Clintonium!

The Bonus Feature Generation

August 16th, 2006 - Comments (4)

So yesterday Levi walks up to me and pulls on my pant leg, and says, “Daddy my show is over.”

I look down at him, smile, and say, “Great, did you like it?”

“Yeah,” he says, “now I want to watch the bonus features.”

Uh huh. The bonus features. See, Levi is only four years old, and this stuff is already in his blood. It’s little moments like this one that I think give us some insight into the texture of generational shifts in our culture.

Sure, we as adults are comfortable users of DVD’s, and we enjoy all the conveniences that they offer, but we remember a time in the not-so-distant past when home video meant VHS tapes and strict linear progression through media (some of us even remember the time before that… when there was no such thing as commercial home video). Not so with my son Levi. DVD’s are the way movies have always been. Someday when he’s older and he hears about VHS tapes he’ll probably chuckle, the same way I did when I first heard about 8-track casettes.

It’s not that this changing of media formats means all that much in the greater scheme of the cosmos, but when you put it together with hundreds of other tangible little elements of the daily experience, you begin to see, in the accretion of all these things, the raw materials for a paradigm shift. Contributions to a new cultural vocabulary.

As my children and their peers grow older I want to be a good enough student of their cultural context that I can continue to understand, at least in part, the perspective that they’re seeing things from, and be able to communicate with them in the ways that they find most instinctively meaningful. There are some important things that I want to share with them. Ideas about life, and God, and the universe that I want to come across as clearly as possible.

And I happen to know of some nice bonus features that they might be interested in too.