| The
fact that today is 9/9/99 has got me to thinking. And not just, “Hey!
Tonight is the MTV music awards!” No, my thoughts are running in
deeper currents today.
Today’s date is unique. It’s an interesting date to live through. And it will never come around again. Of course, this is true of all dates, really. There can only be one September 10, 1999. There will never be another March 20, 1992. I have thought about this before, with that same wave of surreality that you get when you stare at yourself in the mirror and realize, this is the face that my mind looks out of. But the special nature of 9/9/99, whether it be as Y2K bug or as prophecy fulfillment day, got me to thinking about the unique privilege that our generation shares. We are able to experience being around to watch a century and a millennium change. More, we will be able to record and preserve that experience as our collective legacy. I’ve often wondered about the characteristics assigned to each decade. After all, why should 1959 be different from 1961, just because they are part of different decades? Why should the 1900s be any different from the 2000s? It seems arbitrary in a way, but there it is. Each decade has its own spirit, and its own counterculture, and its own pioneers. And in some small way, we get to be the pioneers of the 21st Century. I wonder if some 25 year old had the same kind of feelings in September of 1899. If that generation felt like they were on the cusp of some great revolution. Like the world was about to change, and they would be able to say they knew what it was like way back when. Maybe someone kept a paper journal about it that has long since been lost. Today, we don’t have to give up our immortality without a fight. We are in the electronic age. The phenomenon of online journaling is a part of a larger phenomenon: the computer revolution. Those of us living at the turn of the millennium have seen it happen before our very eyes. Like the industrial revolution, the computer age has exploded all around us. When I got my Tandy 1000, I was 10. This was fifteen years ago, when very few people had computers. I found out a few years later that the hackers I knew were already working on blue boxes and black boxes, but at the time, I was blissfully learning about RAM and ROM and playing with the earliest incarnation of The Print Shop. When I was sixteen, there was no “internet” to speak of. I played on a local BBS, and everyone in high school thought I was a little strange because of it. Meeting people online was not what it is today, when you have to worry about rapists and pedophiles looking for prey in the AOL chat rooms or on Yahoo personals. We had a true local community. We knew the faces behind the handles. And I made a group of friends—people like Tim and Max—that are among my closest friends to this day. When I was in college, I discovered Usenet newsgroups. I would sit in the computer lab and write e-mail to the one friend that actually could find a way to read it. The World Wide Web was still alien to me—and this was only six or seven years ago. And it was this year, 1999, that I discovered online journals. That I put my footprint in electronic concrete. That I created a space for myself in the world of bits and gigs and binary codes. It all happened so fast. Realistically, it is still only a small percentage of people who do business online, buy CDs online, or have their own web sites. Still, we all know where this has been and we can all see where it is going from here. Most of my friends and family have home or work e-mail, even if it’s America OnLine. It bespeaks a ridiculously short period of growth. Think about this: within the last year, URLs have become ubiquitous parts of advertising. They pop up at the bottom of every television commercial and adorn every business card. Virtually every company now has a web site, but in 1996, internet marketing was nonexistent. Next year, every film will have its own web site. The promise of online commerce may start to be realized. Within the next decade, personal web sites may be as common as telephone numbers. When I am fifty, I will be able to tell my kids that when I was young, everybody didn’t have their own web page from birth, ready to chronicle their entire lives. I will show them pictures that were developed from film, not taken digitally and printed out on a color laser printer. When I am fifty, I will be able to point my kids to this journal and say: look. This is what I thought, what I felt, what I did when I was 25. This is a record of the changes going on in the world around me. Not like today, when every whippersnapper is clogging the web with bad poetry and pictures from their digital cameras. There were only a few thousand of us back then, all bearing witness. (Of course, we still had bad poetry and digital cameras. Some things never change.) Maybe I’m just a poseur, trying to be profound, but telling you something that’s self evident. Maybe this is just a flicker of a phenomenon, which will be replaced by something bigger, more sophisticated, more permanent. Maybe the web will buckle under the pressures of government control. Maybe people will be censored. Maybe we will lose our voices. I know there will be a fight to keep that from happening. It seems inevitable; this internet thing has a lot of power. We can say anything. We can reach an audience. We can incense, we can incite, we can help change things. We can send chain letters through the whole world (urging people to read this journal). We can post instructions for building bombs. We can plot assassinations. We can tell people to cut down on red meat and save the rain forest. We can tell them which products test on animals. We can fight for gay rights. The grass roots movement is digital. I don’t know how to sum this up, except to say the future is as yet unwritten. And day by day, we’re hanging around to write it. It’s 9/9/99, everyone. It’s good to be alive.
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Can
You Name The Movie?:
Yes,
Empire Records was not just a soundtrack. It was a movie starring
Renee Zellweger, Robin Tunney, Maxwell Caulfield and Liv Tyler. Plus
that cute kid from Can't Hardly Wait. If you have any doubts that
Renee Zellweger can act and Liv Tyler sucks, watch this movie.
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