“How the brilliant kids of the future, having invented their own new media,
just laughs at this.”
just laughs at this.”
From Fury by Salman Rushdie:
“There are so many brilliant kids who just love to create all kinds of, you can’t even say it, they’re inventing a whole new media everyday.”
So many brilliant kids writing so many blogs, creating a whole new sub-culture with their not-unheard monologues in rather diminutive spaces in the internet. And they can write in the language of XML and HTML. There are deviant arts enhanced in Photoshop, Seventeen-year-old kids staging photo exhibits in one of the greenbelt bars, five-megapixel cameras dangling from their wrists. There are galleries and galleries of them scanning themselves and their artwork. Them having two whole years worth of entries archived. Them moving in .gifs. Them buying their dreams, them in whiny entries about their own boring lives, their debaucheries in spas and malls and vacation houses, their attempt to be articulate and erudite, and them throwing words like: “God, words! Words! May faculty of the English language is not enough to communicate the horrid, screeching and agonizing pain that it’s auditory atrocities have inflicted upon me.” How phony. In an oxymoron: senseless profundity.
It’s all vanity that’s never even a bit self-effacing. I can’t help but smile a condescending smile, or even sneer a condescending sneer. I read them during office hours, and I feel like I’m almost paid to be entertained. Blogs have become part of daily office life’s ebb. How the brilliant kids of the future, having invented their own new media, just laughs at this.
With what some of them have aspired and accomplished, I almost felt incapable. Of what? Of writing in HTML, of having an eight-megapixel, zoom lens digicam, an ipod, of having all the time in their hands to send their creative juices streaming. Well anyway, many of these bloggers don’t have obligations and are free from no-brainer jobs. With this little journal lag I developed because of reading their blogs, I almost felt inept in writing, or straightforwardly felt envious that my own entries could not match their postings which catered a regular audience.
The conclusion is a sweeping simplicity: “All is Vanity.” It’s all about being meaninglessly vain. No matter how the richest mark-up language formats, digitized, beamed up images, or despite the fruitfulness or futility of the entries in these web logs, no blog could blow over the monumental vanity of writing about me, and writing only for me.
