Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Tuesday, August 04, 2015

The More Things Stay The Same The More They Are Marketed As Change

I truly do not understand popular representations of retired folks presumably befuddled by an internet that actually hasn't substantially changed much since they began surfing it, texting on it, making transactions with it themselves in what was at most middle age. In American popular culture the moment you hit retirement age you are transformed into someone who lived through the New Deal and World War II even if your adolescence was spent on rollerskates listening to Disco. I have noticed that cultural signifiers of the seventies and eighties and now even the nineties are weirdly mulching into an archive of indifferent simultaneity. I wonder will the real stasis of the contemporary US culture finally become palpable when kids realize their cellphone selfies and jeans and t-shirts are indistinguishable from their parents' cellphone selfies and jeans and t-shirts?

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