I realize I am getting too old for this high tech world we live in and it seems that a dozen or so times a day something reminds me of it. Somehow it brings me back to the Kermit the Frog song “It Isn’t Easy Being Green.” The message is loud and clear that my age and country-style upbringing don’t fit well in the fast-paced electronically powered social media society of today. This certainly deserves the name of the high tech communications age.
At a televised professional (Major League) baseball game the other day the camera picked up on two children (age probably about 10) with cell phone type instruments playing video games or texting while the game was being played. The adults with the two boys were intent on the game, but it was rather obvious the young men were much more interested in the iPhone features than the All-American pastime.
Maybe the adults have the same feelings about the fast pace of the world around them, and therefore were oblivious to the boy’s activity, but I’ll never know.
At our house, we still haven’t gone the Skype route even though my six grandchildren (and their parents) can’t understand why. That means of communicating has all the features I need to watch them as they grow up, but having a Dick Tracy type activity in my home reminds me that these were the comic strip futuristic things in my youth and like Rip Van Winkle, I have slept too long. We do talk about doing the Skype thing as I’ve probably mentioned before, but we don’t move as rapidly as the grandkids would like and we didn’t grow up in a world where a computer was an accepted part of our childhood.
Recently I had an opportunity to turn down my third invitation to join the LinkedIn network.
Whether my generation was brought up to be too private for society and the social media of today, or whether it is a personal hard-headed thing you must decide. However, for me to share the personal aspects of my life with others, the relationship has to be much more personal.
The commercial potential of these websites (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) would certainly be attractive if I were young or in the market for the purpose of selling a product. However, without those reasons I’m not ready for that personalexposure just yet.
One of my grandsons advised me he had just gotten the approval from his parents to set up his own Facebook page and he proudly viewed it as a measure of his maturity. He was, however, concerned that his older sister had been allowed to have an account at a younger age than he. That goes down as sibling rivalry I guess, but there is no doubt that there are some “dangers” in the social media world that the news media keeps us abreast of daily. And as a parent I would probably be concerned for my young children.
For those of us who have lost a great deal of our faith in our government and read about the government’s freedom to tap our personal electronic communications, it seems a bit frightening to me. With the super computers available to the government, it is possible for them to produce a personal profi le on anyone and/or everyone from the electronic communication surveillance. They may not do it, but the fact that they can, should make all of us cautious, or at the very least careful. Maybe there is a connection between the willingness to put personal information on a Facebook page and being complacent about the U.S. governmenttapping into the personal data. Maybe it is just older persons like me that don’t feel the agencies that are “protecting us from terrorists” need to know who we talk with and how often.
The emphasis on entertainment and the growth of electronic communications must be linked also. Does anyone know how many television channels there are today? When the news was so slow that several cable channels actually carried the Zimmerman trial in Florida by the hour, I gave up on television news for all practical purposes. That hour-by-hour full-time coverage was not newsworthy to the likes of me and therefore could most closely be associated with pure low-grade entertainment.
It ain’t easy being green, or growing old in a changing society that seems to get more direction from Hollywood than from Washington, D.C., and more meaningful output from Apple Corporation than from the president.
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Editor’s note: Leo Lynch is an award-winning columnist. He is a native of Benton County has deep roots in northwest Arkansas. He is a retired industrial engineer and former Justice of the Peace. He can be contacted at prtnews@nwaonline.
com.
Opinion, Pages 4 on 07/31/2013