Newspapers, Mom, Media, Trolls

My mom has been working in the newspaper business for most of my life.  At work, she edits news.  At home, she watches news.  In the car, she listens to the news.  On the weekends, she reads the New York Times.


I guess I'm similar with cooking and beer.  At work, I serve people food and drinks.  At home, I cook and come up with recipes.  On my nights off, I like to have beer with my friends.


However, I am certainly noticing the disparity between my mom's generation and my generation.  Take my brother and I, for example.  We're people of the Internet age.  While my parents certainly use computers and the Internet a lot (my mom is at a computer all day), we absorb the world differently.


My brother and I have trouble understanding newspapers, though we certainly recognize our mother's passion and interest for her medium.  For us, all the information we could ever need comes shooting out of a thin box with a screen attached to it.  So when my mom talks about how much she loves the New York Times because there's something in it for everyone, I can't help but think to myself "but if you want to know about something, why not just hop online and use Google?"


Perhaps this will incite an inflammatory response from those who think technological advancement and digital media are somehow tarnishing the art of reporting, the art of writing, etc.  Or that these phenomena are over-saturating people with information, making it more difficult to vet through what's reliable and unreliable, what's substantial and what's "fluff."  In my opinion, these are probably the same people who think that Amazon Kindle is a bad invention because it makes physical books obsolete, despite the fact that it reduces paper waste and clutter, and allows consumers to obtain more books without spending a fortune.


Seriously, books are unnecessarily expensive.  The printing press has been around for a LONG time.


As usual, I've digressed.  The bombardment of information we receive in the digital age is difficult for me to make judgement on.  On one hand, people should be abundantly knowledgeable about their world, about the things they purchase, the people they vote for, the religions they follow, etc.  On the other hand, people's capability to get any information they want at their fingertips has made everyone a critic.  Not everyone should be a critic.  When everyone becomes a critic, trolls are born:

"I've never played a guitar or studied music before, but I'm pretty sure John Petrucci is over-rated," says Trollface.

What is there to be so critical about?  The world, while certainly trashy depending on where you look, is pretty unbelievable.  There's a lot we take for granted.  We are able to watch videos and access information and talk to other people any time we want.  That's pretty amazing!  Hell, it's pretty amazing that if we want to go to another part of the world, we're able to hop into a machine with wheels attached to it that can shoot us across paths ten times faster than we can run.  Maybe more, I'm not sure how fast the average person can run.  Or we can get access to a machine that FLIES IN THE SKY.  How are we not impressed by this???  Even simple things are amazing.  If it's the middle of winter and we want ripe, delicious heirloom tomatoes, we just hop in our wheeled machines and buy some in a convenient, well-stocked, heated building.


 Still, I even hypocritically find myself getting mad when my Internet is slow.  And when I say mad, I mean kind of indignant.  How dare the computer try to think about something else other than what I'm commanding it to think about.  Every time I try to click on a video, and the computer does that thirty second "hold on, I need a minute here" freeze, my outrage is unparalleled.  "I don't fucking care about a McAfee update right now!  You do what I click on you to do!"  Seriously though, the people at Windows, iTunes, and McAfee could take a break every once in a while.  Enough updates, says this troll.


I think I'm done talking.