Why, yes! But it’s not some Rocky Horror Picture Show/Lady Gaga hybrid this time (unfortunately).
I was reading this article from the New York Times (yes, I realize it’s a few months old…so I have a little catching up to do) about the future in media consumption. The article’s interesting as a whole, but the word “Mash-Ups” naturally caught my eye, and a good point was actually raised:
“MASH-UPS AND HYBRIDS WILL RULE Everything that can be mashed together will be. The Tea Party will do a debate with CNN, and the Showtime series “Homeland” will be a cable series, an on-demand product, an app and a community. That informational crawl at the bottom of your television set? It could come from the broadcaster or it might come from Twitter. Soon the Oscars award show could be accompanied by comments from your wisecracking friends, not on your phone but on the bottom of your flat-screen. Huge world events will first appear on social media platforms and then leap to mainstream media and back again. The books you read to your children will take over when you are tired and read themselves, or they might turn into a game when the joys of unadorned narrative begin to bore.”
I’m kinda looking forward to this new world, personally. In fact, I kinda wish I had books that turned into games when I was a kid. Namely, my textbooks – which I turned into games manually, by swiveling my chair 90 degrees to a Solitaire game. Kids those days.
However, while it has its pros and it has its cons, I like this idea of integration. I feel like it’s where we’re going as a whole, what with this ability to contact someone on the other side of the world in under a second. Whether it’s a clash or a collaboration, everything’s coming together quickly. For better or for worse, it creates more color in the world, more influences, more ideas, and to me it makes this place a great deal more interesting.
Of course, eventually, we’ll all be integrated enough that the world will likely be reduced to some global version of that uniform, prehistoric village of sorts where everyone in the pack looked, acted and thought the same. But I’ll hopefully be long dead by then.
And no, I don’t believe that the idea of “villages” were really a part of prehistoric times. Or humans for that matter. But I said what I said, so deal.