Margaret Mead left us way too early…
I just recently got hold of a great, exclusive article written by the late, great Dr. Mead in 1969 (for no less than TV Guide) about television’s overall divisive effect upon the separative generations, old and young. Her findings concluded that the elders, many to whom TV was this new, trendy but take-it-or-leave-it device, bore no intention of taking it’s reportedly deleterious effects seriously. The young however, were at the same time at the dangerous idealistic mercy of this inoculative medium, drawing minds to violence and unreal, defeating fantasy. The result was a generation gap widening by the mile, with no communicative unity on the horizon whatsoever.
Well over fifty years later, and a collective culture miraculously glued together since, another, more invasive technological advancement has now proven to accomplish the same, if not in such an alarmist fashion, then possibly in an even more disturbing, resigned vein. Can you guess what that force is..?
Television did one thing. It has, since its inception, despite vast pre-century World’s Fair predictions, served as a powerful one-way commander of cultural image and dictate. If the TV says it, it must be so. In the last twenty years, the internet has reversed this power radically. It’s the silent revolution no one recognized because it didn’t quite commence with violent demonstrations with network-branded TV trucks filming angry mobs yowling “The whole world is watching…!!” That sort of reactive behavior has long since been more of a timepiece than any kind of active form of effect. This might have something to do with the reason the famed “protest” that overtook Wall Street’s square-foot Zuchotti Park over a decade ago was met with little more than disparaging scorn.
The un-televised “revolution” as it were, in this case, corresponds to a globe of humans rapidly turned largely and clinically reliant upon their capability to have their immediate voices heard and thoughts projected in last-word fashion at any possible moment. Audible, linear conversation, (linear as in that medium once decimated by television, according to Professor McLuhan in 1964..) would in less than one decade, to no one’s conscious intent, become vastly obsolete as a communicative science. What’s more common on your phone lately..? Talk or text..? Quite sadly, I can recall that moment on my life’s continuum when I finally tired of conversation. Somehow, it seemed that talk became redundant, and ineffective. Now we scroll down and stare at redundant, ineffective stuff. But unlike conversation, we can scroll, shut it off, turn away, ignore with impunity, and keep our throats unsore.
Of course, for those of us in the “shifted” generation, it begs the question, just what has that done to our communicative skill, our emotional incentive, our sense of base morale and our generalized success in that constant, war effort against the enemy known as Depression..? Were the internet something purely tantamount to a disposable, dismissable toy in any given modernized life, no such questions or concerns could be deemed relevant. Unfortunately, in this immediate world, the one containing the device on which you’re reading this, that’s not the case.
Then of course, there’s that generation succeeding us, the ones we’re not about to even try to make heads or tails of. Parents of youth are pretty keen at maintaining a connection with their children’s neurology. To a point. Ultimately, many give up. And giving up nowadays is a much more scientifically complex surrender. Is that a bad thing in a world predicated upon fast-moving technological advancement..?
As the legend goes, it’s only bad when the communication erodes. Supposedly, the installation of values in one’s young is the most important thing. In the last couple of web-driven decades we’ve seen the property line. Our nation’s youth has acknowledged it with temperance. Over the line you have the “Snake Pit”, the psychotic, firearm bearing murderers. On the other side, a frightened, clutching, affectionate population of mindful, mature thinkers, in many ways on a quest for an intellectual collective that transcends an endless scroll of foolish bumper-sticker memes.
In the meantime, any or all of these surfers are making use of this ubiquitous technoessence. Blogs, video channels, podcasts, it’s all a new “platform” for self-expression. But there is in fact a kind of smirk generated by onlookers Gen-X and older, perhaps life-worn and too cognizant of just what these new “forms” of communicative “platforms” are.
Just what were those wooden boxes of early design, with all the wires, that plugged into a wall socket in homes blissfully endowed with electric power one hundred years ago..? What was that wild picture box that divided an entertainment industry nearly eighty years ago, one that had determined innovators insisting there’d never be enough new, intellectually stimulating material creatable to fulfill our mentally voracious republic..? Perhaps the only significant difference lies in the pedestrian accessibility to venture into such, in ways that did not exist in the early 1900s.
But what we’ve come to recognize in the last decade or more is that much like any new, explosive advancement, a fine example being the progressive “underground” rock music genre borne over sixty years ago, the counterculture will fast be swallowed by the commercial mainstream. The “underground” internet culture just might win the award for the fastest swallow yet. Has anyone seen anything more clueless than the scared expressions of magnate Mark Zuckerburg upon federal questioning some years ago..?
It’s all these vast predictabilities, like the tidal waves of a stormy beach, that leave us dry, blanket-bound, elder beachgoers in the overview distance, unseduced by the technological possibilities, and charmed rather by the facilities made available to our own lexicon: An access to the identifiable history and past we’d care to selectively recall. On our own, comfortable terms.
In a world of banks and boutiques replaced by Starbucks, walk-in clinics, cellular phone dealers and high-end optical shops, the wars of Rock versus Disco replaced furiously by Left v. Right, Fox v. CNN, amongst a society young and old, all who seem to know best because “they said so on the internet”, there’s only one peaceful directive to survival.
And that’s unquestionably a mindful return to the intellects by whom we were once raised, in a web-free world dominated by well-formed, questioned and argumented thoughts, based upon concepts read rather than raved, professionally published and taught rather than “blogged”. For us, the most natural, life-giving forest is the vintage bookshop. The internet is our precious chariot to the on-line libraries, of scanned and re-printed journals, scattered television clips and articles of eons past. It’s the precious galleries of exquisite photographs, allowing us to recall the splendor of a time governed by genuine adults. To be certain, this indeed is a lifestyle mostly virtual.
Virtual is to this day perhaps the only uniting force between the gapped generations of our time. The so-called “holodeck”, that atmosphere-generating device that sends so many crews on sci-fi drama reruns into the 1930s, 40s, and the like is not yet a common device. The fantasy shows for that reason still remain predominantly popular. But the technology remains the ruler, and its owners and founders will undoubtedly remain the almighty leaders of our future Hunger Games. Meanwhile, the corporately owned and policed earth of internet virtue is the ground we all walk. Old and young, much like the divided factions of the Nixon Era are now united just as strongly in their lives by the same connective grip that pulled a nation together long ago:
The utility bill.
N.F
