Mashable potatoes

There’s a lot happening these days and sometimes I wonder when all the doom and gloom will go away and something nice will happen. Perhaps it has a lot to do with the immediacy of the worldwide reaction to just about anything that can be put on the Internet. Sometimes I like to call it the worldwide circus, as any old Joe or Jane can win immediate international attention for acting like a clown. All this reactionary explosion of information, a lot that has nothing really to do about anything, catches and splits our ever-diminishing attention spans into nano seconds of concentration. At least for those of us with high-speed access.

In the old days, television was the devil in disguise and it was all-out war when it came to ratings, remember those things? Ratings were random surveys conducted to see what we were watching on television at any given time and would be used as an ad-marketing tool for big TV networks. Anyways, I was never surveyed nor did I ever meet anyone who was. Today, that information is available for any fool to use. At one time, though, wild-eyed fear gripped society that, some day, nearly everyone would have a TV set and loll around until they became mashed couch potatoes.

Thanks to the Internet, potatoes, besides being a side order for everything, are slowly becoming extinct. The WWW has rapidly taken eliminated the passive potato role and forced everyone to become self-conscious of how they look. Thus the need for exercise machines to improve our selfies. Even bathrooms will need to be cleaned up a bit as the selfie seems to occupy the lavatory a lot these days. One’s private sanctums are now becoming public for anyone interested in Joe or Jane’s shampoo and other hygiene products in the background.

Incredibly, this has led to a radical change in the way we view our privacy. Now our lives are an open book for anyone who wants to know. Heck, there are surveillance secrets on Facebook than Ed Snowden could ever hope to collect. So why bother with hiding anything when most posts are nearly full disclosures anyways. As one buddy of mine used to say on Facebook, “Breathe in… breathe out” – just to show he was still alive in cyberspace.

For a while, people feared that online betting would take over the world, but the new generation of thrill seekers just can’t see themselves glassy eyed and crippled with casinoitus for hours on end. Remember, the attention span.

So what lies in store for the future generations of our people? Will we be master miners and logging champions? Will we stand the test of time and last in an age where anything a year old is ancient history?

Remember, today is the time when you get the news before the news gets the news. We are the news. Not so surprisingly, more and more people are getting on the news using anything that can record visually. That 15 minutes of fame really is an eternity today as news flashes simple format videos endlessly until a new one arrives. Fodder for the inquisitive mind may be another’s fertilizer.

Lastly, the news just ain’t the news unless Rob Ford is in it!