Day Three

Talk about changes. The other day I watched the season finale of a series I like on Netflix, The Umbrella Academy. The only person I know with whom I can talk about it is my daughter. Compare that to the season finale of Roots in 1977 or who Shot JR in 1979 where the entire country talked about it, and you can see what I mean about change. The plethora of choices we now have means we can sit in our little silos and only watch what we like. Seems a little antisocial.

It’s the same with radio. In my day in Houston, it was KILT for rock and roll and every kid in the city listened to it. It’s where I heard the Weird Beard play “Please Please Me” one night by this unknown group called the Beatles. But these days new music seems to arise organically out of the ground and there are so many choices as to where to get your music that again you can live in a little silo of your own making and never ever hear the next Beatles or Chappell Roan. Although the emergence of the latter makes me think the kids are doing something so maybe they’ve got a handle on it.

And perhaps this is where the internet might save us, because there’s a lot of people around who have only known the internet and they have a good idea of how it works and how it might work to do good things. And I for one think TikTok is pretty cool. And people have really gotten good at slapping down misinformation and lies, although it is dispiriting to see just how much bad information is flooding the circuits and more importantly how easily some people gobble it up without question. But maybe that’s nothing new. Maybe it’s just the way the world works when humans are involved.

John W Wilson

Gatewood Press is a small, family owned press located in the Hill Country of Texas.

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Changing