NYT columnist sums it up and I have nothing to add to it, maybe except the cross-cultural angle about change or perish.
I hear Yesterday’s lyric ” I am half a man I used to be”. ..
Technological leap forward (surround sound, anyone?). Star Wars itself has to keep up with its own 3-D version.
Google Eric Schmidt says “there is always the OFF button”, implying that we, human, are still in control (or IQ>AI).
Yet, how many of us even want to turn it off, just to again boot up.
Semantically, “friend” is a new definition for “contact”.
Acronyms are too long. We speak in short bursts “3-D”, “4-G” , “Hi-def” etc…
Stephen Cannell, Hollywood prolific screenwriter, recently passed away. The obituary shows him sitting next to an IBM Selectric (not I-Pad).
That generation (Norman Mailer, Andy Rooney …) has passed away.
Raw meat, raw man (BTW, Bruce Willis appeared on David Letterman, wearing a raw-meat toupee. He even dared Letterman to taste it).
Talking about paradox: the more society changes and moves on to the “cloud” somewhere, the more likely we long for the real and raw stuff of “yesterday”. (as of this edit, there is an op-ed in the NYT about French’s Bonjour Tristesse).
I never understood people who collect antique, until I put on Lennon’s Dream # 9 (he might be dead, but his dream is still alive).
Yesterday, I waited for an oil change. So I sat with my second of the Tatoo-girl trilogy (adult version of Harry Potter). Next to me was a gentleman immersed in his Sony E- reader. And here I was, still in paperback version.
Change or perish. It would be ironic to read “A La Recherche du temp perdu” by Proust, on a Kindle.
And the best book, according to Amazon’s Bezos is The Remains of the Day.
Thank you Mr Cohen of the NYT for a beautiful summation about where we are: at the crossroads of change. And the streets are now paved with conveyor. So even if we stand still,
it still carries us forward, no matter what.
The more we want to stay in place, the more we will have to change.
It is so true of what John Lennon said “life is what happens when you are planning something else”.
Thang Nguyen 555 