Forty-one summers ago, Chicago's Grant Park wasn't filled with today's jazz & blues concerts, but hate & kill crowds. It was called the Democratic National Convention of 1968. Inside, the party nominated Hubert Humphrey to face Richard Nixon for the presidency. Outside, tens of thousands of young protesters taunted Mayor Daley's baton-twitching police lines. The crowd's well-rehearsed taunt was bellowed in front of international TV cameras: "The whole world is watching....!"
What was then an electronic event, is today in electronic universal. Everyone is watching everyone. Every day. Every where. Every person. The explosion of hand-held phones, cameras, recorders, and playback screens has come to mean any 8-year-old anywhere on the planet has the electronic potential to invade anyone's private space and hurtle it instantly by satellite into the lives of any other 8-year-old in their home, any Supreme Court Justice in their chambers, any monitor located in the West Wing, any training camp from the hills of Montana to the mountains of Afghanistan.
Not only instantly, but eternally. As in the case of the millions of downloaded moments available on YouTube for a gazillion curiosity-seekers any time of any day of any year.
Exactly what might these images be? Well, let your imagination ride cyberspace. Maybe a Taliban death-threat from Pakistan, a pair of African elephants mating in Kenya, Mel Gibson spewing anti-semetism to a highway officer, an off-duty copy brawling in a Chicago bar, David Letterman driving Sarah Palin crazy, or perhaps your high school principal fornicating with his secretary in the campus board room.
Marshall McLuhan's Electronic Global Village is alive and well ("well" being an arguable adjective). What mankind has wrought is a planetary grid-work of electronic interfaces which has swallowed distance and collapsed time forever. Just as our world was different the day after fire and the wheel, it is now exponentially different the day after the mobile Internet.
Entrepreneurs may not see this as much more than a new frontier for their products....movie and recording studios as simply a new delivery system....Wall Street brokers and Vegas odds-makers as a new tool with which to toss the big dice. And yet, are not these but nibblers at the easy edges of a life altering happening?
Today, were Rodin to sculpt his classic "Man Thinking," he would have to portray him as "Man Watching." Think about that.....!
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Scary.....!
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