Internetitis
Posted by Patrick in Books, Game Shows, The Price is Right, TV, Writing & Publishing
I never cease to be amazed by the level of laziness the internet has caused, especially among younger folks who’ve pretty much always had access to it.
Hand them a phone book, or walk them into a library with an increasingly-rare card catalog and you would think you’ve taken their entire life away.
Over at a certain game show website I’m a member of, a poster asked about a new book just written about Johnny Olson, the original announcer on The Price is Right, the man who made “Come on down” a part of Americana. The poster asked if anyone had read it, yet.
About six minutes later, another member posted a follow-up in that same forum, asking if the original poster could provide a link to information on the book, like, perhaps, an Amazon.com link.
My response:
“This always cracks me up…really, folks, it’s the INTERNET! Go to Amazon and look it up!
When I went there and entered VOICE IN TIME RANDY WEST, I got the listing. Why would anyone wait for someone else to post something here they could find on their own??”
I’d hate to be of a mindset that would prevent me from being able to find something on my own if I wanted to know more on a subject. 
The internet has made finding information much easier and much faster. But sometimes, you still have to make a little bit of effort!
The book, Johnny Olson: A Voice in Time, was written by Randy West, another game show announcer I’ve had a few conversations with. He’s a nice guy and he was lucky enough to know the legendary Olson and strike up a friendship with him. When Olson passed away in 1985, West received a good deal of Olson’s papers, including an autobiography he was working on.
Johnny was the greatest game show announcer in the business, and unlike many others, knew how to be the perfect second banana.
I’m definitely going to look for this one at the bookstore. Here’s that Amazon.com link to it. I’ll give it to you, assuming that you would have taken the time to find it for yourself if you really cared.
Welcome to Patrick’s Place, home of the Saturday Six and the Sunday Seven.
Sign of the times. Necessity is no longer the mother of invention - it's laziness. Vehicles were invented to improve our ability to travel. Television was invented to create a whole new medium for sharing news and information. Now we mostly just re-invent the wheel to make it more round, more smooth, faster to roll, easier to handle, compact, high-definition, with smaller processors and longer-lasting batteries. Funding for space programs (one of the last forms of true human exploration left, aside from nanoscience, pharmacology, etc) gets slashed repeatedly while we stick to ensuring that anything "new" just makes it easier for us to do everything without moving a muscle. To drift a little further from my point, have you noticed how increasingly more members of the younger generation have "attention-deficit disorders" and the like? They blame the preservatives, lack of this and that nutrient, even the large number of vaccines kids get growing up... I think a lot of it also has to do with the culture these kids grow up in. We talk about how kids don't read books anymore, but seriously, when even an 8-year-old carries a cell phone, does his/her school work research online, posts on MySpace and other mind-numbing social networks - how is this kid supposed to disengage from that kind of lifestyle of instant gratification enough to sit down and leaf through an actual book? By modern standards of time/accomplishment ratio, a 400-page book is a no-return investment to these kids. They are used to getting information in bullets, tables, abstracts, compact headlines. A novel is a commitment, insisting on an attention span that can process things in a more in-depth way. Do these kids have this mental capacity anymore? And if so, will they still have it 40 years from now?
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