I'm pulling an all nighter, which doesn't mean I avoid tiny naps. I'm wide awake right now, and it's only an hour before the dog's breakfast anyway. She's nudging my elbow.
I have my reasons for burning the idiomatic midnight oil (although not so idiomatic in my case as the heating system in this house is literally burning oil, day and night). Given differences in time zones, it's not such an obscure time (4 am-ish) elsewhere in my reality.
One could fill one's later years with study of what one just went through, over most of a lifetime. I'm speaking not just of a personal timeline of foreground activities, but a shared background marked by public events.
I think we tend to do that anyway, those of us of grandparent age. Nor do those of younger age necessarily fail to reflect and look back either.
Along those lines I've been sampling several new media analysis channels, going with generations younger than Boomer (my cohort, roughly speaking), each engaged in retrospective summations in some dimension. It's by looking back that we see trends. We may sense what's trending going forward, but as the blockchain teaches, not everyone's block is the one added.
"Boomer" refers to "baby boomers" i.e. a bulge in the US population occasioned by a period of prosperity and relative peace, post two World Wars. As a boomer, I was starting to tune in world affairs, from television and adult conversation, during my early years in Portland (having been born in Chicago). Airlifting supplies to West Berlin was a thing. I preferred cartoons. I'd get more into reading later.
The geek in me sees all these internet video channels engaged in serious processing, both on and off cable, on broadcast television and radio. We're computing, as quickly as we dare. Cutting corners may be dangerous.
Marshall McLuhan saw the tsunami of TV and wondered if the printed word would survive, or rather, those who could really relate to it. The convergence of TV and text in the form of computers was just starting to happen in McLuhan's day. The senses would rebalance and remix.
We were seeing a quick evolution of hypertext media (http, https), a new form of tension in the world, but also old hat, as scholarship had always been about making these kinds of connections.
Computers made it all go much faster, the better to keep up with the CERN stuff.
Dr. Vannevar Bush of the National Science Foundation, was seeing search engines in the 1940s.
