Hot Topic

Writing about the Colorado movie shooting is probably the right thing to do, but I don't know that I have a lot to say about it. The incident has inspired some gun control debate, but mostly even that has played out how anything else in the public sphere plays out anymore, in the exchange of tepid one-liners on Twitter or in ideas expressed in word balloons coming out of the heads of kittens in pictures posted on Facebook. Seriously, I'm waiting for popular culture to hit the media saturation point where we all get over the cuteness of kittens due to abusive overexposure the same way we all once got sick of looking at the cast of Friends.

I'm not saying that things are necessarily worse now than they have ever been or in any way fundamentally different than in America's past in terms of popular culture. We were, as a nation, born after the invention of moveable type and thus have always been, even from conception, a mass media culture. The pace is a bit faster, sure, but the only evidence we really have left of how things used to be is in examples of stuff people chose to hold on to or were popular enough to have survived by sheer weight of numbers. Both groups are self-selecting for quality. I don't know what the colonial equivalent of lolcats was, but I'm certain there was something that made parents throw their tricornered hats in vexation when faced with the degenerate wastrels and blackguards their children were withering in to, wasting all their time with penny broadsheets, writing in their inane truncated language to save precious paper space.

What feels like the white-hot pace of news and information is only relative. It has to have felt just as modern and overheated when the first mail trains arrived, delivering news from three states away in a blinding, unprecedented four to seven days. Imagine the cultural exhaustion of, just a few years later, trying to wrap your head around the communicational ephemera of the telegraph.

It took over 2,000 years to get from Pheidippides running a message from Marathon to the telegraph and only 200 years or so to get from there to naked pictures of Snooki on a smartphone, so I can see the argument that a) the rate of advancement has increased somewhat and b) sometimes evil happens because of it. I guess my point is that, yes, sometimes the result of the New Now is a plugged-in immediacy that both informs and inundates; it breeds both paranoia and numbed indifference, depending on the subject. And yes, a vast majority of what's produced in the rolling digital media isn't always an efficient or worthwhile use of your time. I guess what I'm saying is: thanks for reading.