The Pulse of Culture

Now that I am older, I sometimes feel as though I have lost my sense of the direction our culture is moving. I so often recognized coming trends in my younger days and now I just feel general confusion and my sense of trends has evaporated. But then I began to consider how much our culture has changed since I was young, how much diversity there is now. There is not just one pulse, there are many. The sense of confusion I feel is due to the diversity and one would have to have their fingers on the pulse of every cause of that diversity.

Why should I be out of touch? I spend too much of my spare time on Facebook. Isn't that where our culture is, generally speaking? Everyone and everything is now on Facebook. The whole Internet is now on Facebook and everything we do online can be reported to our Facebook page. I call Fb 'never-never land'. If I log in, I'll be there for hours in the blink of an eye. Then, when I log out, I'll be none the wiser than I was when I logged in. One liners really don't impart much information. So, the trend in Fb is less is more and we are mentally shrinking.

As much as I would like to be sidetracked by Facebook as a subject, I must move on to other trendy things. Needless to say, electronics are so trendy that the industry is controlling their users now. They tell us what we need and then they eliminate what we might want otherwise so we can't get what they have decided we don't need. Again, I feel my tendency to draw back, to withhold their right to do this to all of us. For example, the now, already, essential mobile phone. Seriously, do you like your mobile phone . . . er . . . apps device . . . er . . . surfing device . . . texting device . . . compact-office-in-a-pocket-including camera & games, minute-travel-agent? How long does your battery last? They are rated on how long their batteries last if they are not used. What happened to good mics? They used to have them back in the 90s. I suspect that the bad mics are on anything less than the latest and greatest. Is it heavy? I fondly remember how tiny the earliest mobile phones were. About ten years ago, I heard an elderly man complaining at the phone store that he just wants a basic phone. And, of course, the salesman patiently and repeatedly told him that they don't make the old basic phones anymore. Now, I feel that way. I want a phone that will stay charged through an entire conversation without ending it, 'My phone is warning that the battery is dying, so when it goes dead, you know I didn't hang up on you.' Maybe, now they are making 'handheld devices' (even the name of these things is vague), we could return to a basic phone that is good at being a phone. So, the trend is bigger is better now, a whole tablet, and the world is stuck on convenient sources of power.

I thought this would be a simple subject, one I could just muse on, a series of brief paragraphs over each subject. But rather, I have hit two subjects that are loaded and require more than a hefty paragraph each. I managed to eliminate most of the Fb paragraph, but when I launched into the subject of mobile phones, I realized it is too important to slice it down to the essentials. That is one misguided trend when the original intent, a good phone, has been entirely forgotten even by the users. I intended to consider fashion, music, books and other media, as well, and I made a mistake. Perhaps some other day I could try again and avoid Fb and mobile phones and related media.