Blog 13     Information Rich – Time Poor

 

In this age of downsized shrinking hand held technology, a funny thing is happening to the human mind. As the luxury items in our houses grow smaller (outside of televisions which are getting exponentially bigger and flatter) so the amount of information they contain grows bigger. As a corollary, the amount of information we attempt to cram into our minds is overloading, and we are becoming cluttered.

Well at least I am. When I were a lad, we had to rely on our imagination for most of our entertainment. Nothing wrong with that. Most of our time was spent on imaginary sporting encounters where you represented whoever your heroes were. If you were really well organised or perhaps a Virgo (ahem!) perhaps you might have recorded all of the scores in an exercise book, which you hung on to for years and years afterwards.

Other games generally included playing soldiers and cowboys and Indians. Hell yes I am that damn old. Oh and in my case, imitating professional wrestlers off the Saturday afternoon shows, whereupon mum and dad’s big double bed represented the ring, and my four year younger sister my unwilling opponent. After I had slapped and slammed her around for long enough and finally pinned her, all the while doing a running commentary, she would invariably run screaming to our parents for help. This inevitably resulted in my dad running in and chasing me around the bed (ring) while I commentated aloud that ‘this is no way to treat the heavyweight champion of the world!’

Anyway, that was then but now, there is just so much information and entertainment out there that I can’t keep up. The Internet for a start, is crammed full of enough knowledge and crap to keep me busy forever. Old TV shows and movies, new TV shows and movies, utube clips, and every piece of information ever created by humankind.

Even a technophobe like me knows how to download movies, and if not, other people download a whole bunch of them and give them to me on thumb drives. Add these to the multitude of bargain DVDs and all their added extras which clog up my shelf space.

My television is now so smart, it not only has at least 20 channels of crap, but I’ve also recorded a crapload of shows and movies that I’ll never have time to watch. Then there are books. I love them but I can only read about 50 a year, so the rest sit in growing piles on my study floor, alongside the already crammed wall to wall shelves. Yet I can’t resist buying more, online (ridiculously cheap or free), in second hand bookstores, at remainders sales, markets and op shops.

In addition to this there is the nostalgia network. Everything old is new again. Meaning that sad middle aged gits like me can once again access all the lost toys and shit we loved as kids on sites like eBay and Gumtree to recapture our misspent youth.

I’m just thankful I never got into gaming otherwise there would be another 23 hours a day gone into the ether. I never got past Leisure Suit Larry, the very first iteration of WWE wrestling, and football manager when there were the proper 4 Divisions, although I am proud to say I did fully conquer Wolfenstein 3D AND Spear of destiny – when I was supposed to be writing my Master of Philosophy dissertation on a university scholarship.

As a full time employee, and part time writer, I’d never get any writing done if I played online games. Oddly enough though, a lot of writers seem to be gamers. It’s like their reward for hitting a word count target. In fact a writer friend put me onto the online demo of the NEW Wolfenstein… Jesus H Christ. Talk about realistic and complex. Despite the fact the protagonist looks a bit too much like John Cena.

The only thing that hasn’t changed is the phoney American bravado. That’s still totally unrealistic, because let me assure you if you put me in a battered old warplane in a modern day dogfight and the thing was going down, or a shell racked building with incoming fire on all sides from a vicious enemy, I wouldn’t be standing there giving it the big bollocks. Nup, I’d be curled up in a foetal ball on the floor whimpering, ‘I’m gonna die! I’m gonna die!’

Hey Cena, why don’t you run through this channel of bombed out buildings while the enemy fire on you from all sides and take out that tank launcher 500 metres away single handily while we give you covering fire?

Yeah, nice one chuckles. How about I stay here and YOU fucking do it?

That’s my idea of fighting. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go and polish my world wrestling heavyweight title championship belt.

Merry Christmas.