Everyone loses their phone once in a while, it is part of the process of regeneration and upgrading and black market sales. Phone numbers, while an important function of ones daily transactions, are essentially only an assigned identity, and they can be traded and switched without much sentimental currency attached. Phone numbers are easy to recollect, as long as you know someone who knows someone, and invariably everyone does.
Ones computer, on the other hand, is a creature of intense personal cultivation. More than a communication device it is an external storehouse of our dreams and desires, memories and madness, secrets and solitude, past and possibility. Last week the desktop on my PowerBook made a gurgling sound, spun its wheels uselessly and put on a sad face before disappearing itself. The hard drive suddenly decided, at the ripe old age of two, to retire to the Bermuda triangle of electronics. As if it got fed up with my archival abuse, my constant mainlining of illegal music, overweight photos, pirated software, not to mention a ton of bad writing and several versions of resumes that have yet to attract a prospective employer, cluttered all over the wallpaper like a 2D reflection of my actual room.
If I had learned anything from Sex and the City, it was definitely not from the episode when Carries first-generation PowerBook bemoaned the very same tragedy. Against all reason, logic and warning, I did not back dat ting up. Three hundred dollars in the poorhouse later, I have my computer back, but its just a ghost in a titanium shell. The shiny new hard drive the hipster nerd technicians at Tek-Serve installed in my coffee-stained laptop was a tabula rasa, and so was I.
The New York City subway, subterranean second home of the rambling kind, is also a gathering space for paused podophiles those amblers cloaked in an ambient cocoon of MP3, their omnipresent white ear buds twining into a secret place. When the iNano was innocuously released to the frothing masses who reactively shrieked "I wanna be updated," it only reconfirmed that this handheld music player was more than just another sterling page from the book of Jobs, but the incarnation of a defining moment.
Some of the complaints people have projected on to the current version of youth are that they have no focus, no backbone, no rallying desire to change the world. A recent Vanity Fair essay contest posed the question of what is on the mind of American youth. The accompanying photos seem to imply that yesteryears youth were all anti-war do-gooder types, protesters, activists, people engaged with the world; they also implied that todays kids are zonked out on pharmaceuticals, drift-less media junkies trapped in a 24-hour party, people disengaged with the world. This is both true and unfair.
Ive met young people who spent time in the Peace Corps, lived in Africa where they lost 40 lbs and gained a few indescribable parasites, others who willingly left comfort and cable TV to hunker down in off-Lonely Planet places like the mountains of Uzbekistan or the dark heart of Congo. Then again I know a lot of people who dont have that inclination, but it also doesnt make them ignorant or uncaring about the world outside their social orbit. These are the same kind of people who rallied and raved at EDSA 2, but come the next morally bankrupt establishment, only burnout is in the soul, and you cant blame them.
Now there is a multiplicity of modes for being, a thousand different ways to rouse your rabble. That peoples attention spans have shortened significantly and only operate better when on multi-tasking mode. The shifts come much quicker. We are a culture of rupture and interruption. We cant even slap a label on this generation now because its so in flux. We try to live in the moment, but once we figure things out, that moment is already passé.
Bobos and tweeners caught in the throes of their quarter-life crises, all these catchwords were created to capture the palpable feeling of je ne sais quoi, a result of those who lose their bourgeois de vivre. Click-wheeling back to the iPod, it is this little portable music-player that has come to stand in for our effervescent moods, our downloadable interests, our party shuffles. The iShuffle in particular symbolizes its users most accurately. Not that life is simply random, but that we allow it to be, in fact, we morbidly desire it to be. We shuffle from one degree, one job, one relationship, one belief, one city, one country to the next (all the while still partially dependent on parental indulgence) because, we say, were keeping our options open, were experimenting, we dont want to settle and be shackled down. The truth is, theres less of a defined path, what our parents may have seen much more clearly before, its not really there before us. We see bare wisps of paths, trailing into the future like smoke.