We're in the shutterbug era. It's not just Gen-Alpha, Gen-Z, Millennials, or Gen-X, it's Baby Boomers, too. Everyone has to document everything and share it with the world on social media posts. It's easy when you have an iPhone with you at all times. 4K Dolby Vision video recording, Action mode, and macro video.On Steely Dan's second album Countdown to Ecstasy, there's a not so great song with a refrain of "Show biz kids are making movies of themselves and they don't give a fuck about anybody else". Prescient for the current environment.
A big parody song in the sixties and seventies was "The Comet Song". It never made the airwaves, but was big on playgrounds. Although it sounds like something straight out of MAD Magazine, it's not. It originated organically from kids on a Jungle Gym. The ditty goes something like this: "Comet - It makes your teeth turn green! Comet - It tastes like gasoline, Comet - It makes you vomit, So buy some Comet, and vomit, today!" It was sung to the melody of the "Colonel Bogey March" made famous in the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai. Kids today would take it verbatim and make a TikTok video of it.
I went fifty years without a smartphone, but now that I have one, I don't know how I'd live without it. I wasn't an early adopter because I didn't know what to buy, the upstart iPhone, or, the more established Blackberry. Plus, they were expensive. If you go back twenty years, Blackberry was the number one communication device, but Apple ate their lunch after launch. I'm glad I went with the iPhone.
Apple sucks you into their ecosystem, but it's the best out there in my opinion. This is not a slight to Android, but most everyone I know has an Apple phone. I had a Palm Pilot Personal Digital Assistant in the late nineties and spent too much time playing DopeWars and Space Trader, but I was excited for what was coming in the future. We're a society of digital natives and digital immigrants. I'm definitely a digital immigrant. I had to learn everything from scratch beginning about 1990. I haven't had a landline in about ten years, but in my apartment, there's a wall-mounted rotary dial phone to remind me that things are in perpetual motion.
Although I frequently check my email, financial accounts, text messages, stock watch lists, and social media feeds, I primarily use my iPhone as a jukebox. Give or take a few songs, I've got about 500 singles I've bought from the iTunes Store for almost twenty years in the palm of my hand. Dick Clark, who was once known as "America's oldest teenager", famously said "Popular music is the soundtrack of your life." I get flashbacks listening to some of the tunes ranging from the 1950s to now. Reminds me of good times and friends gone too soon. Clark hosted American Bandstand on Saturday mornings for decades, sandwiched in between cartoons and Soul Train. I watched all three. Don Cornelius was the emcee of Soul Train. The program's tagline was: "Sixty nonstop minutes across the tracks of your mind". It was a great way to grow up.
Kids these days stream cartoons 24/7 on The Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, and The Disney Channel. If you prefer music, you can watch videos all day long on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Music. Although more convenient and accessible, I liked it better in the old days when you did things together, with your friends or family, in a group. Soul Train and American Bandstand had significant ratings reductions when MTV was introduced and they both went off the air about the turn of the century. I should know. I was part of the problem. Video killed the radio star, but I haven't watched MTV in decades. I still listen to radio.
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