Tag: Alvin Toffler

2012 Bookmarking

I used to rely on researchers like the Tofflers (Future Shock) to “see” into the future.

For instance, the pro-sumer trend, the mismatching speeds among various sectors ( IT, Financial, Educational, Governmental…in that order).

Lately, all I came across in Futurism was 2012 prophecy .

Like it or not, this year will have come down as a special year, if not, end of an era.

Let me explain.

We had a bloody closure on a terrible event which Tom Wolfe ably put “New York got knocked out of its two front teeth”. Then, Sandy rinsed through the Big Apple as if to complete this dental procedure.

Up North, we buried school kids died not of their own choices.

In today’s NYT Op-Ed, Father Kevin was quoted as saying “we are God’s presence to extend Mercy incarnate to one another”.

2012 marked a year full of flood and blood.

Dark Night Rises, while  we hardly hear George Harrison‘s Heres Comes the Sun.

I wish I can still rely on the likes of Tofflers to point out where our technological society is heading.

But then, while focusing on I-phone, I-pad and I-pod, we forgot the I-ndividual.

Consumer or Prosumer, the individual loves, laughs and learns.

When the power is out, and the water level keeps rising, people suffer.

Don’t tell me it’s war time (which somehow makes suffering a matter of fate).

It’s peace time. And we can’t handle the truth, still.

The truth is: we are victims of our own progress. We live too long, consume too much and complain far too little (venting does not affect change)

I love technology when it humanizes our society. It carries us to far-away places. But technology makes it too easy for kids to take down kids (compare to No Easy Day – set in Pakistan – Newtown shooting was far too Easy a day).

I know we will soon rid of the keyboard, mouse and monitor. The technology has already been beta-tested. Those are good stuff.

Softwares continue to rule the day.

James Bond already paired up with a much younger whiz, while his boss is nearing retirement. Signs of the time.

What it is ain’t exactly clear.

But if we don’t hear Here Comes the Sun, at least I suggest we click on “It don’t come easy“. Always with a price. Insurance companies are quick to spread the liabilities and costs, but slow to recompense.

Same with everything else. Statement comes due. Rent is up. It don’t come easy. But somehow, being “mercy incarnate” to one another doesn’t come at all. We barely grasp the concept much less putting it into practice. Yet other “right” such as the right to bear arms, has been built-in as second nature. I propose another amendment: next to the right to bear arms is the responsibility to pay for the victims killed by arms.

No Farewell to Arms. Own them, but just realize, like other technologies, everything comes with a price. Why should someone’s kids be your target practice. And why should civilized society be forced to make an U-turn back to Pre-Khan Mongolian era to pamper the rights of a few (9 guns out of every ten Americans). 2012. Something about that number.

Hate it or like it, we still have a few more days before Count Down. Have a “closure” weekend. Remember to plug-in your electronic devices, and while at it, plug yourself in as well. We need to be recharged as much as those things we have created.

Au cinema

When Facebook profile (soon to be called Timeline) needs me to complete my favorite movie section, I put down Cinema Paradiso.

It’s in Blu-ray now (Oscar-winning, well-preserved quality). It’s about growing up in an Italian village, with the cinema , Cinema Paradiso, as central theme. It was later demolished to make room for a parking lot. It’s a coming-of-age movie, with movie house no longer pro-fit-able (like Friendly’s ice-cream chain).  It mourned for the Best of youth, with melancholy and nostalgia.

It’s every man and woman’s twist-and-turn of fate, like an amusement park ride.

Mine was also related to a neighborhood cinema, one of dozen own by my uncle.

So I got in free, double or single features. My cousin just waved me in, no ticket was required.

I shed a lot of tears there in that darkened theatre.

I also watched Woodstock, the movie, a couple of times (Ten Years After, remember?) and was amazed at the energy and freedom of  American youth.

I even took my first date there, and half way through the movie, we sneaked out for a smoothie.

The theater is now own by someone else while both my uncle and cousin were no longer with us.

I sat across the street from it on one of my trips back to Vietnam. After I had finished my smoothie, I stood up and did not look back.

One cannot swim in the same current twice.

Yet, like the character in Cinema Paradiso, I often wonder what’s like to have lived the second time around.

Would I be embarrassed by a sudden surge of youthful feelings?

Can grown-ups like me indulge in another treat that of a child?

Will my first date and I even recognize each other however precarious the encounter may turn out to be?

I wish I could fade in the music piece (Cinema Serenade) from the movie right now.

It never fails to bring back scenes from the movie, but also, scenes from our own interrupted lives.

It’s so Italian yet so universal. “Go, don’t come back here”.

A little over ten years ago, they demolished a drive-in theater in Southern California to build a Walmart. Every time I drove past that site, I couldn’t help thinking of the old drive-in (teenagers were denied another place to hang out, unlike when my cousin took the projector home to show family wedding clips to hundreds of kids out in the open).

I guess that same sentiment was a trigger for the making of Cinema Paradiso: the loss of a gathering point, a common space and screen where we all are projectionists (self-projection). People nap, snore, kiss, eat and sometimes, just escape summer heat.

Now, we got home theaters (buy now, pay later) but it’s a solitary not communal act of viewing.

And certainly, no adult is going to take time to show a kid how to load a film reel inside the projections booth, or as in my case, wave me in to see a movie for free.

Yes, it’s now in Blu-ray: neither grainy nor counting down (or waiting for the second projector to kick in during intermission.) And certainly no attendant with flash light.

Technology (digital) brings change, at neck-breaking speed (hockey-stick curve), while our ability to adopt is bell-shaped.

I have waited for Alvin Toffler to come out with more of his series (which began with Future Shock). But apparently, yesterday’s futurist is today’s museum curator.

The thing with speed is, like the bullet train in Shanghai, no one knows how damaging the impact is going to be when two fast-flying objects collide.

I felt that gnawing in my stomach when taken up to the top of an amusement ride. I know it will soon drop me mercilessly with kids sitting behind screaming like characters in a horror movie.

The best scene in Cinema Paradiso was the one which our Toto enjoyed a stress-free ride leaving Alfredo with all the hard pedaling.

Mathmatically Vietnam

Berkeley is popular with Asian students. Last weekend, I heard that an acquaintance got accepted and would be travelling to Houston to start college.

But many young Vietnamese study abroad chose University of Chicago.

It is no surprise  that Ngo Bao Chau, the math wiz, pitched his tent there.

Windy city. Cold. Home of Oprah and Ebert, the late movie critic.

I spent two years in a Chicago suburb, with my long coat in tow.

And one of my recent jobs was with a company based in Chicago.

So, Chicago, Chicago. Memories of jogging along the railway, in freezing temperature. You got to be there to experience heartland America. You have to read “The Devil in the White City” to understand Chicago’s place in the scheme of things.

Sears tower is no longer called Sears. Nor is it now world’s tallest.

Chicago itself used to be America’s number 2 city.

Now, at least, U of Chicago might, in a few hours, have its Vietnamese faculty receiving the highest honor in Mathematics.

I blogged yesterday about “revving without a cause”, about urban youth in Saigon. Today, I feel proud to share the heritage with one of world’s math treasures.

I ponder what makes someone a genius, while others would flush their lives down the toilet. Don’t they know, life zooms by faster than the speed of their bikes?

Even the author of Future Shock (Alvin Toffler) admits that his prediction wasn’t nearly “fast” enough for today’s speed of change.  Bill Gates, author of  “the Speed of thought”, missed the importance of the internet and the web (I know they are playing catch-up with cloud computing).

Energy, matters, and motion.

Cultures and technology converge and collide.

Generations with restless dreams, and unmet aspiration.

Fashion TV fuels the fire, while in reality its audience couldn’t afford a decent lunch (which is better than its models who mostly starved themselves to death).

So young Vietnamese girls try out for Vietnam’s Next Top Model.

The drop-outs packed up to work as “PR”, nothing to do with the profession of Public Relations.  Tuoi Tre, syndicated through Yahoo Vietnam, ran a nine-part expose of the trade. Mostly about how young girls having to endure trade abuse just to get some tips e.g. old foreign man, putting kleenex in their chest, and pulling the tissues out as if their bras were a tissue box or the infamous tale of a gangster who used $100 bills, folded, to shoot at PR’s like young brats would at birds.

In this boiling hot-pot, I have found mixture of the good, bad and ugly.

Math wiz, born to be wild, and modern-day Geishas. All here, and now.

Some thoughtful folks would chuckle, yet end up de-sensitized because life is what it is. Yesterday’s enemies become today’s best friends.

And most surprisingly, it’s not our friends who know us best. It often is the opposite. I am thinking of the McCain (warship) once docked at China Beach.

I am sure someone on that carrier know the ins and outs of Da Nang’s terrains.

All quiet now on the Eastern front. For now, the nation stands still awaiting the news. Big news. All of a sudden, numbers and math become chic here.

And for once, I breathe a sight of relief. The audience is tuning in to a show other than Fashion TV or World Cup. They are tuning in to await Nobel-equal Fields prize for Math. It may very well be one of our own, Ngo Bao Chau.

http://vnexpress.net/GL/Khoa-hoc/2010/08/3BA1F68C/

As of this edit, Bao Chau indeed got the prize which mathmatically puts Vietnam on the equation (better than known for beer consumption).