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The Age of Everything and Nothing
Our abundance has created the modern void instead of fulfillment
In high school, I convinced a close group of friends that a ninja had won one of the very first Ultimate Fighting Championships (UFC). The story I told bordered on the absurd, complete with smoke bombs and the ninja disappearing suddenly after the fight, never to receive the award. Given that I was the only martial artist among my friends, they believed me. There was no way to fact check in the late 1990s either, as we were all using the internet to message our friends on America Online, not surfing Google to prove they were liars. Plus, there was the pesky business of having to spin up your second land line from a boxy PC or Commodore 64 that sat in your parents’ bedroom or office while it screamed “skee dee da dee da dee” (that was the noise your modem dial up made when you logged on for all the youngsters out there). It wasn’t like today, where you can simply pull out your phone and ask Google to find song lyrics or prove your friend wrong. Instead, most times you just took people’s word at face value.
I first started using the internet to fact check during my college years in the early 2000s. However, most professors refused to accept a works cited sheet with information coming from the World Wide Web. It just wasn’t “verifiable” they’d contend, given that the internet was fairly new. Most times I’d have to trudge up to the library stacks to find sources, or whip out an Encyclopedia Britannica for an essay. Even when I graduated college in December 2005, the web was still a faux pas to include in a collegiate level essay, so imagine my jealously when colleges loosened the standard and everyone began using online articles to back up their claims.
But it wasn’t just fact checking that changed, it was our entire way of life and gratification. I first scoffed at the idea of paying $99 a year to get Amazon Prime’s two-day shipping. Friends would remark about getting drunk and having a ton of boxes show up at their house and just how dangerous “drinking and Prime’ing” could be. I assumed people were lazy. For my entire upbringing and adult life, if you really wanted to get the VHS, DVD, or video game, you’d show up at Blockbuster Video early or ask if they could dig through their return bin. If the mall didn’t…
