Thursday, November 19, 2009

It's A Series Of Tubes!

I am in a serious rut. Oh, sure, I've kvetched before about my apparent lack of motivation re: obsessions (although my mom rightly pointed out that I may have, ahem, fixed that), but in terms of time spent surfing the various screens, I'm losing my touch.

Oh, sure, I still love me some CSI: Someplace, especially when Eddie Cahill gets all drunk on the subway, and I'll still sit down for the old Jon Stewart and his Daily Show - a stalwart favourite since 2002 - but TV, when you only get two channels, means watching a lot of local news. The local news is always some lead story about: the dearth of/apparent unsafeness of the flu vaccine; a massive local fire; some boneheaded thing Americans are doing; a shooting. Then it's weather, sports, and a feel-good story about a local kid made good. Then I have my nap.

It's the same on the internet. I regularly read, like, three websites: Go Fug Yourself, to which I am fully and completely addicted; XKCD, which I remember to check maybe once a week; and Cracked, which, given the chance, I'll read everything they post. Dudes: this isn't enough. Wither the funny Youtube videos? Where is my addiction to online TV? How come I can't find anything new, anything fresh, anything that hold my interest for longer than a few months? My cultural currency is like, a peso.

I guess it's okay that I'm not totally addicted to the Next Big Thing on the internet, since I don't have an at-home connection and am loathe to spend hours in Robarts, which gives me a headache and makes me hungry. But I still feel a little out of cultural touch - it makes me wonder how I'm going to cope with I'm older. I mean, the things that grew up when I was growing up include: home computers, cell phones, digital cameras, Discmans (Discmen?), iPods that shuffle songs when you shake them, talking to your car, phones that fit inside your damned ear, hologram newscasters, and making long-distance phone calls on your computer.

Do I own any of those things? Nope. I am so technologically ill-adapted at this point, when someone hands me an iPhone, I return it and demand a phone with numbers. I can't work this shit. I have been alive for 26 years. What the hell am I going to do when I'm in my fifties? I can't drive a regular car; how I am supposed to drive my flying car?

In a way, it's a relief not to keep up with the trends; if something's really important, people will tell me about it. Like the Beyonce video that everyone spazzed about this summer. It sort of clears the path of all the look-at-me crap that's out there competing on 456 different channels and a zillion websites. With a DVD player, a stereo system and a land line, we can figure it all out, and still have time for a nap.

2 comments:

  1. I don't think most of what's hot on youtube could be defined as culture, but fuck it's funny
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhEw4nKPmyI

    ReplyDelete
  2. Check out Hark, a vagrant!

    http://www.harkavagrant.com

    ReplyDelete