By Jeremy “DJ Q” Quintin
The Dubstep Master
We live in the digital era. This is no secret. From morning till night we find ourselves plugged into an complex series of tubes known as the internet where so much of our entertainment, information, and our lives now reside. Movies and music can be streamed or downloaded instantly to hard drives without dealing with pesky material objects known as “discs.” Much of our beliefs are now translated into blogs, vlogs, and forum posts for the entire world to witness and disagree with.
Many classroom settings have even been moved to online chatrooms, allowing us to achieve our education without having to leave the safety of our beds. We can just take our laptops into our beds with us and learn from our professors’ disembodied heads propped in our laps. This is the future, and yes, it’s available on Mac.
It perplexes me then why so many continue to try and live in the past and insist that we still use archaic methods of obtaining information. I speak specifically about newspapers. You know, the thing I’m writing for right now. With all our advancements, literature is something that can finally be stored in a digital setting. Why then would anybody continue to write, read, or publish a newspaper?
Let me put it like this: I want you to imagine yourself getting out of your bed, exiting your dorm, questing through the outside world, and picking up a copy of The Elm. With your hands. To read.
You can’t imagine it, can you? Know why? It’s because you don’t know I’m asking you to. Know why? It’s because you’re not actually reading this article right now. Nobody will read this article because not a single person reads The Elm. Nobody reads The Elm because it’s a newspaper, and nobody on this campus even knows that it actually exists.
Everybody is too captivated by the internet, watching hysterical cat videos and getting annoyed by the blog of some ignorant sexist prick in Utah, to entertain the possibility that there might be a world outside their 17-inch field of vision.
Frankly, why would anyone have to? So much is online and made available instantaneously that the need for another source of anything has become obsolete. In order for something to actually be noticed, it has to be presented to the public in a digital format or else it’s the same as being nonexistent.
Most children born nowadays are not even able to recognize other sources of information because they’ve been raised in the comforting glow of computers. Seriously, this copy of The Elm is more than likely being used for toilet paper because some poor unfortunate soul who has run out of other options was not capable of identifying a newspaper as anything other than blank pages. They’ve become too familiarized with monitor screens to identify anything which isn’t luminescent as information.
But the problem isn’t with digital media changing the way we think. It lies with those who insist on holding the human civilization back from evolving. If some people continue to believe that the newspaper has a place in this world, they will be expelled from society as a result of not being able to communicate with anyone in the digital realm. They will have no choice but to form small packs which roam the deserted wastelands of Earth, left over from the great digital shift which moved the entire world population onto a virtual plane of existence. The rejected will have no choice but to fend off other groups of cannibals from feasting on their young, all because they supported the printed press.
Disagree with me? No, you don’t, because you don’t even know there’s something to disagree with right now. You don’t read The Elm. You’re on the internet, looking at porn.