| Image via Willie Lunchmeat |
I don’t know about you guys, but I can only hear so much about social media without wanting to move to the Australian Outback (the region, not the restaurant) to open my own kangaroo farm. Look, I’m not some old rip who can’t hack new technology — most of it I love — but do you ever feel like there’s just too much noise out there? When car manufacturers start telling you to go to their YouTube channel to see how their dramatic commercial ends, or your auto insurance agent pesters you to follow him on Twitter to get great safety tips, doesn’t it kinda, sorta make you want to move to a remote island, where status updates are limited to smoke signals? It’s amazing to me that even in the midst of this so-called communications golden age we are seeing a huge upswing in the number of teens twirling “Little Caesar’s Pizza” signs at busy intersections. They’ve got Twitter, Facebook, Groupon — a practically infinite number of free methods of mass communication with which to market themselves — and yet there’s that doofy teen doing the Dougie with a poster board on the sidewalk. And why do they do this? Because everything else in this world is too darn loud, and I don’t mean just decibels. There is so much competing for our attention that the only way anybody can get a word in edgewise is by dancing in front of us where we can’t (easily) ignore them. What’s next? Will the dry cleaners start throwing bricks through my window with coupons attached? The worst part of all this is that I don’t have a clue how to fix any of this. I consume entirely way too much entertainment and information than is healthy. Rarely do I make it to the end of a newspaper article, much less a book. Instead, I dart around the web gobbling up news just sentences at a time, or paragraphs if I’m feel really patient. When there’s so much begging for my eyeballs, who has time to make it all the way to the end of that 3-minute video? Thirty seconds is enough to get the gist. And even though I’m not handy or hardy in any sense, sometimes I get these odd aches to go build a bookshelf, or bust my butt as a logger in Alaska. Either of these would be disastrous, as anybody that’s watched me hang a picture frame could attest, but I think it’s just my inner human being longing to escape the exhausting electronic fuzz of this world, if only for a little while. Like I said, I’m all complaints and no answers on this one. But if anybody has any connections with an Australian kangaroo rancher who’s looking for a pair of mildly sturdy hands (though they do get kind of dry and cracked in the winter), please put a good word in for yours truly. |
