Generation Paradox: Black vs. DePape

Philip Darlington
Video Editor
This past week a young woman about the same age as myself known as “ The Rogue Senate Page” decided to voice, or rather sign her opinion during the opening of a new parliamentary session. However, I do believe very few people will know what I am referring to. Why? Well because they will probably have been watching Rebecca Black or some other video that under-twenties find entertaining.
I am twenty-two years old, which makes me not quite old enough to remember the death of Enzo Ferrari, and too old to understand the fascination with Justin’s Beaver. However I’m in the prime to be bewildered by how little everyone knows. Well when I say everyone, what I mean is everyone who is between the ages of 8 and 18.
Growing up I never took a huge interest in news, it was only something that parents cared about. Still, I was well aware of 9/11, foot-and-mouth disease, SARS, and even what happened at Prince William Sound Alaska a few months before my birth. While I used to be impartial to the goings on of the world, I still kept up to date and prided myself in being able to talk to grownups about things that were happening now as a result of mistakes their parents made decades ago.
I work in the media, so I know exactly what the viewer, listener and readership numbers are; I also know that because of things like You Tube and Twitter many of you are getting your “news” online and not waiting to get the full story. The technology that has allowed for this incredible speed of communication over long distances has lead to a generation of people who can plan a whole summer with their friends while waterskiing in Antarctica with Ke$ha blaring in their ears. But is that really a good thing?
I will admit that I, too, am guilty of texting way too often and spending an inordinate amount of time staring at large clusters of pixels, but at least I know what’s happening in the world. Those of us who are old enough to remember the beginning of the Iraq war remember that as soon as it started almost every journalist on the planet dropped everything and went to cover the same story.
Since then many more technologies have been improved upon so that now anyone anywhere can share a thought with anyone else almost instantly. Its like the Ansible from that Orson Scott Card book. These technologies have let citizen journalism run rampant throughout the interwebs, and much of what we all took to be fact was only the really flash bits of a story, twisted by bias and then chirped by 10 million people on word-tube-face-space. But this has lead to what I will call the wow factor.
The wow factor is what is ruining intelligence. Rather than discussing important things like Ms. DePape’s Parliament episode people are crowded around their iberry watching some girl sing about a calendar. I mean is this what the world has really come to? Is this what humans have been striving towards in the last century?