I was talking recently with a good friend of mine who is similarly afflicted by this condition we call “the thirties,” when one or the other of us (who can remember?) brought up the fact that kids these days just don’t know the value of a good porn quest.
It’s sad that a decade and a half of technological progress means that today’s teenaged boy will never know the thrill of reaching under his dad’s mattress and pulling out a dog-eared copy of Playboy or a discretely labeled videotape. (Okay, so my dad drew a big “X” with a circle around it on his… but I bet your dad was more subtle about it.) Or training your eyes to go one vibrational cycle shy of epileptic to make sense of the scrambled nudity on the higher cable channels. Or (in perhaps the most desperate and pathetic example from my own adolescence), dumpster diving behind Stop, Look and Listen in hopes of finding a discarded box for Debbie Does Ernest, or whatever the porn du jour had been.
Equally sad is the fact that we’re already saying things like “kids these days have it so much easier…” But the thing is, it’s true. The Internet has made kids weak.
And it’s not just the porn. As a young smartass, I remember choosing the most bizarre and obscure subjects when the time came around to write reports. And, inevitably, I’d be driven to frustration (and most likely, making stuff up) as my local library — which had maybe twice as many books as we had at home — came up short. Back in those bleak, sunless days of the mid-1980s, I was at the mercy of my local librarian and her mysterious associate, Mr. Dewey Decimal. If they couldn’t help me, I could not be helped.
I suspect that these former power brokers are perhaps the worst casualties of the Information Age. Because, as much as I generally like and respect your average librarian (hi, Jim), who really needs them anymore? I mean, sure — you need people physically at the library to make sure homeless people aren’t using Redbook as toilet paper, or flashing their trenchcoats open in the Young Adults section (though I bet those kids have already seen worse on the Internet), but aside from helping those few elderly stragglers who insist on using a freaking card catalog in the twenty-first century, they seem largely obsolete at this point.
You know who else hates all this information at our fingertips? Retailers. Your average salesman cannot stand that we can research a product and pricing information before we set foot in their store. And don’t even get me started on travel agents. Because, seriously — unless you’re planning a multi-stop jaunt across Europe or something, what can some weenie at a keyboard do that you cannot do at your own keyboard? Very little, in my experience.
I suppose these disenfranchised people do have a point, in a certain sense. It must indeed be frustrating that any idiot with a laptop and a WiFi card thinks he’s an expert on… pretty much anything. But those people existed when we had PBS documentaries and encyclopedias, so I suspect they always will. The Internet just makes them more ridiculous, and consequently, easier to spot.
And speaking of encyclopedias, that’s who I feel the most sorry for in all this: the encyclopedia salesmen. That was pretty thankless work to begin with, lugging all those books around, door-to-door. Now, unless you’re peddling to those same old folk who are quaintly looking up things in their goddamn card catalogs, you’re out of luck. A moment of silence, please, for that poor kid who had a report due on space, and the disembodied voice who pushed him into a complete Encyclopedia Britannica set.
(Side note: I love the opportunity to type “encyclopedia” as much as I did in that paragraph. It was the first long word I learned to spell, thanks to the exploits of a certain clever young detective.)
Really though, this is an incredible age in which we live. Between Wikipedia (which is essentially the idea Douglas Adams had for a real-life Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, just prior to his death), imdb and tv.com, most of the information I need is two clicks away. (That’s one click for the link, and one to close the damned pop-up ad.)
Oh, and then there’s the YouTube, which — pardon my cliché — is addictive and pleasurable, like crack cocaine. If I could have all the hours back that I spent on the YouTube, watching old Sesame Street clips, or the intros to shows I loved in the 80s, or rare clips of stuff I’ve actually enjoyed since after I actually hit puberty… well, I’d probably be able to tack an extra few months on to my life.
And, on a more basic level, I think this whole situation has spoiled people like me. With infinite knowledge at my fingertips, not only do I not have to work for anything, but I also never get anything done. It’s a bit of a nightmare for someone as Attention Deficient as I, this constant parade of increasingly shinier objects is.
That eastern ideal that the journey is more important than the destination is starting to make a lot more sense to me in light of this situation. I almost miss those old quests of my youth, digging through bins for old comics or music or books. Everything’s just so damned easy these days. Sometimes having the infinity of human knowledge at your fingertips isn’t the blessing it appears to be. I think that was an old Star Trek once. Or maybe a Twilight Zone. I could probably go check, but then I’d get distracted and never finish this thing.
Then again, I do sometimes wish I could get back all that time I spent in my twenties, looking for the soundtrack to Fletch, only to eventually discover just how horrible it was. If only I could have those months of my life back. I’d add them to the reclaimed YouTube months, tack them on to the end of my life, then probably waste them watching porn. Which, to bring this thing full circle, is far too easy to find these days.
In summary: internet good. And bad. Complex conclusions like this are why you count on me to do the mental heavy lifting.