Is It Time To Remake Blade Runner?

What I’m really asking: Is it time to make another movie version of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?   Blade Runner was a masterpiece film adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s masterpiece novel, but it was just one interpretation of a very complex story.  I first read the novel in 1968 when I discovered it on the 7-day new book shelf at the Coconut Grove Library in Miami.  I can still remember reaching up to pull this very strangely titled book off the top shelf.  Even the cover was bizarre, far beyond the weird science fiction standards of the time.

I have read the book and seen the movie many times, and just recently I listened to an unabridged audio edition read by Scott Brick entitled Blade Runner, even though he was actually reading the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  It’s sort of sad when the public has to be sold a classic book by using the movie title.  Whenever I reread the book I’m always amazed by how well the movie got the book but also disturb by how much was changed and left out.  As soon as I started listening to the novel this time I kept thinking they really need to make a movie version that’s closer to PKD’s original vision.

Blade Runner is famous, and Ridley Scott keeps trotting out tweaked versions every decade or so, keeping his film version prominent in the public eye.  The Library of America just released Four Novels of the 1960s that includes Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which ups the ante on the novel’s value.  Dune has had one movie version, a television miniseries version and now another film version is in the works.  There have been many science fiction novels that have had two or more media productions, including The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Thing, and so on, so the idea of remaking Blade Runner isn’t totally crazy.

The reason to make a new version of the novel is to try and get closer to PKD’s actual story.  Blade Runner used most of the major plot, but left out most of the subplots and many fascinating themes, and it reversed the polarity of the audience’s attitude towards the androids.  In the PKD novel the androids are bad and the reader ends up wanting them killed.  In the movie, the audience feels sympathetic to androids and wish they could live.  The movie leaves out the obsession about owning live animals, Mercerism, the fake police station, the mood organ, the other bounty hunter, Rick having sex with a very different Rachael, Rachel killing the goat, kipple, and so many other fascinating ideas.

Philip K. Dick wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? at a particularly significant time in U.S. history, during the peak of the sixties, facing the issues of the Vietnam War, civil rights, psychedelic drugs, and so on.  PKD was obsessed with two questions:  What is human? and What is real?  I believe the androids in his story had nothing to do with science fictional robots and future tech – they were metaphors for what Dick hated about people and what he thought made them inhuman.  Dick could not believe humans could have committed the atrocities of the holocaust and wondered how to explain the human-looking creatures that ran the ovens?  Ridley Scott and crew seem to be asking:  Can mankind recreate humans?  This is a very different theme.

Should A New Version Be Faithful To the Novel

Would a new version of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? have to be faithful to the PDK book?  A lot has happened in the world since 1966 when PKD wrote the book.  Now that humanity is destroying the planet and making animal species go extinct faster than mother nature, what if there were a race of androids that were fighting humans to stop us and save the world for their reasons?  In PKD’s story, humans are superior because they have empathy and love animals – well, it appears Dick was wrong because we have failed at both.

Robots in today’s society are popular and loved.  I have an issue of the hobby magazine Robot sitting right beside me and it shows our drive to build androids.  Commander Data is one of the most loved all all the Star Trek characters.   There is something that challenges the modern mind to build an android that’s better than ourselves.  If the 1982 audiences felt sympathy for the androids of Blade Runner, what would the audiences of 2008 feel?  The 2004 film I, Robot got away again with evil robots, so we know audiences can accept robots in bad guy roles, but is that what people really want?

Even in the original 1966 novel, Philip K. Dick walks a tightrope by creating a race of artificial slaves that want to pass for humanity – doesn’t that beg for the reader’s empathy?  Well, at the time PKD ends up saying no.  In the novel, androids will kill humans, betray their own kind, but most importantly they will kill and torture animals with a total lack of feelings.  They are all intellect and no emotion.  Rachael has sex with Deckard, not out of love, but because she knows bounty hunters become sympathetic to androids and can’t kill them after having sex with her.

In the novel androids are incapable of feeling love.  Dick wants the reader to believe there are humans that look just like us but ultimately lack that qualities that make us good.  I feel that in the violent times of the 1960s PKD had specific people in mind.  I assume Dick is not writing a book advocating killing off empathy lacking humans but is merely telling us we all need to kill off that portion of our psyche.   Blade Runner confused the issue by suggesting that androids do deserve our sympathy.  It further screws up the story by suggesting that Deckard is an android.  I really hate this twist of Ridley Scott.  It actually hurts his own work of art.  Part of the beauty of the film is a human falls for an android and an android falls for a human.  If they are both androids you lose a lot of philosophical zest.

What I’d Like to See

Ultimately, what I’d like to see is a new version that is extremely faithful to the book except that it will be ambiguous as to whether humans or androids are truly good.  As long as they kill each other who can be the morally superior species?  If homo robotica can develop a will to live, an empathy for life, a sense of ethics, and a desire to preserve Earth, mankind, as well as all the other species, will such an artificial life-form be bad and worthy of destroying even if it kills out of self-preservation?

The next version needs to add the philosophical aspects of religion and mass culture that Dick explored with Mercer and Buster Friendly.  Also, Deckard needs his wife to contrast any possible relationship he will have with Rachael.  At one point in the book Deckard comments that Rachael and her kind have more will to live than his wife, Iran.

Then there is the whole choice of casting.  Harrison Ford brought an action hero aspect to the film that wasn’t in the book.  From the recent audio production I pictured Deckard being a lot like a younger William H. Macy, more of an average guy with a tendency to doubt over action.  Rick and Iran have a lot of marital problems that help set the philosophical stage when we ask what it is to be human.  A Sean Young type actress is perfect to represent the temptation of an artificially perfect woman.

And that brings up we humans want to be as perfect as artificial beings.  After PKD’s death there emerged a science fictional story line of downloading human minds into artificial bodies, which essentially combines humans and androids into a yet unnamed construct.  This new being goes beyond the bionic man and woman.

I had a friend that used to argue most vehemently that if an artificial intelligence was ever created it would always turn itself off.  My friend could never fathom programming the artificial will to live.  I, on the other hand, never could imagine any creature, live or artificial, that was self-aware willing to turn itself off if it wasn’t suffering.  I always assumed that awareness is always preferable over non-existence as long as there is no real incentive to shut down.

Any future film version of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? will need to deal with these philosophical issues of identity.  In 1968 and 1982 we imagined PKD’s fictional world dark and decaying, suffering from the effects of a nuclear holocaust.  Any future film version will probably use the backdrop of an ecological holocaust.  The current debate over global warming centers around a very deep conflict over whether mankind is the cause of our own potential doom.  In any mythic archetypal story about the lethal conflict between human versus artificial humans and the ethical considerations of which species is superior will have to deal with this ecological issue.

Like the classic SF short story, “Farewell to the Master,” which was made into the memorable science fiction film, The Day the Earth Stood Still, we have to remember the roll of the robot, Gort, who belongs to a race of robots that rule the humans to protect them from themselves.

The science fiction stories Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner exists on the razor’s edge between the hated world of robots in the Terminator movies and the acceptance of Commander Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation.   Any future film version of our story needs to continue being a blade runner riding the razor’s edge between those two positions.

Engineers and computer scientists are working full tilt to build robots and artificial intelligence.  The question will not be if robots will shut themselves off – the question will be how they judge us, their gods.  Most science fiction that gets to this point, imagine homo robotica taking the dominant position and wanting to snuff us humans out like cockroaches.   Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner explores the Romeo and Juliet world of the ever feuding Capulets and Montagues, which is why it remains so fascinating.

Jim

Electric Cars and Wikipedia

I’m going to kill two birds with one stone in this post.  I started out researching electric cars and quickly discovered one of the best sources of information on them is Wikipedia.  Since this came just after seeing a major attack on Wikipedia the contrast of the two stories is too hard to ignore.  If you have time, look at this video “The Truth According to Wikipedia.”

These people think Wikipedia is evil but my experience is just the opposite, I think Wikipedia is very positive and creative, and represents a new paradigm in thinking and transmitting knowledge.  I wanted to find out about electric cars and Wikipedia provided a very comprehensive survey of what’s going on with that technology, and had links to more information and related articles.  I jumped over to the Encyclopedia Britannica and found zip – well that’s due to the fact that it’s a sales site and doesn’t offer a way research electric cars without paying.  I bought the deluxe DVD of the EB over a year ago and it included one year’s access to the online version of EB.

For awhile whenever I looked up something I’d check EB first and then Wikipedia and in all cases I preferred the information I got from Wikipedia, so I stopped using EB.  I could check my DVD copy of EB for what it says about electric cars, but I didn’t reinstall it on my new machine and I don’t feel like hunting down the DVD right now.  And it will be out of date.  In other words, if Andrew Keen and company want an authoritative encyclopedia to compete with Wikipedia it needs to be on the web and free.  I can understand EB wanting to make money but can’t it make money like all the other commercial Internet sites through advertising?

Even if you aren’t interested in electric cars, look at the Wikipedia entry for electric car and plug-in hybrid.  I found the stub for electric cars at EB and it promises 227 words if you buy the online subscription.  Wikipedia is offering thousands of words of info for free.  Sure there’s a chance that some of Wikipedia’s facts might be wrong, but I think the group effort looks extremely good.  I learned all I needed and wanted to know and more.

The major criticism for Wikipedia is it’s written by amateurs – but the results look very professional to me.  I was quickly able to learn about the different types of electric cars, their histories, and the planned models on the drawing boards.  For the plug-in hybrid, the technology I’m most interested in, Wikipedia gives continuously updated listing of press reports.  Other than finding insider blogs from fanatics about electric cars, I can’t imagine needing more information than what Wikipedia is presenting.

I learned quickly from Wikipedia what kind of electric cars are for sale.  The ones I can afford, I don’t want, and the ones I want, I can’t afford or they aren’t in production yet.  I also learned that certain types of electric cars have restrictions to driving on roads with 35mph or less speed limits, which is another reason why I don’t want the affordable electric cars.  The information was so good at Wikipedia that I don’t even feel the need to search further.  Wikipedia is even supplanting the Internet. 

My conclusion is I need to wait for the automobile industry to come up with a good solution.  Not only that, it looks like it will be a long time before Detroit or Japan offers a $20-25k plug-in hybrid that will be practical for the average driver.   It appears for the next few years the best electric cars will compete in price with the more expensive models of Mercedes.

This brings me to the second bird I wanted to kill with this stone.  If global warming is the crisis that scientists are saying it is, why hasn’t our government and others around the world jumped in a created a crash program to manufacture low cost plug-in hybrid electric cars?  If what scientists are saying about global warming is true it’s far more terrifying than anything Osama bin Laden plans to do, or more threatening than Iraq five years ago.  Why is Muslim terrorists more scary than a threat that promises to grind civilization down world-wide?

Politicians who avoid the issue of global warming do so because they fear fighting it will hurt the economy.  I would think one major solution to keep the economy stable and fight global warming at the same time would be the development of an ecological car.  Plug-in hybrids appears to be the next intermediate solution – they still use gas, but much less, so they will work with the existing infrastructure of gasoline supplied energy stations.  Plug-in hybrids will also benefit from people who install solar energy panels on their houses.  If you create a Marshal Plan like effort to promote both technologies we could lower our oil consumption and lower our use of coal in electrical production and thus find two major ways to lower our carbon footprint.

I think our leaders are still in the authoritative mindset of people who are attacking Wikipedia, but the world’s population acts more like the human dynamics that create Wikipedia.  Car makers still want to sell expensive Encyclopedia Britannica editions.  What we need are leaders who can promote solutions to global warming in the same way Wikipedia succeeds.

Jim

My Perfect Routine Day

Daydreaming about retirement makes me wonder just what I would do if all my days were free from the 9 to 5 job.  My biggest fear is I would become a couch potato and die soon after retiring because I’d let myself go.  What I need is a good routine, a way to pace myself and maximize the use of my free time.  Now this is all speculation because I’m not going to get to retire soon.  If I’m lucky I could retire in another year and work part-time, but only if I’m brave enough to find a good part-time job.  It would be so easy to just keep working where I do because I like it so well.  Thus I want to contemplate this possible future to help make it happen.

For now, I’d like to imagine my perfect routine day.  To begin with I want to get up early – I don’t want to waste any precious free time.  If I had discipline, I’d get up at 5:30 and do yoga and Bowflex exercises for a half hour and then shower and dress.  To be honest, I barely exercise now, beyond walking a few times a week, doing some half-ass make-up-my-own yoga to help my back when it gets stiff, and a rare bout of Bowflex when my arms feel particularly flabby.

As you can see, my perfect routine day also involves becoming a new person.  I wonder if that’s possible?  I’ve been meaning to change myself since I was a teenager and it hasn’t worked yet.  A recent article in Wired, “Brain Scanners Can See Your Decision Before You Make Them” suggests that we lack will power or free will.  I’ve read other books about the brain that cover this territory, suggesting that we have subconscious actors in our head that make the real decisions and our conscious minds go along thinking they decided and are the real bosses.  Thus, I’d add to my morning schedule a bit of meditation hoping I could tune into these inner mechanisms and wrestle control.

I don’t know why, but I’m the most inspired with writing ideas during my morning shower, so I think my routine should be built around this.  I’d like to start writing right after getting dressed and maybe eat breakfast at my desk.  I start the day fully charged and slowly drain my mental batteries as the day progresses.  I’d want to use my best time and mental energy for writing.  Devoting mornings to writing and focusing on fiction is the key to optimizing my energy curve.  This should take me to nine or ten o’clock.

At this point I’d like to read a single non-fiction essay that has great inspirational impact.  Detailed facts are a major fuel for my mental fires, and I need something I can contemplate in my spare cognitive moments for the rest of the day.

About now, if I have to work part-time I’d like to go off for my four hours.  I should snack some because I’d want to work through the lunch hour.  It would be great if work was close enough to walk or bike so I could combine exercise with transportation time.  I’d also listen to books on audio while commuting – thus providing triple multitasking.  During this phase of my life I will be getting most of my book reading done through my ears.  I’d listen to books during housework, yard work, travel and exercise.

Even if I could afford to quit work full time it might be good for me to have one or more part time jobs.  Working in a library or bookstore might be rewarding.  Computers are my work life now, and it would be good to get away from them and do something different, but on the other hand I could be very useful as a Old Geek Computer Fix-It man, and it might be more profitable.  On the other hand it would be more of a challenge if I could start a business developing custom software.  However, running a business usually means 60-80 hour workweeks, and I most definitely do not want that.  I think whatever I do, my perfect daily routine would want me to work more with people and less with machines.

After work I will need a small meal and a nap.  Currently I need two naps a day and I don’t expect to change.  I wish I was one of those people who can sleep five hours and run like a race horse until the wee hours.  I’m not.  Currently I need to nap in the early evening so I can stay up late.  I can’t stay in bed 8-9 hours at a stretch because of the arthritis in my hips.  I get pretty stiff and hurting after 5-6 hours, and I even have to spend part of my night sleeping in a La-Z-Boy.  Getting old and breaking down presents some interesting problems to deal with, and sleeping and living with a growing pain load are two of them.

I know my perfect routine days will coincide with the slow downward slide of health.  I’ll be Sisyphus rolling a rock up a hill and to beat the system I’ll have to squeeze as much positive life out of the time I have.

After I get up from my nap I’d like to have some socializing time, either with my wife or friends.  This will be a good time to watch TV or movies, and eat dinner together, or even play group games or share hobbies.

I’ve always loved television, but I don’t know if I want to waste too much of my freedom on the tube.  I love having a good show to look forward to, like Lost or John Adams.  I like watching television with other people.  For each day I wouldn’t want to watch more than one show or movie, which means devoting no more than 1-2 hours to sitting in front of my HDTV.  I’d want about one-third fiction to two-thirds non-fiction mix.  The world of documentaries have gotten to be a fantastic genre in recent years. 

Shows like The Universe, Planet Earth, Frontline, NOVA, The Miracle Planet, Independent Lens, Naked Science are amazing sources of information and entertainment.  I can’t believe I know so few people who watch these shows.  I’m surprised so many people as they age lock into their favorite entertainments and hide from the current world.  Modern cable television with its hundreds of channels is a sixth sense that allows us to roam the globe and keep up with countless human endeavors.  The Internet gets all the press about social change, but cable television is just as powerful.  Its another medium that brings the people of the world together.  I expect to be watching cable television when I pass on – I want to go out knowing as much as I can before I die.

Part of my perfect routine day will involve blogging.  I hope as the years go by blogging becomes even more sophisticated.  Probably after my social time I’ll take another nap and then get up and spend the rest of the evening blogging and working on hobbies.

I have a number of hobbies I’d like to pursue, but the one that I think would be the most fun is to recreate the experiments from the old “Amateur Scientist” column in Scientific American.  I bought a CD-ROM that collected them years ago and put it away for my retirement years.  Amazon doesn’t seem to sell it anymore, but v. 3 appears to be still for sale here.  I think it would be a fun hobby to work out lesson plans for schools on how to do basic scientific experiments.  Combine the Make impulse with Teach impulse.

I’d also like to experiment with robotics and artificial intelligence, but on a kid level, something like Lego Mindstorms kits.  I guess when guys get old they want to play with toys again.

Finally, I’d like to close out my day by reading a short story.  I find short stories to be intense compact communiqués from deep within the souls of other people.  I’m surprised they aren’t a more popular art form.  To me short stories offer the most bang for the literary buck.  Short stories combine feats of imagination with encapsulated emotion – and a good story should bring tears to your eyes, whether it’s dramatic or comic.  Great ones should make the top of your scull feel like it’s lifting off your head, like the rush of an intense but quick acting drug.  Short stories should leave you drained like you’ve just mind-melded with another human for an hour.

I’d want to leave this fictional rush to just before bed time hoping it would affect my dreams.  I’d like to get to sleep by 11:30 so I could get a good six hours sleep and be up and at it again by 5:30 the next morning.  As you can see I expect to cram a lot into my retiring years.  I’ve been working for decades, during the best years of my life, and this has been zapping all my energy.  I’m hoping my golden years are ones I can get a lot done and make up for all those years I was too tired to do anything but veg out in front of the boob tube.

Jim

52 Essential Astronomy Lessons

A couple weeks ago at a meeting of my local astronomy club I heard a talk about the upcoming International Year of Astronomy 2009.  This reminds me of the famous International Geophysical Year when the U.S. and Russia first launched satellites into orbit back in 1957-1958 and brought about the Space Age and the amazing explosion of knowledge about our universe. 

If the IGY was about new discoveries, it seems the purpose of IYA2009 is to celebrate the 400 years since Galileo started using his telescope and to enlighten the worlds billions to the great discoveries of the science of astronomy.  We are currently living through a renaissance of astronomical exploration and I think most of the world’s citizens are missing out on the excitement.  This is a great time to throw a year long party for astronomers.

At my astronomy club meeting and at the IYA2009 web site there is a great push to find ways to get people to an eyepiece of a telescope so they can experience observation first hand.  I think this is a grand goal, but we should push people further than just showing them the rings of Saturn.  There’s a lot more to astronomy than pretty stellar tourist sites – astronomy is a long succession of conceptual breakthroughs that have changed the course of history and philosophy many times and is the foundation for the scientific age.

I think one project for the IYA2009 is to define the essential lessons needed to understand the science of astronomy.  Since we have eight months before IYA2009 begins this would be a good time for amateur astronomers around the world to tally what those lessons should be and campaign with the IYA2009 to find scientists and educators to develop those lessons to distribute all next year. 

Wouldn’t it be great if we could find 52 essential lessons of astronomy that could be taught across the web each week.  Using web pages, podcasts, videos, computer programs and any other instructional tool to let as many people as possible try than hand at teaching these 52 concepts.  Use astronomy as the subject to show off the potential of the web to teach millions.

Lessons is astronomy are all around us.  PBS, Discovery and History channels have astronomy related shows almost every week.  Bookstores have shelves of new astronomy books and sell several great astronomy magazines.  The Internet is loaded with diverse astronomy sites.  The question is how many people know about the essentials of the science?  It’s the 21st century but I think most of the worlds billions think of the heavens only in terms of the speculations taught by ancient religions or from misinformation brought about from science fiction movies.

How many of the nearly seven billion inhabitants of Earth really understand that our planet orbits the sun?  And how many of those know how to theoretically prove it?  And even still, how many from the last group could actually prove it?  Astronomy is the history of those people who could figure out ways to test and prove observations about our universe.  What I’d like to see the IYA2009 do is teach people the most important 52 scientific techniques used in understanding what we know about the Universe today.

Week 1 – The Stick

I’ll start off with an example of what I’m talking about.  Recently, while reading Neil deGrasse Tyson’s book Death by Black Hole, I was enchanted by his chapter about how much astronomy can be taught with a stick.  Most people have heard of stories about ancient cultures building monuments like Stonehenge or the Pyramids that scientists have reported were used in observational astronomy, but do you know how they worked?

Astronomy began long ago by people watching the sky.  I’m not sure modern kids understand that thousands of years ago they didn’t have television or even electricity, so the night sky was a lot more captivating then now.  You also have to understand these ancient dudes didn’t have clocks or even concepts like years, months, hours, minutes, and seconds.   They did have seasons and days, which I hope you can understand why.

It doesn’t take much observations skill to notice that day and night repeat, but it takes a little more brain power to notice the seasons coming and going and how to reliably predict them.  If you plant a stick in the ground and make notes about its shadow you’ll eventually start learning some cool stuff.  The National Science Teachers Association even offers lesson plans for elementary school kids and you might even like to take a look at what they do.  Sadly, these simple astronomy lesson plans seems to be singular, with most other web sites referring back to them.  A search of “Teaching astronomy with a stick” should bring up hundreds of unique individual pages, but it doesn’t.

Modern classroom teaching is mostly cramming kids full of words and numbers with the expectation they can puke them out later in the same order they were shoved in.  Instead we should be teaching kids how to learn on their own.  The tests should ask – 1. Prove how you know the seasons change, 2. Prove how you know the Earth is round, 3. Prove how you know the Earth orbits the Sun, and so on.  Then expect the kids to explain how they learned these truths from their own various experiments, including planting a stick in the ground and watching it, taking notes and making observations for years.  Make them work at learning, force them to develop discipline, expect more from them than memorization.

Great Expectations

Of course I know I’m asking a lot of IYA2009 – but hey, they brought up the idea.  Is IYA2009 going to be some PR fluff for telescope sales, or should it do something profound?  Maybe 52 lessons in science are too many – we could lower our sights to 12 monthly lessons.  I’m fond of the The Teaching Company that offer college level lectures for fun learning.  They build their courses around collections of 30 minute talks that come on audio and video and can include supplemental books.  52 thirty minute lectures would be 26 hours of teaching for the whole year.  About one college course taught in a semester spread out over a whole year.  I don’t think that’s too much.

It would be great if IYA2009 or its supporters could offer podcast subscriptions so people would automatically receive a 30 minute lesson each week of next year.  The audio lessons could point to a web page with supporting material, and if we’re lucky, maybe even downloadable videos that expand on the teaching.  And to make things perfect, I think each lecture should have lesson plans for teachers in K-12 classrooms.  Finally, a complete DVD course from the year, like those sold at The Teaching Company, could be given away as .iso downloads.

For this idea to work I think it would take something like the open source software paradigm to get people started.  Build it from the ground up with contributions.  There are countless astronomy clubs around the world that want to participate in IYA2009 and each could promote and campaign for particular weekly lesson and how to support them.  There are also countless academic professionals that teach astronomy and physics that could join in.  And there are countless instructional design professionals that could aid in the development of the lessons for the web.  Teaching astronomy would be a very good way to marry the potential of computer based instruction with a specific learning goal.  The emerging RIA (Rich Internet Applications) programming tools could be used to demonstrate their power.

I like this idea of an international year to learn something new.  It’s like when a city starts a community wide book club.  I think 2008 is unofficially the year of climate studies, or maybe 2010 should be the official year.  The idea of the world getting together to studying something globally sounds like lots of fun and I hope they pick a new topic every year.

Jim

Do not go gentle into that good night

The title above comes from the Dylan Thomas poem and I encourage you to take a moment and follow the link and listen to it.  It’s about death and dying, not a particularly popular topic for the young, but the ghost that haunts anyone past fifty.  I am only fifty-six but thoughts of Social Security, Medicare, retirement and getting old invade my thinking regularly.  We Baby Boomers tend to believe everything is about us, but I’m finding it interesting to watch the generation before ours get old and see how they face death.  This generation is sometimes called The Silent Generation, but I’m starting to hear quite a racket from them.

The Baby Boomers were born from 1946-1964, and the Silent Generation are from 1925-1945, basically from Paul Newman through Pete Townshend, giving a whole new meaning to the song, “My Generation.”  The generation before them were the G. I. Generation (1900-1924) that included my parents.  So the Silent Generation are those people who were college kids when I was little, and the driving force of the pop culture we Boomers grew up with.  Now they are number one on the runway ready to take off for that famous unknown destination.  I, and all of my generation, have a lot to learn from them.  And what got me focused on this group, is this bit of humor.

Awhile back I discovered a great site, Time Goes By, to observe this generation, the brain child of Ronni Bennett and her promotion of Elder News.  She doesn’t like the label elderly because it implies frailty, and prefers old or elder.  Ronni focuses on elder blogging and through that I am finding doorways to the people of the Silent Generation.    Interestingly, Ronni lists Auxiliary Memory in her blog roll called ElderBlogs – and by her definition I’m in the elder group, and I’m happy to be so.  Her site is for the Silent Generation but includes us Boomers who right behind them.  The Internet is generally thought of as a hang-out for the geeky young, but Ronni often points out her elder crew are one of the largest growing segments.

I wished I was retired and had all the time in the world to read all the RSS feeds from Ronni’s ElderBlogs.  These are people I identify with, and people exploring issues and experiences I’m exploring now, or better yet, people who are going through experiences I’m will soon experience.

I constantly tell friends my age about blogging but they say they don’t have time, or they aren’t into computers, or friendships you make online aren’t real – but I’m finding the movement of Elder Blogging to be a major cultural trend and feel my friends are missing out.  It makes me think back to high school days when my hippie friends felt too cool to go to the proms.  I know now I missed out by being too cool.  I think my friends are missing out by thinking the blogging world as being too young, too geeky, or even too impersonal.

Ronni is onto something by making her reporting beat the elder bloggers.  I think the people expressing their feelings on her ElderBlogs sites represent a new social bonding that is just as real as any connections made at church, bridge clubs, retirement homes or in bars.  Sure, it lacks the warmth of intimate friendship, but so does most of our day to day social contacts.  Where blogging shines is hearing the deeper thoughts of people, thoughts beyond the surface topics you often hear at work like “did you see the game last night,” or “think it’s going to rain tomorrow.”  Blogging allows you to get to know a lot of strangers in a way you’d normally not in real life – just click down Ronni’s list of Elder Bloggers and see what I mean.

Jim