Crunch Time

Chevrolets and Clock radios

Chevrolet recently sent a memo to its employees asking them to now refer to their brand by the original name "Chevrolet". The company wanted to anchor themselves to the traditional perception. This raised the cockles of those who affectionately call their vehicles "Chevy". In fact, the more contemporary name "Chevy" has become a part of our cultural milieu that the shift made news in the New York Times. 

Also highlighted in the New York Times was the replacement of the clock radio with it's antiquated time expression through the glow of digital time on it's face. They are now being replaced with something much more sophisticated: an internet enabled, multi-functional device that can wake us up not only with music from the radio but with news reports from cyber-space.

The point? We live today (as we always have) in the tension between holding on to what was past but familiar and moving ahead into a future that is novel but uncertain.

We must straddle this tension with discernment toward the future and empathy for the past. It can be a delicate balancing act but one that is never going away and will only intensify in the days to come. So how do we do it?

Letting go of what's going away entails grief. Allow yourself to grieve and lament the passing of an entrenchment known as nostalgia. You cannot go back to the "way things were". Our culture won't allow it nor will the reality of the movement of time. Grieving is appropriate in order to move ahead to new realities that will themselves, over time, become nostalgic and be worthy of grief.

Digital Detox Week

April 19 - 24 is Digital Detox Week.  This is a campaign created by Adbusters to free us from the confines of a digital lifestyle.  Here is what Zachary Colbert of Adbusters has to say about the challenge to detox our lives from our digital addiction:

"We are being shaped by the constant proliferation of digital technologies in our everyday lifestyles. The Internet may have connected the globe forever, but the developed world is now completely at its mercy. Terms and conditions apply to our autonomy. The World Wide Web has infused our society with an all-encompassing reliance on media technologies. At any given time we are staring at a screen, listening to an iPod, using GPS or holding our iPhone – the device that combines all the above functions in an intuitive and responsive little pocket tool. With this handy instrument on us at all times we are obligated to communicate and to be tuned in to entertainment and information. We are objectified as “users” not people. The products of our digital revolution run our daily routines. We are no longer free agents – technical extensions to our physical selves have become as vital as a limb or an organ.

Digital media will continue to shape us independently and as a society, by acting as a conduit of experience and by invading our real space and time. How many of us have wasted hours idly surfing the Internet or aimlessly flicking through endless TV channels?

This is what Jean Baudrillard called “the era of simulation,” we are being herded in preordained directions, dictated by omniscient authors. By following hyperlinks on Wikipedia, for example, we are following someone else’s premeditated path through information and jumping from one piece of subject matter to another. All too often users mistake these connections as their own and continually follow externalized thought processes, relying less and less on their natural associations. Similarly, social networks such as MySpace and Facebook externalize relationships, which has fragmented society by encouraging everyone to recede into their new portable plaything rather than sparking up conversation. The BlackBerry smartphone means that bosses never have to leave the office, while microblogging services such as Twitter mean that they can text the entire team to call an all-important emergency meeting in one fell swoop. Escape is futile. As we move from an industrial civilization into an information civilization, we’re online and we’re locked in. Try a digital detox for even just a day, I bet you will fail, I already have"