Being culturally “with it” is partially about knowing what’s on trend, and what may happen next. But lately, in the eternal now, many of these developments seem less important. I’ll explain…
These days I’m in a state I think of as “the eternal now.” A mix of groundhog day, like the film, and experiencing random variations that seem to portend a lot of change to come but mostly add up to the same picture.
In broad terms, I think of the future. (What may happen to the planet for instance.) But I wonder less about my future. It wasn’t always this way. I used to be as trend obsessed as anybody in NYC and future focused along with it. When I was a B2B reporter in the 90s, for instance, one of the annual features that I put together for the banking magazine where I worked was “What’s Next in Information technology.” Generally, I looked forward to working on the project.
In broad terms, I think of the future. (What may happen to the planet for instance.) But I wonder less about my future. It wasn’t always this way. I used to be as trend obsessed as anybody in NYC and future focused along with it. When I was a B2B reporter in the 90s, for instance, one of the annual features that I put together for the banking magazine where I worked was “What’s Next in Information technology.” Generally, I looked forward to working on the project.
Said in a third way, if the application or infrastructure approach was “new” or a variation of something old that promised a new benefit, however unlikely, then it was assumed to be automatically better than existing systems. Sometimes this was true, but not always. Promises, after all, are made to be broken.
The magic of the world wide web
For me, steeped in the research and writing about changes related to the internet, the most compelling time of tracking these “new fashions” was in the early 2000s. My favorite articles to write had to do with what was then called with brisk authority, the World Wide Web.Wired Magazine was in its first flush of success and seemed to weigh a pound each month. This was also a time when the elements of modern web design, technologies like AJAX (asynchronous javascript) and CSS, and web services were being introduced and promised to make individual web pages behave more like an intelligent TV.
Now, this is commonplace. But trust me, getting to this new normal was a long, hard slog. Don’t get me wrong, my experience of the WWW in its early days was interesting despite there being more hype than beef at that point. Typically, checking out different URLs felt like surfing to find an electronic version of a brochure or book page. Blogs weren’t even the norm yet and by now, they seem so yesterday. Websites were grid bound and even the fonts on them seemed blocky in a ham-fisted attempt at futurism.
Nothing seemed inherently electronic. Yet, I would happily surf for hours, thrilled to find new information without needing to visit a library.
As this is The Lauren Report, and not some history of IT, I’ll dispense with a blow-by-blow iteration of how the transition got engineered, in terms of web services and server-side scripting and the like.
Websites are smarter and look fantastic, but we're just as distracted...
Suffice it to say, on the cusp of 2020, websites generally look fantastic. They also tend to have embedded video and well crafted content, or at least, an aesthetic that and can make you feel like you’re visiting another place, even when you’re looking at the images from an iPhone or tablet. The user experience is so much more immersive.The real world looks different to me, too, however and not just in terms of design trends or our lingering reality tv president. There are gadgets everywhere like KeySmartPro, with location tracking, which promise to help you do more with less but still look like another dust collector than something from tomorrow land. The internet of things promises to be hidden, more elegant. It also means someday soon your fridge will talk to you, presumably saying more than “fill me.”
Meanwhile, the majority appear to be plugged in to their phones for several hours a day at a minimum. Certainly for work, but often they are otherwise engaged. Porn angels and robot girlfriends or quick human hookups are a nervous swipe away.
Phone addiction is a thing.
And for me, a bigger issue is nearly everyone running around with a fragmented attention span. For some or some of you, born when I was a young woman, your primary reality is always a split screen of sorts, with many things happening simultaneously that appear to be of equal value and importance.
And you bounce from one thing to another, not sure if your juggling act will hold, but frankly not giving a shit either.
For so many of you, “now” is shrinking into a series of actionable moments that take you to a momentary future, one which disappears as you reach it and on to the next minute… It’s like the vanishing point in art class. Remember? It’s that part of the picture that seems to narrow to a single point of nothingness.
But, if you were actually on that road, or really walking down that hall, you’d feel the spaciousness of the present moment, even if you assigned it to a bigger capsule of time that you thought of as an era.
Meanwhile, I’m gradually settling deep into myself abiding that eternal now I referenced at the start of this report. Trends come and go, hemlines rise and fall, retro is hip again for a minute, then something else comes along. Blue hair, black fingernails, and Lizbeth Salander’s androgynous bony chic has been replaced by outsized colored tailoring—smoking suits in lime or orange or hot pink according to the stylists at Elle Magazine.
Of course, for the foreseeable future there will be the slight variation on a polo worn by this year’s preppie or layers upon layers of linen gauze in shades like pale pink and butterscotch for the Neohippie. Punk, rap and techno pop, beats, and loops, it all comes and goes … and returns… all of it coexisting as additional content.
And, my modified valley chick speak, the “dude, what’s up?” Or “that’s so groovy” has been phased out of the lingo with several iterations of slang. You still hear dude now and then—it’s implicitly sarcastic in a way that few terms are. But you also hear, per the Urban Dictionary, “that kitten is so SMOL.” Or he throws shade and is so savage. Or, he was savage then was woke. Oh yeah, and everything is “sick” even when well.
Options, distractions, and the new next now
Fashions count, but having options too numerous to track counts more. This is true in the broader culture, but amplified online, where Facebook is for fogies and Snapchat, the private messaging service that evaporates the message after it’s viewed, is what’s on now, that is, unless you’re looking to, um, date. Then it’s all about Tinder or Bumble. It’s all a click away.I want to know what’s next in the culture, it’s my reporter’s habit of wanting to stay in touch with the viral curve of change. But in the practical terms of my daily life, it doesn’t matter as much.
Sure, some of this is about fogey-ness. But some of it is the belief that in the coming world, past, present and future will co-exist like content does now. And “now,” won’t be shared, or a mono culture. “Now” will be a matter of sophisticated time travel and will house all the universes, maybe in the 12th dimension.
As for the internet, that shape shifter and trouble maker, I loved watching the web grow up as I grew into maturity with it, as a fact finder, trend watcher, and even as a woman who’s now old, but old as in “woke,” not old as in crumbled cheese.
You settle down in life, and being yourself is more important than being like “the new and the now.” But some of it, for me, anyway is a belief that someday soon, with artificial intelligence and immersive computing, I’ll be able to occupy past days of my life, or something created by a game designer that’s close enough to fool me. So I’ll put on a Helmut and return to 1994, when riot grrrls ruled the world. This has been the Lauren Report