Oregon Trail Syndrome

You Have Died of Dysentery

It was always some disease that did it. Either that, a rattlesnake bite, unfriendly indians, a fire, or a drowning during an unsuccessful river crossing. It was never starvation when I was on The Oregon Trail in third grade. Don Rawitsch's classic video game was meant to teach me something about pioneer life in the 19th century. I don't think I learned anything he intended to teach me. I didn't even bother to learn the pronunciation of the diseases which killed me—I just shrugged my shoulders, wrote something juvenile like "I.P. Freely" on my tomb stone, and started over. All I really learned was that oxen, wagon wheels, and axles had to take a back seat to ammunition if you planned to shoot every squirrel, buffalo, deer, or bear on the trail west. None of my friends had much interest in making it to the coast at all; we'd travel only in search of more game, shooting far more than we could ever fit into our wagon every chance we had. Those yellowish Apple II's were nothing but weapons of aimless, vacuous conquest in our young hands.

Hunting the Future

Technology was rapidly changing in 1991, the year my dad relocated our family to start the Utah chapter of Futurekids, a franchise of computer training centers for kids. While my classmates at Brookside Elementary were learning to play the piano and karate chop one another, I was learning the anatomy of a PC and how to run programs through DOS. Because no one wanted their kids trained on obsolete technology, Futurekids was always on the cutting edge. While my school was still swapping floppy disks mid-game, we played dozens of them on CD-ROM at Futurekids. Mario taught me to type, Reader Rabbit taught me to spell, and Carmen Sandiego taught me geography. We even had one of the earliest touch screens- a clunky nylon screen that clipped to the front of the monitor.

When we started Futurekids, we believed the digital world would bring more prosperity and freedom than we could handle. I remember going to a convention in Los Angeles where we met Brazilians who made millions doing it, and I wondered when the same would happen for us. My parents worked long hours for six years trying to make it happen. I remember my dad coming home long after sundown, exhausted and disheveled, only to leave again before I got up for school. He even started working another job to keep things afloat, but Futurekids finally went under, and our dreams became a thing of the past. The great digital beast we had hunted was nothing but a bunch of empty zeros and ones.

After the Future

One Halloween, I was "The Karate Kid." Maybe you where too. Or maybe you were a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. Maybe you were just a regular ninja because all ninjas are cool. If you weren't a ninja but wanted to trick-or-treat with one, you'd have to be a pirate, a super-hero, or a cowboy with a six-shooter. Ninjas don't hang with just anyone.

You can bet no one was trick-or-treating with a Bill Gates mask on; he may have had a more enduring and successful career than Ralph Macchio, but Bill Gates is no ninja. Maybe Futurekids had too much in common with Bill Gates to make it. Maybe it was too much like school and not enough like karate lessons. Maybe we only cared about hunting bear-shaped pixel clusters.

The Boxee Animal

Lately, I've been squandering a lot of my time on Boxee, a free program that aggregates the internets vast multi-media resources into an interface similar to satellite TV's menu. It let's you surf the net the way you channel-surf, with an infrared remote from the comfort of your couch. A mini-DV to VGA converter was top on my birthday wish-list so I could hook my MacBook up to the TV, click on the frog-shaped Boxee icon, and blow entire afternoons watching video podcasts, YouTube clips, and old TV shows on Hulu. Once again, I find myself hunting for far more than I'll ever need or be able to use, aimlessly collecting every app, clip or download that crosses my screen.

Sometimes it's Viral

Dysentery is actually a disorder, not a disease in and of itself. It's basically an ultra-intense form of chronic diarrhea which often contains blood and/or mucous. It's disgusting. According to the World Health Organization, dysentery may be caused by "chemical irritants, bacteria, protozoa, or parasitic worms." It's most often contracted as a result of poor hygiene or sanitation. Dysentery-linked pathogens enter the digestive tract through the mouth, usually in the form of food or water contaminated with feces. Once one member of a household or community develops dysentery, the underlying disease spreads quickly. No one plans to contract dysentery; it happens when they get careless or impulsive.

Catalytic or Cataclysmic?

Viral ad campaigns are every companies dream. Who wouldn't want to throw a cheaply produced video on YouTube and sit back as it gets passed around and around, generating buzz and awareness for your product. As a student of advertising, we've occasionally had companies ask us to create a "viral video," treating "viral" as a noun rather than an adjective. Though there are things you can do to encourage viral distribution, messages and products only become viral when a chord is struck with large segments of a population. Like Twitter, MySpace, or Facebook, they're an outgrowth of a social phenomenon.

I loved Facebook at first, but the unmitigated proliferation of contact points (apps, groups, fan sites, pokes, messages, instant messages, walls, supper-walls, etc., etc., ad nauseam) has made it intolerable. Becoming everything to everybody is a good way to end up nothing to nobody. The steady stream of self-indulgent, narcissistic, drivel it facilitates has diluted it's social utility.

But the technology is merely the catalyst. It doesn't create para-social behavior, it cultivates it. It's like feces—not a bad thing in and of itself, it just passes on the toxins once they've entered the system. The digital dysentery on Facebook, Twitter, and the like is merely an an outgrowth of the verbal diarrhea that's plagued societies since the dawn of time. It seems the majority of those who refrained from voicing or enacting every vapid thought banging around their skull did so in fear of impending consequence. Once a digital wall had been placed between them and the world around them, fear and any sense of social responsibility disappeared.

I guess what I'm really saying is let's not get delusional on our digital trail. Every social and personal flaw will follow us onto the frontier.