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Wednesday, September 06, 2006
That's my favorite caffeinergy sauce!
Ok, so here I am posting again, hopefully this will be more regular this term. So, the coming soon poetry section is acctually almost done, the A&E page may take a little longer though. Right now I have homework to do, but a good blog is in the works and it should be up this weekend. But for now I will leave you with a snippet from one of my favorite authors Douglas Adam's from his article, "How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet."

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I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

This subjective view plays odd tricks on us, of course. For instance, ‘interactivity’ is one of those neologisms that Mr Humphrys likes to dangle between a pair of verbal tweezers, but the reason we suddenly need such a word is that during this century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport – the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.

I expect that history will show ‘normal’ mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this. ‘Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn’t do anything? Didn’t everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?’

‘Yes, child, that’s why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.’

‘What was the Restoration again, please, miss?’

‘The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity back.’

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The whole article can be found here - How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet

Posted at 9/6/2006 1:46:43 am by Jason Richard Taylor

Saint
September 6, 2006   04:36 PM PDT
 
Huzzah for Douglas Adams!
 

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