Happy Solstice, Bob. I would hope you are correct (about newspapers making a comeback) and I agree completely that it is technology and the 'hurry-hurry' pace of modern life that forms the primary impetus behind this 'impatience'...both individual and collective.
However, it’s also a matter of age. When one is young (if one arbitrarily accepts that ‘age 30’ cutoff we so often encounter), one is full of lust for life, filled with limitless desires and naturally inclined to be impatient. When one gains a few more decades, experience in the world and more familiarity with all its disappointments and failed promise, one acquires a veneer (a patina, perhaps) of lessened detachment, lessened ‘need for speed’ and an inclination to slow down and smell the Nasturtiums. [It’s also called ‘maturity’ by some who dare to poke the puerile paradigm in its aesthetic underbelly.]
Of course, America is a ‘special needs case’ in that over the past 60 or 70 years or so, the vultures of materialistic, capitalistic commerce (read: marketing and advertising businesses) have learned that youthful impatience not only has advantages implicit for sellers of consumer goods but that it is a socio-economic dynamic may be artificially augmented and exponentially enhanced so as to exploit the well-documented spending potential of already inherently impetuous youthfulness.
As a direct result of this, commercial advertising and marketing actively promote impulsive spending by trolling with those never-fail baits of the youthful consumer sport called lowered critical thinking (called sex, drugs & rock&roll…the last now supplanted in America by HipHop, Rap and other aesthetically deficit entertainment genres).
In other words, the lower the quantity and quality of youthful critical thought, the easier it is to socialise (with Pavlovian adeptness) people into buying things they would otherwise not buy without a LOT more reflective analysis (i.e. a new Apple smartphone, every time Steve Jobs’ successor farts). In the past 30 years alone, these evil forces of the Commercial Business Dark Side have succeeded most admirably in the never-ending effort to promote pop-culture (which exemplifies and rewards tawdry banality), a process dedicated to making the whole concept of ‘delayed gratification’ utterly extinct!
Sadly, far too many members of American society have been lulled into this fatal trap of three-brain-cell intellectual development and the result is what contemporary author Kurt Andersen has artfully termed ‘FANTASYLAND’ (also the title of his rather brilliant book of the same name).
It is this same commerce-exploited dynamic of youthful immaturity that has resulted in…to a substantial extent…the demise of newspaper and other printed information. Whereas reading requires a bit of perspicacious work, internet/on-line feeds tend to spoon-feed (shoveling it in rather rapidly, at that!).
Far too many in America today regard scientific progress as a God in itself, failing utterly to take a more circumspect view of where science-enabled technology is taking us (a slippery slope, at best). And too many who do so are merely ‘youthful’, impatient and a latent remnant (if highly transmogrified) of the 1950s Beat Era drive to ‘Go-go-go!’
My argument here, distilled to its essence, is that newspapers are a relic of an older, far more mature state of human life since it’s been pretty well established by whole hosts of social observers and commentators that modern America (which worships the impossible and utterly fantantastical and highly narcissistic ‘eternal youthfulness’ our commercial advertising puppet-masters dangle tantalizingly before us…thanks a whole heap, Oscar Wilde and Dorian Gray!...) is now essentially in the hands of these same, impatient and ‘hurry-sickness afflicted’ youth (QED). And as the natural processes of aging continue to be regarded not as an ineluctable part of life well-lived, those who comprise our population (the ‘over 50s’, if you will) have been and continue to be regarded as nothing but an annoying social burden.
So, Bob, when you get on that small, detached, floating iceflow that your younger ‘loved-ones’ have prepared for you, you’d better take some newspapers with you to keep you occupied until the ice melts and you slip into the sea (they’ll also help keep you warm until you slip off). Even if you somehow managed to survive the dip in those hypothermic waters, the last printed newspaper businesses shall probably have gone belly-up by the time they revive you. More’s the pity! Have a happy Eeyore Holiday, eh!
PS: A re-read of some of Dr. Ted Kaczynski’s stuff would probably be a good idea, too, while you're on that ice-raft.
