Friday, October 5, 2012
Share Everything- whether they want it or not
I know this is supposed to be a cute little slice of life, demonstrating how wonderfully awesome the Connectivity of whatever stupid electronic device which happens to be on the screen is. See how relatives who can't be grandson's tuba concert can now "enjoy" it along with the parents?
Now, of course, we can take the snark in several directions at this point. Mom and Dad let Grandma and Grampa know that just because they happen to conveniently live on another continent* doesn't mean they get to skip out on watching grandkiddo launch an epidemic of ear bleeding in an evening of exquisite torture. Sorry, guys- you WANTED grandchildren, well, here's your grandchild. You BOUGHT him that fucking tuba, well, here it is, being used. Enjoy.
Or we could wonder at the kid who has been so acclimated to being surrounded by glowing screens instead of actual people that he sees absolutely nothing at all creepy about seeing his grampa and grandma's heads sitting in his parents laps, grinning like idiots as they "appreciate" his god-awful murdering of some perfectly good piece of music. I can't help wondering if he wouldn't be perfectly happy with absent grandparents, followed by a "Sorry we couldn't make it" card, containing money. I'm sure the grandparents would have considered it a bargain.
Instead, I'll just project ahead to a future commercial for the same product- one which shows no actual human beings in the audience at all. Just an auditorium full of laptops, sitting on the chairs, glowing away and featuring the faces of people who had Better Things to Do (like watch paint dry or, far more likely, check out a movie on their Kindle Fire IV.) And the kids on the stage smiling appreciatively at the floating heads on the glowing screens, as if this is all perfectly sane and normal.
Seriously, though....is it just me, or does anyone else find this "reasonable substitute for actually being there" more than a little creepy and weird?
*On subsequent viewings (or maybe the viewing of a longer version) I see that the kid peeks through the curtains and is disappointed to see that Grandparents (or parents, how would I know) are not in their assigned seats. Then he is relieved to see their glowing faces on the screens. So they were SUPPOSED to be there and "couldn't" make it- but they DID find time to sit in front of their computers, or at least glance at their tablets from time to time while the kid plays his heart out on stage. Kid is just fine with this. Whatever.
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First off, since when is a tuba a solo instrument? In the brief time I was in a band class, instruments like tubas and baritone horns were all accompanying instruments in an orchestra. They were used for keeping beats and essentially the analog for a bass guitar in a rock band.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, this reminds me of a movie where, near the end of the term, all the students at a college had slowly abandoned actually being at lectures and left mini-tape recorders. Eventually, the last shot of the class was just all the desks with tape recorders on them and the only live person there was the professor, and I have a vague memory of him being replaced by a tape playing back the lecture in the last shot as well. The movie might have been Real Genius, but I'm not sure. Some vapid 80's teen/college movie, at any rate.