Douglas Coupland has an op-ed piece in the Globe and Mail yesterday which discussed the problem of Gloomage which is worth considering. The piece starts with a consideration of the current recession to Y2K:
I mention this now because it seems to me we're inside another Y2K-like hysteria scenario, except our current doomfest doesn't have a Jan. 1 expiry date - it's open-ended. Perhaps Jan. 20? Maybe the third quarter of 2009? Early 2010? Or perhaps the worst date of all: unknown.
I like his idea. The reaction to the impending recession does seem to be over the top and needs extra thought but I think he has gone in the wrong direction or at least not taken into account all the relevant factors. Back when I started blogging one of the topics that kept popping up was the comparative level of fear that 9/11 triggered compared to the points of highest tension in the Cold War. Here is a post from March 2004. If you ask me (and you are because you are reading this) I think the decade of the 2000's has become fraught. Fraught with fear of terrorism, of job loss, of chicken flu, of what ever's on the news. Fraught with the need to spend on credit, fraught with the need to have an ideological stance or a religion or denomination that is better than anyone else's, fraught with the need to have the better cell phone, more friends on Facebook and other forms of a better social network. We fear a lot.
At one point Coupland considers the leveling effect that access to data has had and calls it democratic. But has it done that? Or has it isolated rather than individualized, thereby destroying the demos? Has it also taken apart paths of authentication without providing a replacement? We are left to judge everything and find we have no capacity for that. Are we not more inclined to each think of ourselves on small existential bergs in an ice flow seeking new poorer networks via which we get dit-dit-dot Morse Coded messages from the next human. But they are fading in and out. We fear because we have been taught by the technology and the times that we are alone.
Comments
Ben (The Tiger) - January 8, 2009 9:28 AM
Agree that people are hyperventilating.
But then, I was hyperventilating in 2003-04ish, too.
Go figure. People will probably come out of it, when they have spent time crying that the sky was falling and it didn't fall...
Alan - January 8, 2009 10:11 AM
Ian has a related thought.
Seanie - January 8, 2009 8:46 PM
As usual douglas is awesome 2.0
It's mostly craziness brought on by too many people receiving too much negative overeationary news clips who are unable to intellectually filter out the realism from conjecture. A lot of people have so little control over their lives nowadays, they go all power trippy when they get the chance i.e. yelling at poor kids who screw up their latte at starbucks. When something happens that might further upset their applecart, they go bonkers paranoid.
Like most other bad things about society, I blame the back patting praise craving boomers.
Music - January 14, 2009 2:27 PM
I am thinking Douglas is starting to lose touch with todays youth. As the owner of the largest teen community portal in Canada I can tell you the kids today are alright. They have more control than meets the eye... Are we perhaps projecting a bit in our old age???
I think they will be the next golden generation
And that's Music 2 my ears.
Seanie - January 14, 2009 6:38 PM
I don't think Douglas has been trying to sell himself as the voice of todays youth as much as reflect on them as an aging gen x'er. I have a 19year old and from he and his bazillion friends I can only hope they get with some program at some point as they are more slack and unprepared for reality than any bunch I have ever had the pain to be around.