starting out playing video games with these motion controls and awesome visuals. They're spending way more time on the internet. They are the subjects of studies saying that these things are bad. And that's crazy too...because soon all of it will be normal, and something new and crazier will takes it place. Then the kids will struggle to consolidate it into their lives...and they'll watch kids get with it like it's no big thing.
In 2021, I'll be 29 years old. Think of all the things that happen in your 20s. You're supposed to get your career, find your soul mate, get married, possibly have kids. I try not to think about that (Woman Rock. Soon.) but that might just be what happens...well, I kind of hope it is. Seriously though, what's going to happen? What am I going to do? How much more am I going to get used to? Is it safe to say that all of the old things I remember doing as a kid will be, at very least, debatably relevant or the fodder of purists?
I'd say I'm sure this is the way it's always been...but I don't think that's true anymore. My parents never faced changes like this. The things they knew as children, television aside maybe, took their time getting better. Things didn't go so fast that the world spun a little quicker too. My generation is like that weird twilight between the colonists and the people of the 1950s. There's going to be a new old soon.
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