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Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Touch-and-go landings on the Information Superhiway

Published: May 28, 2013 1 minute 5 comments

Rwo
Now, freshly returned from the Reubens where it was named "Best Newspaper Panel," Rhymes with Orange!

Okay, this one was completed well before the convention, but it cracked me up, and I promptly began probably reading way too much into it.

To start at the most superficial level of the gag, I've tried on-line dating and, when I see people talking about it on Facebook, my response is "people still do that?" 

I got to the meet-in-person phase about half a dozen times, and the result was pretty bland, like running into someone you know from work at the mall and sharing a table at the food court: Congenial, but not romantic.

The times I've fallen in love (13 years, 2 years, 7 years, 2 years) it's been pretty much a combination of shared 3D lives (apartment building, church, work, work) and the Thunderbolt: There's somebody you know anyway and — POWIE!

You cannot summon the Thunderbolt by Googling it.

Back in 1970, I was living next door to a biker who astonished us all by getting into computer dating back when you filled out a questionaire and mailed it in to the people with the punchcards and mainframes. We teased him about it, but he replied, "I said I wanted to meet a good looking girl who was into premarital sex" and we had to admit it sounded okay to us.

Especially when, by golly, the computer matched him up with a really cute Jewish girl, whose religion I mention because they dated for a few weeks and then she introduced him to her parents and they immediately packed her off to a kibbutz in Israel. When he found out, he went by the house and heaved a brick through their picture window. I'm not making any of this up.

I know some people who met their mates on-line but I also know a drama major who ended up with a solid Hollywood career and a couple of guys who played in the NBA and NFL and someone whose mother won a share of a six-figure lottery ticket.

But I know a whole lot more people who gave those things a shot without getting much in the way of payback. 

Some people have fallen out of airplanes without parachutes and survived, but that doesn't make it a smart move. I guess the question is how literally you view the phrase "taking the plunge."

School daysAnyway, the more thoughtful interpretation of the above is about the ocean of social media in which we swim, and at that point, past experience threatens to operate on the Andy Rooney level of crabbing over how much nicer and simpler and more sane things were when I was a lad.

Romance aside, I've heard of everything in today's RWO and I have no idea what most of it is for. 

That is, I know what most of it does, but I can't for the life of me figure out why anyone wants to get all wrapped up in it.

There are a lot of cartoons now about people staring at their phones and, if nothing else, I certainly feel that airports should have lanes for people who want to wander along texting and surfing and whatnot and those who are trying to get down the concourse.

I don't think that's an Andy Rooney attitude. Heck, hipsters get pissed if someone reclines their seat on the plane — which makes a difference of all of about an inch and a half — or if someone dares to bring a child on an airplane.

By that measure, I'm not Andy Rooney; I'm the freakin' Dalai Lama.

Where I become the Old Guy is when I say that we lost the battle for social interaction when we gave our kids Walkmen and headphones so they would shut the hell up in the back of the car. And now that generation has grown up and has their kids isolated and blissed out on "Finding Nemo" DVDs back there instead of sharing the family vacation with the family.

As for their on-line lives, it's like they figured out Santa and the Easter Bunny, but they still believe that, when Hugh Downs said, "We're in touch, so you be in touch," that Hugh and Barbara actually sat down and read their comments on the 20/20 site, and that when Jane Pauley and Stone Phillips said "we want to hear what you think," they actually meant "we give a rat's ass what you think."

It used to be (said Andy) that you had magazines and newspapers, and people who felt they had something to say would write it down and send it in, and, if it seemed interesting to the editor, it would appear in the publication and people would read it.

That was unfair to people who had something to say that wasn't what an editor wanted to have said.

Then came blogs, and people who felt they had something to say could post it and it didn't matter if some editor "approved" it or thought it was significant or well-phrased or whatever. It was up to the people to decide.

But that was unfair to people who didn't have much to say, so now we have all these short-form self-expression venues, like Twitter and Tumblr and Pinterest, and too-long-did-not-read blogs are dying (said Andy, on his TLDNR blog) and damn but Facebook needs to add "selfies" to its dropdown menu of updates you don't want to be shown.

I wish everyone would change their underwear as often as some people change their profile pictures. 

There is a whole lot of chaff out there and I don't know how you sort through what you need to be on and what you can happily ignore and how much any of it matters.

I do know this: A couple of years ago, I went to a webcomics conference and wrote it up here and it got noticed by quite a few web cartoonists who linked to it on their sites. I had a bunch of hits, some nice comments and also there were comments at the sites where it had been mentioned and some of those increased numbers seemed to become permanent. Not a lot, but some.

I've also had a couple of times when something here was mentioned at Reddit, and I suddenly got a massive number of hits, my bounce rate (average time spent here) plummeted and there were no comments, and absolutely no permanent increase in visitors.

As far as I can tell, people click on the Reddit link and then disappear into the mist. Someone says, "You should look at this," and so they do just that — they glance over, as if they were driving by an accident, without even bothering to pull out their earbuds.

What I'm seeing in today's RWO is a generation of Emotional Idiots doing constant, virtual touch-and-go landings and never actually being anywhere.

Oh well. If Edison Lee is right — and Edison Lee is rarely wrong — at least these technically advanced folks won't starve to death.

Edison

(Normally, I post by 8 and do a final quick edit immediately. Got interrupted today and that edit came later. If you read it before 10 am EDT, you'll like it even more now!)

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Comments 5

  1. Too funny! The reason your bounce rate plummets when you get linked on Reddit is TLDNR in action. Most Redditers wont spend time reading a “wall of text” – no matter how insightful, how informative, how entertaining. One paragraph, max, is the average Redditer’s text quota. A screen capture of a text exchange on your cell phone is much preferred. Better yet, no text, just a photo or video.
    TL:DNR: Words are so 1990s man.

  2. What scares me is it’s not just the kids. I sit down to read a novel and feel my brain adjust to the length and concentration required. I’m not used to it anymore; it imposes some stretching and aching. I sit down with the Sunday newspaper and–while I guarantee I will be the last American with a newspaper subscription, just on principle–sometimes catch myself thinking, “Man, I’ve got to read through this whole damn thing again?!” I feel the shift away from blogs, see it in my visitor count, and wonder what the world’s coming to when people’s attention spans can’t handle six paragraphs, but I’m infected too. It takes effort to fight it, and who’s going to bother when they don’t even perceive a problem?
    Says a guy who loves and makes comics (the original short-attention-span theater) to a guy who loves and writes a blog about them.

  3. Novels I can handle, but not newspapers. 🙁

  4. Tabby, the real problem I see with that is the sudden increase in sites that think they are the Onion. Snopes is swamped with idiotic rumors they “disprove” simply by pointing out that the story is from one of these spoof sites. But you wouldn’t know it if you just looked at the pic and moved on. Irony, sarcasm and misdirection don’t work when people ARE paying attention (ask Orson Welles), and they SURE don’t work when people don’t bother to read past the first paragraph.
    And, Lost, I commented elsewhere today to this extent: We lost a generation of readers, so that, before we could have teachers use the paper with their students, we had to teach them how to read it themselves. They would ask “what reading level is it written on?” not realizing that the answer is “Which section?” because it varies. But to address your point, they had to be told “Nobody reads it all. You’re not expected to read it all. You just go through and read the parts you think are interesting.”
    Then we had to discourage them from telling the kids to “turn to page B6 and read …” and just let the kids wander through the paper on their own and see what they found of interest. That’s how you teach not just newspaper reading but literacy in general — reading should be interesting, not “an assignment.”
    That’s why a good paper is such a potpourri of news, sports, advice columns, fashion, entertainment news and, yes, comics: To create that fun grab-bag, that “something for everyone” package.
    But even those who mostly get it will still put a section aside with a story they’re gonna read later.
    No, you’re not. Throw it out. It’s okay. You’re not supposed to. And there’ll be another one tomorrow, and you won’t have to read all of that one, either. Just the good parts.
    And, Brian, with all due respect (and why isn’t WADR an on-line acronym?), I find the same thing with blogs, except those that blog regularly, and hopefully more than once a week. I kind of wish Dave Horsey wouldn’t blog about his cartoons, because then I’ve got nothing left to say about them, but I read his blog nearly every time he posts, because he posts a couple of times a week.
    But aside from my morning routine being pretty much locked up in comics thanks to this blog, I find that, when I pull up friends’ blogs, none of them seem to update their blogs as often as they did four years ago, and that makes it increasingly fruitless to go back and look, so their numbers fall, so they’re less motivated to update … and there ya go.

  5. Geez, Mike; I’m tired!
    Yes, it’s a cycle. I don’t update frequently–certainly not regularly–and the blogs I’m loyal to are those that do. Like yours. Even with that, though, something’s different. Facebook has assumed some of blogs’ functions (and I guess Twitter has assumed some of Facebook’s, though I don’t twit or tweet). Leaving a note on Facebook alerting my Friends to a new blog post seems to help, though I have to time the Facebook so they’ll see it.
    Sometimes I miss the good ol’ 20th Century.

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