What was the world like before YouTube? My addiction to it is causing me to lose interest in doing things for myself. My sports, collections, friends, and social activities are all falling away from me because I watch videos of other people doing those things. My butt is slowly growing into the chair in front of my computer. My brain is creepily changing into mush, and my muscles are shrinking into strings.
How will anthropologists catalog our generation when, in the future, we are being dug out of the earth for study? Will they reconstruct us in the museums of future civilizations? How will people look upon us? As civilized humans or as programmed robots glued to a black box doing nothing? Where will they find all the millions of digital YouTube videos depicting the subject matter that kept our era so mesmerized? If, when they find the videos, will they have a way to know what they are and will they be able to play them or see them as we did? Even we have trouble playing old photos on new equipment. There is a business dedicated to converting old movies, photos, videos etc into the latest format so they can be viewed. I had all of my home movies converted to digital and stored on discs. Now, I find that I need to keep a disc player and a computer screen just for that. Forget about looking at an old vhs tape. My experience is that the few times I wanted to play, a preserved forever copy of my life, the tape was frozen to itself and could not be played. Technology changes quickly and our efforts to make the job of the anthropologist of the next millennia easier are nil. Instead of using brushes and nut-picks to uncover our bones they will be using ultrasound, x-rays, and MRI to interpret the mysteries they have uncovered.
One of the more interesting and educational video channels I am hooked on is “Desert Drifter.” This young man takes videos of himself wandering through the terrain of the southwestern states, looking for evidence of life from another era. He finds many sites on the face of cliffs that are almost impossible to reach. My knees quiver just watching him climb on slippery rack faces to reach a hollow in the rock face too high for anyone to want to live there. Yet humans have walled it off with rocks and mortar made from mud to create shelter. The best estimate he can give the viewer is that the civilization lived there about six hundred years ago. He will pick up chards of pottery and and arrow points chipped from flint stone and discuss them being careful to return the pieces back to the spot where he found it. He shows smooth and steep rock faces with footholds hollowed out of the stone to provide a staircase to a living space. Inside the living spaces he will find evidence like dried corn cobs indicating that people did in fact live there.
What will the Desert Drifter of 2624 find from exploring our habitats?
Filed under: Education, family, Society | Tagged: Ancient Civilizations., Cliff Dwellings, YouTube | 2 Comments »
