Saturday, November 21, 2015

Football Counter-Programming 2015: Week 12

The football season is slowly winding to a close. (Really, the end is within theoretical sight, I promise.) But it hasn't gone away yet and so the FC-P continues, strong in its mission to distract you from your pigskin-related pursuits for another week. No matter if your team is throwing down against a cupcake opponent (I'm looking at YOU Southeastern Conference) or whether your team is finally facing down against significant opposition that might determine your season. (You know who you are, tOSU.)

But . . . as usual, this is the end of such football talkery for this post. Now, on to the Counter-Programming!

Hit me up Log Lady!

 Do you ever write letters anymore? I lived in a time when letter writing was already becoming a thing of the past--and that was even before the overwhelming rise of the Internet and e-mail. I once had a pen pal, but that was pretty short-lived. (I don't even remember now where he lived.)

I wrote some letters when I went to summer camp and when I was in college, I wrote an occasional letter back home. But my main method of communication has always been face-to-face. (As anyone who knows me can tell you, I don't like communicating on the telephone and generally try to avoid that.)

Of course, these days, I communicate a lot in words--but I type them in this blog or on Twitter or on Facebook. And the words are not directed to anyone specific. They are just composed and put out into the world for general consumption. That is nice, because it gives a creative outlet and some (informal, to be sure) practice in the writing process. Does it weaken the overall use of language, however, when I'm not specifically targeting a person?

These days when I write something directly at someone, it is a note of specific goals. Telling Lynda that I've gone for a walk. Or leaving lists of chores for the kids to do when I'm out of the house.

Speaking of that . . . my mom used to write chore lists for me every summer morning. When she was off working and when I was home without school, she would hang a note on the refrigerator door with tasks to accomplish by the time she got home: vacuum the floors, wash and fold laundry, clean my room, wash dishes. What sort of chores did you do as a kid?

And how do you communicate? Do you write letters? When was the last time you received a letter from someone? When was the last time you got something in the mail that wasn't a bill, junk, or an annual Christmas card? Do you think it is a diminishment of our historical record that we don't write anymore? Have you even considered what future historians and anthropologists will use to determine how we lived our lives?

Or maybe it won't be so bad? Will all of our digital records more than suffice? Will it only be paper receipts from Walmart and Best Buy that tells our history? Or will future civilizations judge us by our random blog posts, our DVDs of Breaking Bad and whatever retro-tech they devise to watch our Netflix files of Friends?

(On further reflection . . . that might be our most accurate depiction. It's not all State Department communiques, after all.)

So . . . welcome future archaeologists!

My name is David and I lived in Ohio most of the time. It was a state located in what we called the Midwest. We valued corn, football, butter, and wholesomeness. Our summers were hot and our winters were cold.
We--unlike you--were able to go outside when the weather was nice. But . . . during my adulthood, we chose to stay indoors and entertain ourselves with digital communications and filmed stories on our portable computer devices. (These were the progenitors of our cortical digi-implants.)
We made movies predicting the robot enslavement, but we never took it very seriously.

Sorry about not preparing for that like we should have.

And remember (as you from the future already know) . . . no one cares if your team didn't take that Division I-AA team seriously during the late season cupcake week. A loss is a loss is a loss . . .


. . . unless that loss is actually robot enslavement. Then--well, its a paradigm shift for the whole civilization.

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