When I was itty bitty and full of wide eyed dreams of living the rest of my days as buddies with the Ninja Turtles and neighbours with the dewwwds from Duck Tales (They are awesome, you find a set of triplets with that much nous for cracking crimes, finding treasure and foiling the attempts of this evil son of a bitch I dares you)
I had one other dream it was to live the life where Inspector Gadgets pieces of awesome were real. I dreamed of a day where I could helicopter myself from place to place by what came out of my hat and get to places on my rocket boots, but most of all I ached not for penny his niece, but the computer he had that was also a book. That shit was amazing.
There I was aged 7 thinking, WOW book computers, then someone said to me, but that’s like a laptop man, relax your flaps….. Not knowing what that meant at aged 7 I probably got back to making my own radio show and making dams in the creek. Always as unsatisfied as a suburban housewife and wanting the real deal, I was always left wanting more than this short change small computer that fits in your backpack crapola.
Then I awoke Wednesday morning, it was a day like any other I was still yearning for Shredder to send a bunch of Foot Clan men to come fight me in the sewers, but it still hadn’t happened, then the morning news arrived, whatever just a bunch of the same old stuff happening to the same old people. And then it came on the screen. The iPad.
Sure the name sucks, and it looks awkward, but this is everything I dreamed of right? It is as close as it got to Inspector Gadget and his awesome computer book with its flashing lights and its touch screen bits. I should be crawling over broken glass to even look at this should I not? Well eehhhhh I dunno.
It seems with the onset of modern life, the education of how the world works and who does what, I have lost the imagination and the want to have cool things that make me go ‘You know what I am very impressed’ without thinking, oh corporate big wigs how I hate you, or how many poor workers were extorted to produce this? Whilst stopping short of teenage apathy, and the kids who sit glum faced at EVERYTHING and go ‘meh’ (By the way to those kids out there, your world is boring, because you are) I was still not busting a nut, raising the roof or whatever it is kids do these days. To me the announcement was just another piece of ‘news’…. And I HATE THAT!
What have we become? Are we supposed to expect things like this to keep popping up? There were people commenting that ‘oh it’s wayyyy to big’ or ‘this is just a big version of an iPhone’. Excuse me Dr Dickhead, did you just say you were not impressed by something that allows you to touch a screen and move stuff around, where you can read the newspaper via something that allows you to play games, something that allows you to do all sorts of shit, and you aren’t impressed? Why? Were you some kind of extra on the Minority report? Is your dad George Jetson? How are people not impressed by this?
Ok let’s come in close, take a knee and let me say my bit. Here we are living in this world where day by day we are getting cool shit thrown to us on a consumer plate. All the time there are new advances, currently I can let my phone read my emails to me. That is straight up Jetsons! Where is the guffawing? Where is the wowwwwwwwww. Now I will be honest, I am not far out of the Commodore 64 era; I never had a Nintendo, a Gameboy or a Playstation. I was still playing pong whilst you guys were all doing your Wii Fits and your world of warcrafts, but I don’t think I am to far gone. We are living out our cartoon hero’s dreams right now; do you need a flying car to be convinced?
As a result of this glut of technology and massive boon in electronic advancements we are left with no imagination firstly because Hollywood already played it out to us in the 80’s and because we are always being given this amazing stuff year in year out and our biggest concern is ‘how do I fit this in my bag’ when it should be how many you can fit down the front of your pants before the security guard realises something is up.
Now this is not to say the iPad is the way forward, ill be honest apart from the Inspector Gadget nostalgia I am not that convinced, but I feel that there are some questions that need to be raised, firstly is Steve Jobs stealing inventions from my childhood? And more importantly are we losing our imagination?
Gone are these days of dreams and living in cartoons, where once the cool movies were the ones where stuff was going down thousands of years from now. Now we live in an era where cop shows rule the roost in TV, and cool stuff like iPads go hand in hand with disappointment. The other day I was in a conversation where we were wondering if making out with Lola Bunny from Space Jam was bestiality, who cares? As a kid she was a ‘smokin hottie’ who cares if she was a rabbit! Whilst peoples desire to get it on with small furry rabbits is none of my concern right now, the imagination that we once held for things awesome and cool regardless of the inconvenience that they cause to our modern life has been abandoned and for what?