Joe Moody’s Web Adventures

With our remote-controls and keyboards, we not only surf TV or the Web, we surf reality itself. Reality is a summation of the five senses. The infinite possibilities of our digital environment enables people to change reality like changing a channel.

There is no mainstream anymore, just many streams running into the same ocean.

• from having 3 Network TV stations most watched, to hundreds of channels on digital cable or satellite

•  from Casey Kasum’s American Top 40, to Napster and iTunes

• from one superpower opposing us, to hidden terrorists communicating over the internet globally

•  from the locally owned “Ma and Pa” grocery store, to WalMart Online

Instead of having one career for life, Generation X migrates through multiple career paths. The journey becomes the end. This is our psychological defense to the cutthroat nature of the corporate environment, with downsizing, outsourcing and technologically driven change.

The result is less loyalty to corporations, less expectations, more willingness to learn new skills, and overall apathy when it comes to turning a buck. We surf from job to job, reality to reality, whatever pays the bills.

Previous generations had a handful of television channels, many of us now have so many channels we don’t even know how many or what’s on them. It’s like when McDonald’s surpassed the 99 billion served and stopped counting. Nobody knows how many they’ve served but it’s a hell of a lot.

Technologies like DVR’s (digital video recorders) and TiVo further enable people to select the particular reality of their choosing, or surf several, with no ads or time constraints.

Video games enable people to interact with simulated realities, not only are they becoming more lifelike, but they are becoming one of the entertainment industry’s greatest money makers.

The Internet allows people to connect with unique groups or others who share similar lives globally, providing unlimited ways for ordinary citizens to customize their own reality.

Like the endless rows of the newest super-center, a new world of influences, distractions and empowerment have emerged unique to the digital society.

Just as the catcher’s mitt, or the hammer, or sword, are physical enhancements, the computer is a mental enhancement. Old fashioned tools empower physical abilities. The computer, a powerful extension of our mind, enhances and even changes how our minds function.

The difference in the digital mind is that it thinks more abstractly, from more perspectives:

• Computers enable us to interact without physical limits. Our office desk is available anywhere on our wireless laptop, people interact from anywhere on Internet chat rooms or online games.

• Today’s digitized movies are potent examples of how non-existent beings imagined by a storyteller can appear as real as sunlight.

• Before the digital clock was the face clock: pointers moving around the dial of a face clock were a much more physical representation of time. The digital clock is a numeric representation of time with no beginning or end.

• Before the CD was the phonograph record: its needle riding along the mountains of the vinyl disk, compared with a compact disk where sounds (and now images) are stored as electronic bits and played back by a laser beam.

• Before the computer was the typewriter: its set of metal stamps punching ribben into the paper, as compared to Microsoft Word, software made up of code.

• Before the cell phone was the rotary telephone: each digit of someone’s phone number dialed manually, compared with a voice activated Motorola.

We exist in an entirely different rhythm of time and space. Realities can be simulated, distances shrink with Internet connections, time warps in the wireless network. Our own neural networks, which created the digital networks, cannot help but be influenced by our own creations.

Clinton was a good steward of the new information society unfolding, mainly by allowing the tech boom to flourish without government intrusion.

The web, however, owes its roots to the government. Like many technologies, the Internet would not exist without military technology.

The Internet was born around when most of Generation X took their first breath in the early 1970s. It was created as a way to decentralizing info sharing by networking computers. If one computer failed or was bombed, other computers in the network would continue operating and information would continue to flow.

After such a network was in place, it didn’t take long to be converted for more civilian purposes: first by companies and universities and by the late 1980s birthday greetings sent as electronic mail and “newsgroups” like rec-music-dylan or alt-tasteless-jokes filled the circuits.

Email brought back the written letter as a primary form of communication, previously overshadowed by the phone. Newsgroups allowed people of common interests from all over the world to share information online.

But online life didn’t truly come of age until the invention of the Web. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist, created the original program in Geneva in 1989. It would allow for the organization and linking of pages in a network, referred to as a Web. People could easily surf this web with a web browser, like Mosiac of Netscape.

Web browsers quickly evolved from text-only to showing pictures and later audio and video. The Internet spilled out to the general population and became the biggest invention since television or radio before it.

It appeared to many at first that the Web would be a passing fad, but it began saving businesses expenditures, while opening new markets not yet realized. The Internet soon became an essential tool for business.

By empowering people to publish their own content to a worldwide audience, the Web decentralized the media, and even culture itself.

This was first evident in the publishing and newspaper industry. One did not need to go through a publishing house filter or editor to get a message out to the masses.

Matt Drudge of the DrudgeReport.com was a prime example of one man with a Web page publishing to the world.

Drudge became famous after publishing the first piece of what would become the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal. It didn’t take long for it to reach every media outlet everywhere.

A glance at Drudge’s website today often foretells what stories dominate the mainstream media tomorrow.

Amid all the optimism of this emerging digital world, there was also apprehension.

Some feared the Web would make radio, TV and print obsolete, but it actually gave old media a new angle:

• The encyclopedia Britannica didn’t become outdated, it went online.

• Radio didn’t become obsolete, it expanded its reach worldwide online and via satellite

•  The Wall Street Journal and New York Times didn’t fold, they created lucrative online editions.

•  Books and magazines didn’t go out of style, they flourished online in the form of e-books and e-zines, inspiring and reinventing established print magazines.

Surround sound DVDs began streaming through broadband connections. With pay-per-view and i-Tunes, viewers can rent a movie or buy a CD without a trip to the store, without even a plastic case to hold it.

With virtual reality games, people are submersing existence intself into the digital, like characters in the sci-fi movie Tron: digital representations of the self.

The Old Testament talks about man as created in God’s likeness. As we reinvent our likeness, will we lose the original?

After communism fell, popular sentiment turned to domestic issues. America was ready for a different kind of leader, and baby boomers seemed ready to put to one of their own in the Oval Office.

The election of Bill Clinton in 1992 was first perceived as a dream come true for boomers wanting another JFK. He was a young, vibrant president who echoed their social causes in many ways.

For the younger generation, the election of Clinton signaled more relaxed times. The first baby boom president sparked a whole revival in 60’s outlooks and aspirations.

The threat of world destruction from nuclear warfare seemed a distant possibility, some took an interest in their parents form of rebellion, making a group like the Grateful Dead the top selling act in the early 90s.

It wasn’t that Generation X necessarily believed in any of the utopian pipe dreams, it was simply another reality to surf.

There was a different kind of revolution quietly underway which would open up even more realities to surf.

The architecture of a new “World Wide Web” grew globally, constructed mostly by young “slackers” discovering new ways to work, socialize and interact.

The metallic 80’s morph into an earthier 90’s, remnants of the 70s like bell-bottoms, Earth Day and the Grateful Dead reemerge. This youthful interest was not seen as any final answer to life, but something different to try in the increasingly colorful wheel of life.

The young generation’s overall mood shifted from materialistic to apathetic: “Black hole sun, won’t you come,” grunged Soundgarden to the slacker nation.

Culture shifted to the cynical, from “Hands across America” to Beavis and Butthead: “Drums, guitar and Death. They finally got it right…huhhh huhh huh.”

When Douglas Copeland released the book “Generation X” in 1991, it branded the new generation. Generation X implied a void, nothing too special, spoiled by too much peace and economic prosperity, hyper-intellectual and utterly cynical.

There was no Viet Nam for Generation X, no Watergate. But we watched the freeing of the hostages to the relentless pursuit to win the Cold War.

For years since the mid-1960’s trust in government had eroded to all-time lows by 1980. This reversed for the first time in two decades as Generation X came of age during the Reagan 80s.

Then the 90s begin with a miracle: the iron curtain melts. Russians aren’t commies anymore, they’re Russians again, revealing a much more human, struggling and desperately attractive people we’d ever known.

The Russian’s were tired of waiting in bread lines, tired of wondering if the grass is greener in the Western World. We welcomed them with open arms and both superpowers agreed to dismantle more nukes.

And so our greatest adversary quietly evolved beyond their political manifesto, and seemingly looking toward us for guidance.

The peaceful end to the Cold War became a pivotal moment in understanding the coming brave new information society.

Meanwhile America’s weapons, gadgets and way of life evolved.