--anonymous 13-year-old girl, as reported in today's Toronto Star
If you've a little time and half a mind for an entertaining diversion, I'd urge you to read this story, by E.M. Forster. It was my first real speculative fiction experience, read sometime in high school. I've since gone back and reread it several times, and my admiration for Forster's prescience continues to grow; it's now to the point where I've begun to wonder if he had access to some kind of time travel. The world he describes in here feels eerily similar to our own...moreso with every passing year.
I fancy myself to be pretty connected to what's going on. I listen to 680 News out of Toronto almost religiously..."three, four, five times a day", just as its advertisements ask me to. I watch Global National and the News Hour most nights. I've got a weekend subscription to the Star, though that's mostly for the long meaty articles. And of course I'm online. My media folder includes the Sun (it balances out the Star), the Globe, the Post, CBC...and reddit.com, which links just about everywhere.
So I'm pretty connected to the Vast Machine. Yet every day, it seems, something goes viral on the Internet and I'm always the last person to find out about it.
Turns out I'm behind the times. Many young people get their news almost exclusively from YouTube. I'm still having trouble wrapping my head around that. YouTube? I've always thought of that site as the ultimate PVR: a global repository of music videos, funny commercials, comedy clips, and political speeches. All of this stuff was, of course, televised first. Then there's the people trying to get famous by means of Jackass-type stunts and general lawlessness (for a while there, the in thing was to beat somebody up and record it for posterity).
I find it hard to take YouTube seriously as a genuine resource for breaking news. And yet...the huge propane explosion in northwest Toronto was on YouTube before any of the local media had reported it. The same goes for all manner of news, apparently. People flocked to hear interviews in the wake of the Manitoba bus tragedy, for instance.
This represents a paradigm shift. Not all that long ago, if you were lucky enough to have a videocamera ready to catch news in the offing, the first thing you did with the footage was try to sell it. It seems people these days (a) always have a videocamera handy and (b) don't care for money. Last I looked, YouTube doesn't pay a shiny dime for footage of any kind, no matter how dramatic.
More mystifying: I've looked at the YouTube homepage and while it does show videos "being viewed right now", there's nothing anywhere that says "see? see? This is today's media frenzy." How do people nose this stuff out?
My age has shut a door on my perceptions, methinks. Or perhaps I'm just not ready to submit wholly to the Machine.
As for Facebook being the place to "fix" things...huh?
I like Facebook. Though I get the feeling now I'm using it to maybe a trillionth of its potential. I used to play Scrabulous until that got shitcanned...now I play WordScraper, which just might be better. I keep in touch with old friends and relatives, like everybody else on Facebook. I've joined little discussion groups that mimic Usenet newsgroups. And...well, that's about it. Every now and again I get invited to join a group memorializing someone or on behalf of some cause. Very rarely will I even spare these things a second glance, because I just don't see the point. But there must be a point, because every time somebody dies there's a Facebook stampede. In lieu of flowers, send status updates. I just don't get it.
Protest groups: am I supposed to believe that 'the powers that be' give a good goddamn that seventy thousand people have joined a Facebook group in protest? People routinely ignore real-life petitions. Is a virtual one somehow more powerful? Increasingly, young people seem to think so, but does that make it true?
We're moving inexorably towards discarding the flesh-and-blood world I live in, and I don't like it one bit. There no longer seems to be a need to hear anyone's voice: people would much rather text than talk. I made a vow a couple of years ago never to send a text message as long as I live. I wonder how long I'll be able to keep that vow. At the rate things are going, I half expect the telephone to go the way of the telegraph within my lifetime.
In a world where everyone's experience is digitally uploaded at every opportunity and shared with the world, what value experiencing anything firsthand? In a world where people turn to their computer screens for solace, comfort and connection, we're already halfway to Machine worship. I have to admit, as much as I love many aspects of the 'Net, there's a little part of me that fears both it and what I become while I'm caught in it. That little part of me would dearly love for the Machine to stop.
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