Forty–plus years ago, a couple of Harvard psychologists, Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary, chronicled their experimentations with a mind-altering mold. Their magic bus became the paean of a youth movement with a predilection for peace and harmony, hair, music and smoke, enchanted pears, idioglossia, quasi-political unrest, a lust for both social change and fluid exchange, and, of course, self-gratification.
LSD so framed their lives that Leary went leery, obsessed with evangelizing the benefits of taking more and more of the stuff as a balm for the what ailed the fractured zeitgeist of the ’60s. Alpert traveled to India, met the Maharishi, changed his name to Baba Ram Dass and wrote a book called Be Here Now, later memorialized by Beatle George Harrison’s tome: Remember, Be Here Now.
Forty years later, the phenom of real-time digitalia has exhumed Baba Ram Dass from the cemetery of All Things Far Out. The difference between then and now is that being in the present then was a desired state of mind; today it’s available at the click of a mouse. Driven entirely by our never-changing need for self-gratification and dutifully delivered by the internet, the concept of “Nowism” (as promoted by trendwatching.com) has become THE mega trend.
“Nowism” has been gaining ground for years, having a profound influence on societal attitudes, consumer expectations (they’re sky high), and new technologies “converging in such a powerful way that brands truly have no choice but to go real time in their business intelligence processes, customer conversations, distributions, sales, and marketing” efforts.
Consumers “info-lust”, a craving to access every minute occurrence, from right-now world, national, and local news to the superfluous, supercilious trivialities of their tweeting and texting friends, is a dream made true by technology. The bonus track being the cheap thrills of watching the most recent car crashes, skiing accidents, celebrity humiliations, fist fights, lad-humor debaucheries, or hidden camera burglaries and beatings available on YouTube and its myriad descendants—all from the comfort of an easy chair or work cube.
Everything is live on planet NOW. A liquid world, ever changing, ever morphing. Media can use real-time testing to determine which headlines are better read by users and make immediate adjustments to employ the most effective spin. Retailers can transmit a discount offer to someone’s cell phone via a 2-D bar code on a billboard. Why wait for a reporter’s newspaper interview the next day when you can see what Brett Favre was tweeting right after the game? Why browse through newspapers or magazines when you can have spiders search the info-universe for all that interests you and have it delivered right to your iPhone?
If I sound cynical, I’m not. I just tend to believe that the “Nowism” is already the So Yesterday of tomorrow. Why? When surveyed, consumers claim their biggest obstacle to happiness is no available time. They are just too busy, no time to do anything fulfilling. The obvious fix is to stop worrying about being in the know, thus reducing the amount of time being in the Now, opening up more time to be in the present.
You dig?
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