Photo credit: Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
Having recently celebrated my 65th birthday, each passing moment brings another reminder that my life’s chronology largely predates today’s image-driven, post-literate world.
My grandparents were born in the late 1890s. I taught myself to read by looking at the pictures in actual books, and we had a black and white television set until around 1971. As When I was a kid, the local AM radio station began each morning with hog and soybean futures.
As a child, I was up at the crack of dawn to wade through knee-deep snow drifts in search of the morning newspaper, and humiliatingly compelled to eat nutritionally balanced meals prepared by my mother, who taught home economics at the local high school.
Wrestling, anyone? I haven’t watched a single episode of the long-running farce since Jerry Lawler was King. I gave up sweetened soft drinks 30 years ago, refuse to eat at Chick-fil-A or shop at Wal-Mart, and believe to this very day that Oswald acted alone.
Finally merging onto the information superhighway, my wheels might as well have been a two-stroke East German Trabant, but somehow it all worked out, even if the interweb has proved to be a brutish propaganda tool fit to make Goebbels blush, rather than an unprecedented educational opportunity.
I don’t blame the social media algorithms, which merely exploit the current human propensity for living in virtual unreality. But on widely scattered occasions, there comes a genuine shock, and the type of disori …
