Hyperwords

29 April 2009 in 21st Century World | Tags: hyperwords

I have just installed the Hyperwords add-on. It’s intuitive and helps you to search from the web page you’re viewing.

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1 comment

22 June 2009 at 10:58 pm

Joe kelly

It’s an interesting concept – Youth. Oddly enough, it sometimes appears to me that since the rebellious 1960s, there has almost been a reversal in what the experience and indeed the expression of youth really means. Perhap many of those forty-somethingers and beyond who cling to a certain flavour of youthfulness are really attached to the bywords of youth, i.e. alternative, bohemian, coming-from-the-edge, literary, insightful and creative. I leave out “sexy” because that is a marketing tool for a certain limited field of experience. I leave out “dynamic” – because that is the byword for the rich and greedy youth of dot.com economics. The new media and telecommunications explosion that we’ve seen since the 1990s does truly indicate a dynamical side to a certain class of youth in recent years. And yet there’s something about the high-flying class of techno and capital savvy generation of the mid-1990s onwards that reeks of the destructive and deathly rotten conservatism of the generation that came of age in the 1950s.
From this perspective, I think perhaps that the notion of “youth” can be meaningless. The experience of what it is to be part of “the youth” as a sort of collective self-defining moment, cannot be delinked from the way in which “youth” is generated and made within particular life contexts. There may be those who have spiritually (I prefer this word to intellectually) aged at twenty, and there may be those still being born to the excitement of self-discovery and the power of expressiveness at the age of sixty and even beyond.
The various crises in the world today – war, environmental waste, economic stagnation, and so on, suggests that dynamos of the 1990s (how are old they usually, 26-39?) were a bunch of selfish rotters who really fucked up in the end. Maybe it is the ones who came of age in the 1980s, who will teach the next generation of bright sparks what’s needed to clean up the mess. I say this on the grounds that many forty somethingers are fortunately still deeply impressed with utopianism of the sixties.
Many still possess a generally negative orientation to the world-as-it is and dream of its transcendence, which is why some may think of them as unwilling to grow up and do things that suit their age and “crumbling” station in life. Inevitably, the idea of “youth” doesn’t necessarly imply a fixed phase of conscious being that we ought to leave behind in a race toward maturity and self disposal. “Youth” can also involve a continuous mode of reflectiveness, an unwillingless to be pigeonholed and ultimately action on the possibility of overstepping the excess of all the crap that we fail to surpass as we get caught up in the one-dimensional, supra-dynamical idea of youthfulness that screams at us from every damned advertorial we cross. I’d dine with anyone who refuses to be so narrowly categorised and confined.

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