These days, I hardly use the TV anymore. OK, that sounded less ominous in my head. Sure, it’s still a relevant medium as far as broadcast news is concerned. Also, where else would one be part of a “global television event” such as Great Migrations on Nat Geo? Apart from those two reasons, I believe the long-standing usefulness of traditional media has been upstaged by a much more enabling format—the Internet (in geek terms, “the Interwebz”).
To illustrate, allow me to recount the recently concluded UAAP season. Although I was able to watch the first Ateneo-La Salle bout, time—and tickets!—would be much harder to get as the season progressed. Most people would probably avert their attention to TV in order to address the lack of edge-of-your-seat hoops goodness. I am NOT most people. But it’s likely that you had come to that conclusion since I used the word “octogenarian” two columns ago. But, yes, I digress. Anyway, how did I solve the problem of receiving blow-by-blows as they happen? Two words: social media.
Don’t you just hate it when you log-on to FB while the game is on, and your feed is flooded by updates telling you Kirk Long hit a three-pointer to cap off the first quarter? Seriously! It’s exactly the same on Twitter, the breeding ground for fail whales and attention whores. And all I usually want to do is know what’s on my followers’ minds, not have basketball statistics jammed down my gullet every fifteen seconds.
As you may infer, I’m not the biggest fan of Internet-borne spam—“We get it already! I don’t live under a rock!” Still, as your friendly neighborhood wannabe social media evangelist, I’d like to direct your attention to what’s outlined above and tell you there’s something exciting here.
Welcome to Generation Now. It all intuitively starts with the ubiquity of the Internet. For most people, it starts with Farmville, tweets and Forever Alone reblogs. Believe me, I’ve seen my fair share of drunk tweets and meme culture references to know the different ways to embarrass oneself these days. This is also Generation Wiki which changed the way crammers conducted business. If one were bold enough to try, it could be—just by editing a few lines of HTML—that a bonobo monkey named Harold created Microsoft.
I hope my point does not get lost in the details. The relevance of the Internet has completely revolutionized how I connect to my friends, parents, and even to Kanye West or Neil Gaiman. Easily my tendency to procrastinate has gone all the way to eleven. It has done away with the need for CRTs and transistor radios during sporting events, and made my phone the only scoreboard I’ll ever need.
I’d like to assert that today’s world is a geeky one. Whether as producer or consumer of techno-social realities, Generation Now is all about carpal tunnel syndrome and staring at tinier and tinier screens—a sci-fi writer’s wet dream. The world always changes, but the way it has at this particular point in time has me with a huge grin plastered on my bespectacled visage. w00t.
