It's morbidly fascinating for boomers like myself to feel our wires getting fondled and pulled free and reconfigured by a rapidly morphing media environment. Or, to use a new-school metaphor, sometimes I feel like a device who's been set to automatically update with the latest paradigm when I plug into the stream. What's the paradigm of the week? Podcasting and YouTube are installed and running smoothly in my mental hard drive, while Flickr and MySpace are still just, uh, a little too immersion-driven for this passive consumer to run without fear of crashing my system. My point here is that it can be a truly visceral experience: I can practically feel my neurons pushings out shoots and branches to handle the load. But (metaphor number three— or is it four?) it'll be a while before I develop the gills and fins to swim freely in this new ocean with all the newbies.
Speaking of which, Gen X and Gen Y are probably not quite as self-conscious of how they engage media culture, or else don't very much care...
Whatever. Gen X took to PCs as naturally as we took to TV, and certainly Gen Y is genetically equipped to morph on command; clunky "re-wiring" is of no concern to them. In fact I'm sure I've got the wrong metaphor here: the appropriate technology hasn't arrived yet. In any case it'll be something more organic. No wires or sparks. Something to do with flux, or clouds, or ecosystems, or glands. You know, like how in
Alien the android Ash turns out to be all soft and sloppy inside like a
real organism?
Alright, that's it. I wash my hands of the matter. Let the kids figure it out; I just ate breakfast.
