The Impatient Generation

11/20/2003

One of the joys of watching extending edition DVD’s is the inclusion of the “extras”: missing scenes, trailers (i.e., advertisements), and so on, so I’ve been watching a lot of older trailers lately.

And I've noticed an interesting thing.  The older the trailer, the slower the pace. The trailer for the original "Pink Panther" movie (1964) is unwatchable.  You might as well sit down for an evening of watching the paint dry on the wall.  The trailer for "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" (1979) is painfully tedious.  But that Star Trek disc has an updated trailer as well, made for the DVD version, and the contrast is astonishing.  The material is similar, even identical in spots, but the presentation is dramatically different.

Things have sped up a lot in the last few decades.

The 1990’s started off with a cliche about “internet time.” It’s no longer a cliche. It has become a baseline baseline expectation, at least for some of us.

Think about it: when you send off an e-mail to someone, when do you expect a reply? Next week? A few days? Probably more like a few hours at most. When you order merchandise, 3-6 weeks for delivery (which used to be the norm) is unheard of. The choice is usually between a few days or within the week. When a new virus or security vulnerability is discovered, we want to download the new software with the fix now. Not tomorrow, not next week, not six months from now when the new version is released. Now.

The real fun comes when we of the impatient generation come up against the rest of the world that does not think along these lines. I had to request a detailed audit of my account from a large, bureaucratic organization recently. They expect I should have the results in about six months, largely because they require data from a different part of the organization. To them, this is a perfectly reasonable time frame. To those accustomed to the instant gratification of Google and company (including me), this is ridiculous.

So what do you expect?