Media Barrage

The majority of my generation is stupid. I’m speaking as one of them and all of this applies to me. We’re dumb because we don’t learn things anymore. We don’t REALLY learn things from interacting with the world around us. That’s not to say my head’s completely empty. I do have some random trivia jangling around up in there but it’s not real information. It’s just little snippets of pop culture I’ve picked up over the course of my life like a lint roller. Having real experiences is a thing of the past. I live my life vicariously through a barrage of media. Do you have any idea how much shit there is for me to do to entertain myself? We’re still struggling to get HIV under control but my generation has cured boredom.

Any emotion I want to feel, I can evoke by consuming some kind of media. I can download a podcast, read a blog, read tweets, download a tv show, listen to a song, watch a music video, watch a movie, watch a movie in 3D, watch the jersey shore, play a video game on my computer. I can play one on my xbox or play one on my phone. I can watch a wide variety of people have sex in an even wider variety of ways.

Now that’s all just the shit I can do ALONE. Those are all single-person activities and there are probably even some I forgot to list. If you bring another human being into the equation and there are two of you little media fiends interacting then the list of options for cramming audio visual information into your brain expands even further. You can call people, text people, picture message people, skype people, email people, face time people, facebook people. And even within facebook there are statuses, wall writings, messages, picture comments, events, pokes, and Farmville requests.

I can’t believe the generations that came before mine had to learn about the world by actually experiencing it. It sounds exhausting. It must suck to have to attain scuba diving knowledge from actually going scuba diving, not just watching a discovery channel special on it and then feeling like an expert. I’ll prove my point. You may be aware of the fact that SCUBA stands for “Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus,” but were you on a boat when you learned that shit? You weren’t! You were probably sitting on your couch or in an office chair looking at a computer screen or maybe you read about it in a book, if you’re old school.

Books could actually be my saving grace and the one thing that could lend me some real intelligence because I actually read quite a bit. Unfortunately the act of reading doesn’t make you smarter. Simply looking at text with your eyes has no effect. The content of what you’re reading is a major factor. I read some books but I’m not “book smart” because I undermine all of that reading with 10 times more reading done on random blogs and wikipedia. I’m “internet smart”. “Internet smart” is like the “book smart” of my generation. Internet smart is way dumber and less useful. Someone who’s book smart might know how to change a flat tire. Someone who’s internet smart knows how to ghost ride the whip.