Get your click on

The Internet, still in its infancy, but yet seems old hat. Between “My Space,” “Face Book,” and yes Blog nation, everything is thrown up for the world to observe. It’s a way to shout, “Look at me,” without anyone noticing.

It’s hard to pinpoint when we lost our patience, but we’re an ever-increasing society racked with slipped attention. Today, things move at breakneck speed, causing clutter, and confusion that makes our antiquated mind feel somewhat bored. While newspapers take their last breath and movies drift away from interesting plot lines and great dialogue in exchange for computer generated fakeness and unrealistic action scenes. We become restless and indifferent.

You can’t watch a newscast or sporting event without having information fly in tiny words from one side of the screen to the other. Somehow listening to an anchor report the news or becoming lost in the drama of a ballgame isn’t good enough. Now we must read while we watch. Thanks to technology we’ve ruined T.V.

Do we really need to know half the crap they peddle across the tube? Example, back when Hillary was still the smartest woman in the world, one of the yak news channels had braking news scroll across the screen. My attention was diverted from a pointless story about the economy to this earth shaking news. “Braking News… Braking News… Braking News…” This finally rolled by, “Ricky Martin has endorsed Hillary Clinton… Ricky Martin has endorsed Hillary Clinton…” Okay, in Ricky Martin’s heyday, he wasn’t relevant. You say you’ve never heard of Ricky Martin? Exactly, useless time filler disguised as braking news. Just because we have the ability to relay instant information doesn’t mean all information warrants a scroll, right?

Thanks to satellite, we’re able to view bombs dropped on a country a half a globe away. But also, we can see the latest drunken celebrity puking his guts out on the seat of a Porsche because someone captured the event on a cell phone and put it on YouTube.

It’s all about information. A nude photo of someone’s ex-girlfriend is posted in cyber space. Bloggers preach there own brand of gospel. Music and movies are illegally downloaded without regard to copyrights. And on and on the Internet turns. We click, we move on, and we forget about what we just saw. Never mind privacy or the law…just click and get your fix.

Nothing surprises us anymore. Sure we’re amused, but we seldom say, “Wow.”

The big question, what do we gain from this information age? The world is certainly smaller and more convenient. But at what cost? We’re losing our vocabulary, penmanship, and manners. Communicating is dumbed-down to text messaging.

The art of a handwritten letter went out sometime ago, and we behave much different in anonymity with a user name like “bigfella812”

We’re vague personalities clicking in space looking for anything new, where 25 seconds is an eternity and owning a blog is a rite of passage.

As soon as I click publish, this can be viewed world wide, (hence www.) In another day and time this would be magic and certainly mythical. How would Washington’s email to Jefferson read?

t,

u ok? i’m fine BUT NEED AMMO. u hear benedict is a traitor? i never trusted that guy. need favor, goggle diphtheria (sp) my internet service has been spotty since crossing the delaware.

sorry about the whole, i’m not volunteering for anything. u no martha she wants me home. foreword this to adams in paris, i’ve lost his email address and i need the name of his dentist

gotta go cornwallis just text me, this thing might be over before beerfest 81

hopefully this email gets through and i look foreword to reading you’re blog about cats.

gw :)

Each generation lives in a different world than the previous. It’s faster, more advanced and educated. However, with each generation, time and patience become scarce properties to this enlighten age. We’re trained to beat our mouse into submission until the page loads or the program is installed.

More often than not, news becomes blurred with fiction and facts float off into a never ending sea of argument between political hacks. (How’s that for a mixed metaphor?)

Sudden information might just be our downfall. Without enough time to ponder what happened, we move on to something else that’s about to happen. Yesterday’s news is one thing, but we’re talking about news that’s not even dry before it’s outdated.

But this is the state we live in, like trained monkeys anything is a mouse click away. No points are ever made, we just affirm the points we believe in and move on to the next page. We click, click, click looking at everything and absorbing nothing, gnats laugh at our attention span, we don’t think, we react, it’s in our cyber blood.

Cell phones, GPS, and iPods are this generation’s version of “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” We never pull into a gas station for directions. GPS cut out the middleman for conversation. Of course we’re always on the cell phone talking to friends, so why make new ones.

I’m guilty as anybody. You won’t find me playing the role of hypocrite, like others (Al Gore). Everyone who knows me knows I usually have some sort of device hooked up to my ears. A constant stream of information runs into my head, most of it worthless, but information just the same.

Like the masses, I’m trapped in a virtual world while the real one passes by.