contradictions

the age of youtube. no, correction, the age of people.
i was browsing through the 1st jan 07 issue of Time who crowned YouTube/you as the person of the year 2006 and it got me off wondering what exactly characterised our era: the youtube era, so they say. i guess it is still a long way before we shud seriously consider this era the youtube era - it is just 2 years into its popularity and the effects are not fullblown yet, thou the implications it brought to many were tremendous. more importantly it points to a common entity, a consolidated rising power which we have never seen before - people. long past the past century where machines rose and took over by storm where engineering and inventions were the hype of the era, we now encounter a age best described by the interaction of people. the interaction of the entire world.
i think we are a different bunch of people. the we refers to singaporeans my era. it is sad that years down when we actually hold our babies in our hands and teach them about our timea, we would look to 911 - terrorism as the one big thing that changed the lifestyles(by then we may not even be able to drink liquid in planes) we had in contrary to our parents who talked to us vividly about their world war 2 experience, about the rise of singapore alongside theirs. oh yes, we can also always talk about the crazy internet that connected all of us to a single entity now, talk about youtube which radicalised our participation in citizen journalism, the steady rise of china and india as world superpowers. when we do that we also bring them to our shared childhood where most of us spent in schools playing marbles, yearning to get on the motorised red colour scooter at most parameters of malls all the way to the times we spent in the lanshop shouting across tables and tables of computers so new you can even smell their electronic odour. we risked being caught by principals, teachers at that time when our parents never contemplated that when they were out seeking spiders to slug out. coming out to adulthood, we begin indulging ourselves in MSN where even the workplace's computer's not spared this wonderful program which totally overcame the other program which ripped the earlier generation of their childhood - mIRC. aint it cool that when we look back at things we realise that every generation has had their own characterising features which shaped their people and our time was one of great changes esp to the lifestyles we are going to have in future all thanks to 911 and blogger/youtube.com.

anyways, the few of us were transported back to the times of our childhood when we locked ourselves in a lanshop way past midnight at doubyghaut. its really the 5 of us sitting across a elongated table of computers pressing away on the keyboard, chuckling at every little stupid weird thing we do in games and relaxing ourselves. its so youthful the feeling, so close the feeling where there's no boundaries. we understand each other, we laugh at mistakes, we eat losses and we fight side by side. i think the coolest thing is still playing together and yet we understand each other since years ago and accomodate each other's weird behaviours with laughter and happiness that we actually treat each game as a way to get together physically and virtually. it also somehow brought us back to the very scene where we got together for the first time, most of us actually, and had a game of cs which was extremely eventful haha. beat getting caught by your principal who walked in just for a packet of nasi lemak to see her students in inside out school pe-shirts jamming away right after school when the timing states clearly that sch kids are not allowed in before 530pm. haha. the good old days. and things seldom change much i guess. we are still together after 7/8 years doing the same thing all over again.