Welcome to the outer reaches of the Technology of History: http://www.amazon.com/OBAMA-TIME-CAPSULE-History-Making/dp/B0025VKZ02
Another attempt by 21st Century man to Live Forever. How "audacious" was it to label a book FUTURE SHOCK when it was premised on the continuation of books and the survival of everything we assumed fifty years ago?
As each electron-drenched generation passes, speed and bandwidth reset standards at ridiculous rates; records that expire before the print is dry in the inkless world into which we’ve passed. If desert tombs, heroically named aircraft carriers or post offices measure man’s ultimate ego manifestation, humanity’s need to verify its existence is bequeathed in traces of trivia to a presumed “future” that can only resemble what we now imagine .
We learned nothing from the failed conversion of "Hearts and Minds" in Viet Nam. "Spreading Democracy" has only resulted in death, deprivation and debt. Left standing in the way of "World Peace" are starvation, endless warfare, self-destruction of the planet by its greedy, unheeding occupants. There are more shocking future possibilities than a million metaphorical monkeys could type on manual typewriters long before random symbol generation was possible to create "anything."
"Immortality" might hang on the survival of the adhesion components of data preservation. The very life of the Internet can be terminated at any moment. Who, or what, comes out and says so? Facts, please, about our exponential dependency on the World Wide Web. There is no survival kit for terminally dead air.
What took this evolution of Us to come this “close” to one another while we can evaporate in a flash, unseen as Hiroshima by victims of the bomb (the meaning of the word "bomb" itself blown topsy-turvy to signify something good in raptalk.)
We “bond” “together” by clicks, and screens, and email, in an IT world. Alas, the real “it” is more vulnerable to shutdown than the most improbable action-adventure terror scenarios. How can an island with nearly one million souls aboard be knocked out by persons unknown in a typical rental van cruising past the Nu'uanu Reservoir?Those crackling wires that rear up from paradise bringing tropical juice on the Trans-Ko'olau lines to those who live here can be easily cut as any other act of anarchy by people gone mad.
Hawai'i depends on electrical power more than all other American electricity junkies can comprehend. Here in the 50th State, with no connection to any U. S. power grid, we are only connected in the seat of "power" by one born on this island, Barack Obama. Future writers will be tested to portray a SELF-DOCUMENTING SOCIETY, where action is dictated by simultaneous media distribution based on existing user systems.
Seated at a keyboard and monitor, overlooking the Pacific and beyond the blue horizon, I move back and forth in time, superseding in quantum leaps and bounds the old gumshoe, thumb-the-files, spiral threaded microfilm, "working the phone" in Rolodex Days to capture unequivocally what went down. Imagine if there were Twitter capability at the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Or Hitler with his own MySpace account. Or sweeter, J. S. Bach ripping his own discs.
Reality as perception is shifting swiftly. The limits of perception are defined and controlled by access to electrical power, or at the least, electronic communication and data storage. Kevin Gershan gifted me the above OBAMA TIME CAPSULE on this Memorial Day 2009, a day to both make and recall, memories. This new thing, its link above, will be a wonderful project, I bet. Produced in part by Rick Smolan, whose groundbreaking photojournalism was magnificently on display in A DAY IN THE LIFE OF HAWAI'I and his other illuminating imagery, this is more than one family’s online photo scrapbook.
Historian, documentarian or bloggist must reexamine the principle questions posed in the 1960s by Professor Marshall McLuhan: Is, truly, the media the message? What is Barack Obama without his message? What is his message without media? A moot question in Colonial times. No weekly radiocast from President Washington. No online Monroe Doctrine. How compelling would Abraham Lincoln’s Facebook page be? Would he have more "friends" than enemies?
McLuhan writes of monks, their realizations and revalations of the pre-Guttenberg Era recorded by pushing pens with feathered quills dipped in homemade ink. McLuhan's distinction between aural and oral media is vividly described when the monastics first write silently, not moving their lips, no longer mouthing ideas reflected in their words. Is that more, or less, difficult to imagine than: Humans adjusting from grounded to airborne? Homo sapiens seguing from mono to hi-fi to stereo? Switching from black-and-white to color TV? JPEG or fiction? What would Paul Revere tweet on a midnight clear?
"Planned obsolesence," "disposable society" and other Orwellian options emerge as "life" is rendered on the "tube" (itself an anachronism in a age of fishing with chips for information.) Are we but chameleons of comprehension, reflective of all to which we are exposed, blending in with a Mass Think environment? What the difference between a green field or a field of green in a photoshopped universe? We are long past knowing the difference between what is real, what is Memorex.
The metrics of time between events and their consequences can be measured by how quickly humans apply their many motives, variants of the endless battle between Love and Hate. We have reached the point where our ability to "witness" an event and feel its consequences happen all at once, "in the moment." If one believes the New Testament, its Doomsday Checklist is immeasurable in bytes.
We live in a delusion of connectivity, a sea of simultaneaty. But from where I sit, the distance between Coconut Island, HI and San Pedro, CA remains the same as it was when the white man first invaded these islands. Contemplate this: If the 49 other states were destroyed by the Forces of Evil, they perhaps harboring no beef with the Hawaiians, would the populace of the "Aloha" State turn to cannibalism, survival of the farthest? Out here we are one tsunami, eruption or blackout away from being blown back, from iPods to petroglyphs.
God speed to those archaeologists yet to come, sifting through our deranged digital detritus.
