Today in 1775, the U.S. postal system is established by the Second Continental Congress, with Benjamin Franklin as its first postmaster general.

The Forecast

Participation is the new consumption.

The News

Amid death threats, Paul the Octopus retires from the oracle business.

Wisdom

"It's been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home -- only the millions of last moments . . . nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments." :: Thomas Pynchon

The Monthly Report

...the need for recognition and status is at the heart of every consumer trend.


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© 2010 The Layman's Almanac in cooperation with the Click Boom Pow, Inc. All rights reserved.

We're So Future :: Albeit Debased, Intricate & Profound.

Sloth

And like that, Apple's latest Consumer gadget is discharged into a culture primed.

David Kim

"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And what that means is, I don't mean it in a small way I mean it in a big way. In a sense that they don't think of original ideas & they don't bring much culture into their products." :: Steve Jobs

And like that, Apple's latest Consumer gadget is discharged into a culture primed. The near vapor-state of media consumption in 2010 will most certainly define our era as (Media) "Ingestion" - arguably sans digestion - with the proliferation of wireless devices, & the shear heft of information readily available, it's possible to be aware of nearly anything at any given moment. Apple understands this & the iPad is a well defined ingestion device - in fact, most Apple devices are akin to fast food - they're easy & taste good.

"It's seldom acknowledged that viewers' relationship with TV is,
albeit debased, intricate & profound." :: David Foster Wallace

Of course, also like fast food, these devices may not be healthy or meet our needs, but a company can't be put to the task of being responsible for our nature. This is a hundred-year-old cultural paradigm shift that's tightly integrated into our reality. The dovetail of technology & culture has been quantifying our present course as early as the beginning of the 20th century; particularly in the many examples in
novels1, films2 & music3 where media define the medium.

"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology
has exceeded our humanity." :: Albert Einstein

Like its forefathers, Radio & Television, our current technology has transitioned from media to medium; or in another way, the distillation of importance from WHAT media we ingest to HOW we ingest it. Of course this is neither good nor bad; just the current reality. Whether we move back into a culture of diving deeply versus widely is uncertain, but the keen awareness of nearly anything at any given moment is incredibly exciting & slightly scary. Always a good place to be.




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1 Many Philip K. Dick's novels & short stories eerily suggest the present human / technology tie (Eye in the Sky, The Penultimate Truth, A Scanner Darkly, etc.). John Barth's superb 1960's Giles Goat Boy goes at length in describing the travails of an over-saturated technology based culture, specifically within the WESCAC & EASTCAC computers that control the fiction's education systems. In the 70's, Thomas Pynchon - who worked for Boeing - focused on the disintegration of society via technology in the Cold War novel Gravity's Rainbow. David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, 1996, tackles what it means to be human in a technologically super-saturated future where our years are annotated by corporations ("Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment"). In fact, IJ's fictional video telecommunication devices have a profound social impact; individuals, naturally, are concerned with how they appear, so each person owns a mask of themselves "made up" that they'll slip on prior to telecommunicating. I'd say this is an interesting & valid fictional future.

2 Stanley Kubrick masterpieces 2001 Space Odyssey & Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love the Bomb, explore the question: what if understood technologies & those beyond our grasp ruled humanity? With the human centered techno-thrillers Videodrone & Existenz, David Cronenberg depicts how human desire literally interfaces with technology. Most recently, Pixar's Wall-E follows the adventures of an endearing robot who eventually proves to be the ultimate example of what it means to be human (Steve Jobs was CEO of Pixar at the time, go fig.).

3 Then there's the history of electronic music… Theramin, Moog, Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, Aphex Twin but the shift from makers to listeners is most interesting. The watershed moment of social-network / pirate site Napster in the late 90s is demarcation from a time of digestion of albums into haphazard ingestion of discographies. Notably, this also marked the death of analogue into a digital ruled music industry. However, this proliferation empowered a new generation and style of music - one who's decimated the idea of genre, broken the music industry, & abridged the history of music.

Past Features

Funambules

The Life & Times of E.E. Hale :: She Loves Me Not

The Life & Times of E.E. Hale :: The Finishing Touch

Ask a Layman

Where do my 911 calls go after they've been recorded?


Into a database file of course! However, & keep this close to the chest, sources say that Google stores your frantic & frankly embarrassing 911 call in a maximum security shipping container on a Venezuelan off-shore cargo ship. Watch yourself. Everything you've ever searched for on Google is also stored in said container. Big brother, I mean Google is watching.


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