Youth filed into the lecture hall where the head of the cultural studies branch of the history preservation society would soon preach to his disciples. Murmuring turned to hushed whispering as he took to the podium.
A young woman with a cyberpunk edge nudged Clarents as the noise level in the room dropped.
“Yo bro, I’m sitting on some extra digerall, you look like you’ve got a short attention span. I can’t judge, I’m in the same boat. Might help you concentrate, how bout it?”
“Yeah hit me with some of that brain boost juice my ninja” Clarents responded with an attempt to sound cool and falling flat.
“You got it duderino, a couple slices of power pizza comin’ right up. The access folder I’m uploading to is encrypted but don’t worry I’ve granted you exception already. Don’t ask me how, I’m not at liberty to divulge that information. The walls have eyes, ears and a potent network surveillance system.” The mysterious yet intriguing girl whispered.
An ephemeral link for 4 megabytes of digital amphetamine suddenly appeared in Clarents viewing visor and he double blinked on it before the short lived access expired.
A jolt shocked his brain into sharp clarity as the lecture began.
“Greetings to all of you you new recruits out there. You are the custodians of the new age, sweeping the debris and sifting through the detritus of the 20th century cultural landscape. Plunging the clogged toilet that is our new age of information.”
The metaphor didn’t exactly strike Clarents as flattering.
The scholar began to ramble, clearly enamored with the sound of his own voice.
“Who among can say how the technology shaped our future, individual significance made manifest in through the proliferation of prefabricated personality archetypes. An inherent propensity or a preexisting condition exacerbated by every outlet available feeding on itself? The elevation of the quotidian mundane to profound personal significance through meticulous documentation for it’s own sake. Not so much a zen attempt for “living in the moment” but rather living around the moment on the periphery of the outside looking in. The availability of capturing any given slice of life served in a convenient portable device, no inhibition hesitating the shutter release armed with an ammunition of infinite film.
The long winded mandatory historical sociology lecture dragged on.
“I remember as a young lad the sheer thrill of word processing, the immediacy of thought rendered flesh as word from the brain to the screen with no intermediary guiding the hand of the Lord. The constant fear of revisions abolished with the paradigm shifting technological breakthrough of digital simulation none of the inconveniences of typewritten pages painstakingly edited retyped verbatim.
Clarents began to practice writing with his left hand, believing that becoming ambidextrous would serve a greater purpose in life than anything this man could teach him.
“The information crash of 2000 impacted innumerable aspects of human life. The shrinking of the world thorough an interconnected global network scaled down internally even further into your pocket, and eventually our eyes. Did the mobile device revolution truly alter drastically our behavior patterns? Or did it simply make all the more salient our inherent propensities?”
Yawn, the collective sound of silent exhaustion, a room full of eyes rolling.
Clarents understood the root of his point, but for shit’s sake man turn the academic rhetoric down a notch.
The tone took a darker turn.
“Imagine if you will, a time with information at your fingertips, both fraudulent and pregnant with veracity. Death looming overhead on a hair trigger alert, with no choice but to obsessively check on the status of your own impending doom. What an existence! Fortunately for us survivors of the cold war we had no such technology, only the soothing voice of Walter Cronkite to alleviate our unrelenting anxiety. Perhaps in that sense ignorance was bliss. Nixon’s deranged paranoid delusions came into clear focus after the fact with the release of audio tapes.”
Someone cleared their throat and coughed, echoing through the room.
“I suppose my words could be lost on you. All you hear are the incoherent ramblings of an crusty old curmudgeon. But let me leave you with one final point. If time is a mountain we closer to the summit than any other time in collective human history. The amount of history behind us is greater than it has ever been. From our vantage point we can see further into the past with clarity regarding who we are and how we got here.”