Dark ages anyone?

Seperate random conversations with Pix and Rob and finishing up my Baudrillard book have put me in a philosophical mood, not sure what it all means for now, but thought I’d make a public note of it.

FIRST: Heard through Twitter of this Muxtape phenomenon, essentially using our favorite tool, the internet, to once again try to time travel back to days of slower technology. The sound of rewinding back to your favorite song, exchanging tapes, losing them, breaking them and having to wind them back together with pencils (you know what i’m talking about i’m sure) were probably not elements that any of the designers of tapes thought would become associate with such a small and technical object.

THEREFORE: Rhetoric question: are we entering a kind of cultural “dark age” characterised by “a lack of contemporary written history, general demographic decline, limited building activity and material cultural achievements in general, a time of ignorance and superstition”? You have to wonder about the kids who are internet-native and whether they will learn to question it, hack it, patch it back together and accept it’s faults understanding that this isn’t the end all be all of their world but also humbly, just technology made of wires, capacitors, pcbs, etc.

EVEN THOUGH: I know a lot of programmers started learning about computers while still quite young programing on the BBC Micro perhaps, but for the rest of us, computers were for computer class and usually involved telling a little turtle where to go. The phone was something you used to call your friends after school while listening to the radio and gossiping, getting scolded by your parents for keeping the line busy. Days of friction, when technology was a small part of our daily landscape.
WHICH MEANS: Maybe i’m being a little too philosophical and suffering from a really early form of “back in my days”, but there might be something to be said for a generation like mine that grew up with things that didnt quite work that well: broken tapes, clunky walkmans, personal diaries, passing notes in class, and making paper airplanes. What happens in a world of seamlessness and where things rarely stop working? Does anyone learn to live without them? Do we stop questioning that they even exist because they are so effective and we forget that they are there at all? Stuff that of course governments and policy makers are thinking about specifically in relation to privacy online but I think it extends further into a global understanding of technology or daily assumptions about technology.
Sometimes it feels that progress was a little too fast to come and Gen X and Mtv is still not totally ready for it but that “Generation whatever is on youtube” might never learn to question it and wonders how we ever managed before all of this happened.