Join our mailing list!
©2007
StudentAffairs.com
All Rights Reserved
|
WHAT IF...? and Other Weird Tales of the Digital
Age
Brian
Cremins
University of Connecticut
Posted July 31,
2002 Student
Affairs Online, 3 (Summer)
If Charles Foster Kane were alive today, it would be all too easy
for the Thompsons of the world to reveal his secrets. Just imagine a
modern version of Orson Welles's classic 1941 film, Citizen
Kane. In the original film, based loosely on the life of William
Randolph Hearst and routinely hailed as the "greatest" American movie
of all time, Jerry Thompson's assignment is to unlock the secret of
Kane's dying word, "Rosebud." Thompson, played by William Alland,
spends most of the movie interviewing Kane's ex-wives, friends, and
enemies, only to hit one dead end after another. A twenty-first
century Thompson with a computer in his office would find Kane's
story much easier to write. After receiving the assignment from his
editor, a technologically-sophisticated Thompson could leisurely walk
to his office, make a cup of coffee, light a cigarette (you can't
have a black and white film, even today, without the ghost of
cigarette smoke in every frame), and then run the name CHARLES FOSTER
KANE through Google. Later in the
day, Thompson might grow more ambitious and run an advanced search
for Kane and the mysterious Rosebud. But, as the end of Welles's film
suggests, there are some secrets which are best left as just that -
secrets. Although the audience learns the true identity of "Rosebud"
at the end of the film, Thompson and his colleagues never do and, in
one of the movie's closing scenes, all evidence of the meaning of
Kane's final words is destroyed.
In these days of the Internet,
however, it appears that no information is too secret or sacred.
Google and other search engines are glorious modern inventions which
bring an entire world of information to our fingertips, but they have
also made it far too easy to track down former friends and loved
ones. These search engines have drained all the romance out of modern
life. Would the ending of the movie Casablanca be as powerful
if it closed with a scene of Rick tracing Ilsa's whereabouts while
hunched over his trusty laptop at the local cybercafé?
Recently I received an e-mail from the first woman I ever had a
crush on. First loves are always painful affairs, especially when
they are unrequited. I had not spoken to this person in almost ten
years, and could not even recall the look of her face or the sound of
her voice when I received a mysterious message in my e-mail box. The
fact that she has one of those cryptic screen names which consist of
little more than an arcane set of letters and numbers didn't help
matters any, and I found myself running through the rolodex on my
desk trying to decipher the address. Could it be a virus? I opened the message carefully, but reassured myself that one of the benefits
of working on an old Macintosh is the fact that it is virtually impervious to
the cyber-bugs making the rounds these days. When I opened it, I could feel my heart racing as a light
sweat broke out on my forehead. Could it be...? No. How had she found
my e-mail address? Easy, of course. She had pieced together a
narrative of the last ten years of my life based on information
obtained from - of course - a Google search. "But it's so hard to get
the full story from a computer," she said. "Tell me about your
life."
Academics are probably the easiest people to locate using the
Internet. Our names and e-mail addresses can be found on university
websites, conference schedules, bibliographies, and, of course,
online journals much like the one you are reading right now. After
receiving this e-mail, I ran an advanced search of my name using
Google and came up with over forty two listings, including everything
from a website for a garage band I had once been a member of to
listings from recent academic conferences. I even came across a site
which informed me that the editorial cartoons I'd drawn for my high
school newspaper had won a Scholastic Gold Circle Runner-Up Award
over ten years ago (having never heard about this award while I was
actually in high school, I was very flattered, although I can't
remember a thing about the cartoons I may or may not have drawn at a
time when it was still fashionable to have very big hair and listen
to bands with names like Poison and Whitesnake). I felt a certain
sympathy for my old flame; I wouldn't have been able to piece
together a very coherent story based on the information which Google
had provided either, so why not follow one of the links and see what
more I might discover by e-mailing an old friend? There's nothing to
lose these days, not even an envelope and a stamp.
When I replied to this e-mail I politely asked, "What have you
been up to?" Since she knew so much about me after having done all
this research, I felt I deserved a recap of the highs and lows of the
last ten years of her life. She responded simply, "Just look me up on
Google and you'll find the same." I followed her advice, but I found
myself longing for the days of long, meandering, handwritten letters
filled with exotic details and adventures as exciting and bizarre as
an old Doc Savage novel. I did as she suggested, however, and
found a series of listings for her on Google.
I don't want to suggest that I dislike hearing from old
friends--to the contrary, it was an unexpected pleasure to fill in
the blanks of the last decade and to realize how much the both of us
had grown and changed since our days as college freshmen. How many of
us have the strength to resist the temptation of looking up old
friends and enemies who are best left in the past? Have an old
roommate who locked you out of your dorm room in college? Haven't
seen that impossibly tall and handsome captain of your high school
football team in twenty years? Ever wonder what happened to the King
and Queen of your high school prom? How about the class
valedictorian, and did those "most likely to succeed" really live up
to all the hype? These are questions which, in our darker, more
sentimental moments, we all ask, but most of us have to settle for
never knowing the answers--or waiting until our next class reunion or
issue of the alumni magazine to discover the truth.
Today, however, tracking down the kid who stole your comic books
in seventh grade is as easy as logging on and typing in a name or
two. Come to think of it, I have been wondering what happened to
those issues of What If...Spider-Man Had Joined the Fantastic
Four? and Conan the Barbarian that I "lost" during a field
trip to Philadelphia in the fifth grade. Maybe it's time I made like
Sam Spade and found the culprit, who is probably happily married and
living with his three kids in a small suburb outside of Los Angeles.
Only when the sun hits the windshield of his new Ford Explorer at
just the right angle does he recall the purloined comics yellowing in
his basement. (If only Sam had known the wonders of the Internet, the
mystery of Maltese Falcon wouldn't have been so mysterious after
all).
Ernest Hemingway concludes The Sun Also Rises with one
of the most famous exchanges in all of American literature. "Oh,
Jake," remarks Brett to her former lover, "we could have had such a
damned good time together," to which Jake replies, "Isn't it pretty
to think so?" It's always pretty to imagine what might have been--what the world
would look like if Kennedy hadn't been assassinated, for example, or
if Columbus had never discovered America, or if the great library of
Alexandria hadn't burned to the ground. "What might have been" opens
endless possibilities for the imagination, but there is little room
for idle speculation concerning alternate universes in a world where
technology has made it effortless to discover exactly what happened
to those we thought we'd left behind. Now that my laptop has assisted
me in making contact with a friend I believed I would never see
again, I wonder if it can assist me in locating that action figure I
dropped down the well in the front yard when I was ten years old.
Please excuse me--I have to run a search for a red plastic Micronaut
Pharoid equipped with his very own mint-condition emerald Time
Chamber...
Printer
Friendly Version
|
|
