I grew up in a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama. We would visit my dad’s parents every month, a 45-minute drive away, and I looked forward to every visit. It wasn’t because I liked my grandparents… Like my father, they were cold distant people who had no idea how to deal with a hyperactive boy like me, a kid who loved to read, explore and dream. No, the reason the visits excited me was because of what they had.
They would have the latest issues of Grit Magazine.
Grit was a weekly newspaper/magazine that was a compendium of various news and special interest stories that farmers and rural dwellers read. It was the New York Times of middle America. It was a window into a wider world, a Wikipedia in print.
And it had the Star Wars comic strip.
I loved it.
I’d take each issue and read it in the voracious way that all young boys do… Speed reading, without any grace or focus. And then I’d read it again. I’d cut out the articles that interested me, ones I wanted to keep for posterity. Because, if I didn’t save it, how would I ever be able to see/read it again?
Times change. No need to clip and save and paste into a scrapbook articles. We bookmark, and even hen we shouldn’t bother… It’s always just one search away.
Everything. At least, that’s what it seems like. And I think that’s both good and bad.
The good is obvious: instant ubiquitous access to the worlds knowledge. The bad… Well, I remember the excitement of discovery that I had, that adrenalin knowing that I was going to get that latest issue of Grit.
I think we have lost something…. that urgency and focus, because everything is available to us now. In real-time, we can see what people are thinking and saying, what is going on. We don’t need to wait for a weekly newspaper. We know everything NOW, and anything that happened before, our history, it is just a click away.
Yesterday is forever, now.
But… The moment, those transient moment that we have everyday… It’s not available on the Internet. It’s gone, in a flash… In an instant. We can take photos or videos but all those are are reflections of the thing. Ghosts. Because of this I’m scared that we are becoming a culture that doesn’t embrace the now, that doesn’t pay enough attention…
Because we could always Google it later.