I’m too old to have one. Unless I ultimately live to 140. If so, this is mine. One of them.
3rdActs.com is actually over two years old. That’s midlife in Internet Time. This struggling, waffling site is ancient, as far as the headlong Web rush is concerned. Nevertheless, we continue to search for our identity as a communications entity.
What the hell kind of sentence is that? “…we continue to search for our identity as a communications entity…” Jeez. It’s a Website, stupid.
OK, let me try this again. I’m writing on this site about my life, and those of others in America who are now living the years when it is increasingly impossible to deny we’re getting old. This post is just my affirmation that I’m in this for the long run, so to speak. There are important issues to address, and vast, deep happiness to celebrate. Stay tuned.
Are smartphones and the Web turning us into scatterbrains? No argument there.
There’s too much information out there. Always has been, but it’s worse now, because digital communications technology makes us feel like we ought to be able to take it all in and use it.
I wrote about the information tsunami the other day. As I said then, I spend a lot of time on this problem, trying to keep up. Which makes it hard to find time for all the other things I want to do before I die. For example, I’m writing a novel, which can’t be done in multitasking bursts.
Today I’m trying to keep up with the raging debate on whether our smartphone-Web addiction is making us stupid, or crazy. This takes time: to read up on stuff that might prevent us from frying our brains.
Stephen Pinker, Harvard psychologist, says our fragmented Web world isn’t hurting our brains at all. Nicholas Carr, tech writer and another Harvard man, says Oh yeah?
These links are not shortcuts to total enlightenment, but these thinkers provide efficient information as they make their points. Their argument illuminates. Read up, then go outside and take some time to smell the flowers.
Update: 6/13/10 7:25PM PT — Here’s a link to a great reader’s site. Arts & Letters Daily. And here’s an older article on modern digital life, from the New York Times.
* Saturday, 6/12 — According to a recent fortune cookie, this is my lucky day. Hope I’m not jinxing it by telling. Looks like spring has arrived in Yakima, finally. Or maybe it’s summer. Anyway, we’re supposed to have 80s today. Now here’s TMI about my neighborhood — found it while looking up the weather.
* The Velcro on my pants pockets is too strong. Really. Is there a Velcro-Lite? Answer: No.
* I’ve been reading Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 for the first time. This guy seemed amazingly right for the 70s. So much of his artistic absurdity seems just silly now that I’m 71. Maybe it’s just me. I’m gonna go back and reread Gravity’s Rainbow, which I thought was so great in 1974. Or should I just let it be?
* According to our TV news stations, Yakima is suffering a rash of women molesting 14-year-old boys (KNDO-TV, KIMA). And you thought this was a small town…
* I’ve been noticing subtle changes in my not-so-local NPR station lately (Yakima has one of about 18 transmitters of Northwest Public Radio, the FM network of Washington State University). I’m guessing that the new manager is encouraging his starched on-air staff to, uh, warm it up a little. I’m what the digital geeks would call a “granular” listener. Old radio guys are like that. Anyway, the Unversity Women who host most of the station’s classical music shows seem to be trying to have a teensy bit more oh-so-careful fun. And the guy who’s always sounded more like the highway department’s robotic traffic info voice is actually starting to emulate native English-speakers (American genus). I’m experiencing 12 percent less tooth-gnashing while listening so far this month. You may read this as a rave.
Too much information — means “more than I want to know.” It’s a joke, folks.
I spend quite a bit of energy on the too-much-too-little info debate — the one going on in my head. You can’t simplify your life, you know. The Internet presents us with every imaginable source. How do you select credible sources?
Wait. It is possible to simplify your life. Just go to news and info sources that reinforce what you think you know! Glenn Beck, Rachel Maddow. Fox News, the New York Times, or the Washington Times.
What you become is a doctrinaire Wild Eyed Liberal, or a member of the Tea Party. But it’s a simple life.
I think about this stuff a lot, not because I’m a news junkie or a policy wonk. I’m a media guy. I know just enough about how the system doesn’t work to obsess about it. And of course, full disclosure, I no doubt seek news and information that reinforces what I think I know. That it’s possible to find a news source that isn’t biased. Well, it ought to be.
You know, when you look at the home pages of the news organizations mentioned above, you find the same stories, presented pretty much straightforwardly. You can’t really tell — just by looking at their “stacking” of the news, whether they’re biased. Can you?
In fact, Krishna Bharat, the Google News genius, interviewed by James Fallows in the Atlantic, finds this practice curious. He suggests that news companies ought to be trying to differentiate themselves from everybody else. Scary thought, actually, if you’re reassured when your favorite news sources agree on what’s news.
If you’re interested in a different take on what are the big stories, look at GlobalPost.com, a new Web source that takes a, well, global approach.
I’ll keep struggling with this. It’s what I do.
How do you deal with the information fire hose? Click below to comment.
I’ve been accused recently, and not so recently too, of being too pushy, insistent, angry. It’s come with my emergence into old age, and I consider it growth. I’ll try to be a little less aggressive — stick to the facts and try not to piss too many people off, but I believe I should speak directly about facts and my opinions.
Two famous people are in the news right now for their outspokenness, or lack of it — iconic White House reporter Helen Thomas and White House resident Barack Obama.
Helen has just “resigned” at age 89, after some characteristically direct comments about Israelis, Palestinians and Gaza. Above, from YouTube, one of the video packages produced to expose her, up close and personal. If you’re a reporter, you’re not supposed to present your opinions in such unambiguous terms. Of course this is Helen’s trademark, and her pungent positions are usually framed as questions to the President. Make declarative sentences about Israel and you’re in trouble. Sorry, Helen. It’s time to go. Which, in our surprising new media world, may not be the last we hear from her — I wouldn’t be surprised if Roger Ailes isn’t eyeing her with interest right now.
Obama? I mention him here only because the adrenalin marketing business — media — have been hounding him for his equanimity over the Gulf mess. And they’re reporting that Barack’s expressing more anger lately as the result of their nagging. I say, nuts. We need our President to keep his head. There’s plenty of spleen on display.
Buick TV commercial: “The new LaCrosse lets you pause live radio broadcasts…”
I have to buy a whole car to get this feature?
I mean, in every other way this is a normal TV commercial. They’re showing me a sleek, shiny automobile moving through a cityscape. It’s a slick, expensively produced TV commercial. But, get this — the car stops and moves backward, and stops and moves forward, to illustrate pausing and rewinding the live radio broadcast you’re listening to in your Buick.
This is General Motors talking to me — trying to sell me a Buick, leading with the radio.
I’m sitting in the Starbucks on Madison in Seattle, just down the street from where I took that picture at the top of the page last fall. This morning Madison looks pretty much identical. Light rain, 50s F.
As soon as I finish this post, I’m taking off to Yakima. Just spent the weekend with my longtime writers group in a cabin in Tahuya, in the middle of the woods of the Kitsap Peninsula, just short of Hood Canal. (Google-Earth it.) I’m happy — got my novel kick-started again.
Thought I’d try the McDonalds across the street — free wi-fi. Mistake. I did eat some nice hotcakes among the diverse crowd that gathers there early every day. Hospital workers in scrubs and post-run sweats — three big health complexes nearby; druggies from the methadone dispensary down the street, with their etched frown-grins. Other city hardies — the tall dude with the big black umbrella to protect his lime-green suit and homburg just walked by.
The McD wi-fi was moving like AOL in 1994, so I gave up and bopped across the street to SBux for Plan B: my usual forgot-my-password-and-username hassle, which consumed twenty minutes. Anyway, I’m online, and it’s time to go.
Bye for now, cops and nurses, Asian guy who returns to lean on the plate glass window next to me every three minutes, seventy-something man in Kelly green sweatpants (What’s with green this morning?), street people of all life-stations, and Seattle’s sky-blue police cruisers.
I haven’t thought it through — the Gore breakup — and I’m averse to doing so. I do think that Al and Tipper (look at me, talking about them as if I knew them — just like you’re thinking of them, I bet) are courageous and generous, announcing this move to us and letting us do what we will with it.
But, then, they’re seasoned, political professionals, and they understand people better than most public figures. They can take what the desperate media will dish out and remain calm. There ain’t no story here, kids. Move along.
Is it O.K. to be happy on Memorial Day weekend? Well, I am. So, thanks to all the souls who fought the wars we got ourselves into, and especially those who didn’t come back. At least you didn’t live in ambiguity, nor die in vain. And special thanks to those who fight today. Keep safe as you can. Happy Memorial Day.
I’m with my family, thanks to all of you, in the Washington State mountains, in a campground near Leavenworth. There’s wi-fi here in the big lodge, so I can send you greetings with an authentic today view down one of the lanes. That sunshine comes and goes, because spring is late all over the Northwest, but it’s O.K., because we’re here, together, and we have shelter from the occasional showers.
Have I gone completely bananas? No. And I’ll tell you why.
I’ve gone completely mad. I mean, angry. And if you’re not, you’re not paying attention.
Americans have been ready for huge changes and reform since long before the 2008 election. We’ve been angry and impatient to fix everything we’ve allowed big government and big business to do with our money and our country. In fact, we were so ready, all we needed was a smart, nice, articulate newcomer to say “Change” and a majority of us clasped him to our heaving bosoms. Yeah, he got the Democrat votes, and he ran as a Democrat, which is part of his problem.
Turns out we — all us non-joiners who joined the Democrats to elect him — wanted faster change than Barack Obama could possibly deliver, even if he had wanted to go fast. But no, he tried to create harmony at a dissonance festival. Rather than bulldozing Congressional Republicans to the curb.
He wanted to be the savior of our civility. And, I’m sorry, that’s not gonna happen. So, he spent a year he didn’t have and tried to work with an opposition that’s forgotten how to work with anybody else, even after their chosen ones derailed our government — “fixed” the bureaucracy so effectively that it couldn’t even clean up after a hurricane, much less put the brakes on financial “innovation”.
No wonder there’s a Tea Party. Call them ill-informed, crude, even stupid. But don’t call them unrepresentative. That’s why I’m thinking of joining them. I mean, who else shall I put my muscle, such as it is, behind? Wall Street? All they know how to do is gamble my money in the bonus market. Democrats? Republicans? They all read their dog-eared scripts. Sarah Palin and the rest of the demagogues who want to grab a tea-bag string? In a clean word, heck no.
We need a fresh infusion of civilians in Congress. Citizens who don’t care if they only serve one term. People who think of service as a duty, not a gravy train. Yes, we’ll end up with a bunch of hungry rookies who have to learn the ropes. But our system can handle that, too. We need faster change, to catch up with a world that’s passing us by. I may not actually sign up with the Tea boilers, but I’m redeclaring my independence from both parties. Change. You ain’t seen nothing yet. Bring it on.
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