The Light of Day

Interwhat?
KeithHandy posted in Old skool on August 6th, 2006

Well. That was scary, surreal, and unnecessary.

I’ve just spent a weekend — most of it, before I couldn’t take it anymore — without any computers or guitars. The immediate realization was that I wouldn’t be working on music. The less-immediate realization was that I wouldn’t be doing a whole hell of a lot of anything. Thank you for existing, internet. I kiss you.

I’ve temporarily moved said items and sundry valuables to a TOP SECRET LOCALE, to protect them from dust and disappearance as the Village Gate crew tears down my wall. Techno-withdrawl is no laughing matter, people.

An eerily symbolic kick-start to my Weekend Of Nothing, I spotted an old copy of Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave on the floor of the communal bathroom. Hey, I remember that — I think my parents had that book. Pre-Amazon printings had the barely forgiveable tag line: THE BOOK THAT MAKES SENSE OF THE EXPLODING EIGHTIES. So, with nothing but a wide-open weekend between me and my curiosity, I snatched it up and got ready to compare notes. It is, after all, a quarter of a century later, and I wanted to see how well this guy was doing at foreseeing THE NOW.

For all the rave reviews it received, it doesn’t seem nearly as prophetic as I’d hoped. I wanted to go back and reveal what he was paying too much (colonization of the oceans and space, electronic circuits that would automatically turn your shower on in the morning) or too little (a computer-based bulletin board and “electronic mail”) attention to. Television was bound to become more democratic because of … the VCR? … cable? … video games where you can “play tennis right on your television”? People in a computerized economy would get jobs doing … “nobody knows”? Print media would lose its centralized power because of … photocopiers? There will be a computer in every home … to store recipes on? And the keyboard will soon be obsolete because speech recognition is right around the corner?

(It’s hard to believe how long ago 1980 was!)

I ached to tell him the actual television, radio and print media remains as centralized and untouchable (not to mention mediocre) as ever, but that as the computer gains resolution — visually, aurally, and computationally — it becomes the new television, becomes the recording studio, becomes the darkroom and printing press. And as for speech recognition, not only did it turn out to be way more difficult than anyone dreamed, but trust me, you don’t want it anyway. Speech will always be potentially ambiguous, even to other humans, and even if it wasn’t, how is a computer supposed to know when you’re just talking to someone else in the room?

But even this urge could have been suppressed if I only had the means to tell other people about what I was reading, and this is where my internet homesickness really became apparent. If I couldn’t tell Mr. Toffler about Google, Wikipedia, Bloglines, Flickr, and YouTube … at least I wanted those things back for myself!

So, thanks, Christy, for letting me borrow your Pismo for a few days. Once they get done tearing down my wall, I can come back to 2006 and pick up where I left off.