Generator X

I've said before that twitter isn't really for me. It's possible that I'm just too old for it to have made sense. This I say realizing that the window for someone to be "too old" for something has gotten progressively smaller and smaller. Twitter isn't really any different from the way a facebook* news feed works in terms of the way information scrolls in, it's just that the volume of information available to be tapped in to is vastly, immeasurably, globally larger.

Facebook I get, but I got there through MySpace. And that I was prepped for by AOL and Prodigy. And those were a natural evolution for me as a veteran of local BBS systems, the dark corners of the ur-web, with their ASCII or ANSI artwork gateways that could only be passed with the shibboleth scream of a dialup modem.

I grew up with communications technology, with connectivity, so there should actually be an expectation of comfort or at least familiarity with each new iteration. One isn't really all that different from the next, except, I'm finding, by the natural self-selecting limits of audience demographics. There's nothing about the technology that's keeping me out, it's just that, as I creep past 40, in the communities these apps and programs create, I feel more and more like a creepy old guy interloper. Like someone's older brother who shows up at a high school pool party, oblivious of the hints to get lost.

I feel a little like that with twitter, although twitter is populated by some really old people. The further problem with twitter is that it feels less like a pool and more like an angry, swollen, raging river** flying by way too quickly to dare jump fully in. So I have a login and an account and a few people I follow, but I daren't say anything as it all feels a bit cacophonous; a lot of noise rising and falling, merging into a white static until it all cancels itself out. Plus everyone is trying so hard to be minimalist and quippy, it's like the world's longest Joss Whedon movie, but with way more racism.

I know Snapchat is a thing that I'm certainly not allowed to use, being over 19. And I know vaguely that there are other ones that have come after that, but honestly, I don't have the energy even to figure out what they are. They're like all the CSIs or NCISs on TV now, all kind of blending together, except with EXACTLY the opposite demographic bases. Actually now that I think about it, I think I chose two groups (Snapchat users and NCIS watchers) that would be 100% ignorant of the other's existence. I'd chart it for you, but I don't think you can call it a Venn diagram if the circles don't touch.

YouTube took me a long time, but I think I'm actually starting to get that. I'd used it here and there for clips of things and to put in the minimum hours of kitty and puppy videos mandated by California state law, but I really didn't twig the potential of it until my middle son was disappearing into his increasingly cave-like bedroom once he became a teenager, devouring an apparently endless stream of YouTube content. The first time he told me he was watching someone else play a video game he himself owned and could play whenever he wanted, I spent an entire 36 hours ragingly angry about... well, it turned out I couldn't figure out what. Now that I've had a couple of years to think about it, I'm pretty sure it was fear of my own looming death.

In 2010, though, YouTube got its hooks into me with the reaction video of the Landon Donovan late goal vs. Algeria putting the USA through to the second round of the 2010 World Cup. It's a short clip with shitty sound, blurry video, cut together by someone with a Michael Bay-like eye for dramatic subtlety... but the immediacy of it, the human candor, the authenticity of the response... I remember openly weeping. Not at the actual moment of the goal (well, OK...) but on seeing the compilation. Over and over and over...

Maybe we'll never get the clean response like that again, when a video like that was new on the pop culture scene. A cottage industry has grown up now around semi-professional reaction to things, like TV shows I've already seen or a superficial cross-platform vertical integration corporate synergy analysis of how a movie recalls information from other mass media products I can enjoy if I'd like, or even now, God help me, people playing video games I own and could play any time. But as "genuine" as the reactions are in those videos, they're done with the expectation of viewership where the gravity in the room is sticky and weightier due to (in some cases) a million eyeballs' worth of observer effect.

The weird result of the proliferation of this kind of content is that it exists in polar opposition to what is thought to be happening with broadcast television, where no one is watching anything live anymore. The thought was that all these avenues of consumption would cause fragmentation and alienation, one person to another, which is probably true to a certain extent. On the other hand, YouTube is allowing a lot of us, all of whom are watching when we like, to look in with other people experiencing the same thing, like say an episode of Game of Thrones, and either nod along or shake your head as either their reaction syncs with yours or they are just wrong people who feel things incorrectly.

So I think I get YouTube, but everything else... not designed with middle-aged white men in mind, really. I guess that's OK. I'd feel better about it I guess if I were finding new music on Spotify, but that thing seems to just be a tool for finding music I USED to like and locking me in a bubble with it, through which almost no new music can get in. But that's a post for another time. None of this is for nothing, though. Being too old for stuff and losing touch with current pop culture is the way the universe prepares us to die, softening the coming blow by having us withdraw a little at a time. I realize this is a very American consumerist point of view, but I was born in California in the 1970s. It's the only view I've really got.

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*I realize I'm failing to use capital letters for things like twitter and facebook. It's pretentious and precious of them to prefer that as a style point, but until an actual stylebook tells me differently, they get to keep being douchey and I will keep helping.

**Could have gone a lot of ways with those adjectives. You're welcome.