It’s been a bit since I considered what I do when I’m not (and to be honest, most often when I am1) writing. I feel like I have been entertaining myself with electronic devices and non-electric devices most of my life.
My generation (Generation X) straddled the line between the world before and after the Internet. I grew up without any exposure to life online, but I’ve spent more of my life online than offline. In a few years, I will have lived in the 21st century for longer than I lived in the 20th, so if that isn’t symbolic of this whole before and after Internet deal, I don’t know what is.
With this in mind, I decided to examine my media habits and how they’ve changed from the days I huddled in my parents’ basement and chilling out after a day at school and now when I regroup from a day or a week of teaching in the Yellow Submarine.
I figured since media consumption is an obvious on writers, it’s a legitimate form of discussion for me on this blog. I’ll discuss various entertainments, both print, analog, and digital, and how my appetite has changed over the years in three periods (childhood, young adulthood (18-40 or so), and nowadays). Don’t worry, I’ll keep it quick.
Print Media
- Childhood – I consumed books, magazines, and newspapers more or less constantly from the first time I started to understand the words. I also didn’t limit myself to kids’ stuff, either – I was reading about national news pretty early, at least before my age got into the low double digits. I would go to libraries and clear them out, and I ended up subscribing to a lot of magazines over the years, everything from National Geographic World to Boy’s Life and World Press Review.
- Young Adulthood – more of the same.
- Nowadays – I read less stuff on paper because in the case of newspapers, there is less of it2. In the case of magazines, I’m tired of storing a whole bunch of them I rarely reread.
Books, however, are still a passion of mine, obviously, and not just from the writing standpoint. I have to pick and choose which books to buy and read, but I emphasize trying to support independent authors and/or independent booksellers with my purchases.
Some of my most recent fiction purchases were The Border by Don Winslow and Lord of the Isles by David Drake (both indie bookstore purchases) and The Purple Door District by Erin Casey (a fellow indie author from the Iowa City area). My two recent nonfiction purchases are We Crapped in Our Nest: Notes From the Edge of the World by Art Cullen (the northwest Iowa edition of Jimmy Breslin or Mike Royko) and The Swine Republic by Chris Jones. Both are from the indie publishing house of Ice Cube Press from North Liberty, Iowa, and were bought for research purposes (my upcoming horror environmental novel The Land, the River, and The Waste3.
Television
- Childhood: Absolutely addicted to it. I had one of those old heavy cathode ray tube deals looming in one corner of my parents’ basement that was mine, daddy-o, get it? How could my parents tell I was watching it? Because whenever they looked down the staircase to the basement, they saw my butt parked on the basement carpet immediately in front of the television, and the fact the numbers on the console wore out after a couple of years was another clue. I watched everything from Warner Bros. and the Superfriends cartoons, sci-fi, action films, and everything in between. I had HBO for a couple of years and that’s when I watched Star Wars like thirty times.
- YA: More of the same, but I added VCR tapes to the mix. I kept Blockbuster in business for a few years on my spending money, and that’s when I’d watch some of the more out there movies and videos they wouldn’t show on cable.
- Nowadays: Cable is dead. I’ve watched YouTube TV for the past five years or so and never missed cable. Honestly, there’s times I just watch YouTube and not bother with the channels because it seems like there’s nothing worth watching on them at the times they broadcast them. When YouTube TV dropped all the Disney channels recently due to some pay dispute, I waved goodbye with not a care in the world. The only channel in that lineup I watch is ESPN, and that’s because of Pardon the Interruption and their Formula 1 coverage. Well, they’re dropping Formula 1 next year, and Tony and Michael will retire sometime, so…
Journalism
- Childhood: I made an effort to keep up with the news, either with my local paper (The Muscatine Journal) or with the local television stations. I also started watching cable news, especially CNN, as well as the Sunday news chat shows.
- YA: At this point of my life, I was actively involved in journalism as a career and I ended up reading everything I could about both domestic and international news services. I believed the US press was a necessary check on the power of the government and was proud I was a small part of it.
- Nowadays: I’ve come to consider for-profit journalism, especially the national corporate media, to be a contradiction in terms. Right now the owners of these organizations are only interested in making money and
I still support independent journalists and those trying to be effective local news sources, which are few and far between nowadays. The Iowa Writers Collaborative Roundup and sources like The Iowa Mercury are what I prefer to support now, but I also still follow many international journalism sources.My experiences in journalism drove a lot of the themes of my debut book, The Holy Fool, such as the decline of print media and a need for a new way of conducting journalism.
To be frank, political news has ceased to be entertainment to me. I never read stuff like PJ O’Rourke or journalism memoirs anymore.
Sports
- Childhood: I don’t recall watching a lot of sports on television,
- YA: I followed the 1990’s glory days of the NBA and the Chicago Bulls, because that’s what everyone else was doing. I also got more heavily into the NFL, and choose the Green Bay Packers as my team due to my parents’ ties to Wisconsin. NASCAR was a brief thing. Pro wrestling got my attention. I also continued to follow soccer, especially after the 1994 World Cup, even though television coverage of both foreign and domestic soccer was spotty.
- Nowadays: Soccer is the only sport I follow with anything close to the attention I once paid to other sports. That I watch every weekend now.
I was getting into Formula 1 a bit, but the TV rights silliness between ESPN and YouTube TV has put this at risk as well as the rights transferring to Apple TV next year. Pro wrestling is a bit more of an obsession with me although I never watch live events and usually just watch recaps or highlights on YouTube. NASCAR rules got too complicated and I got tired of watching cars turn left all the time. I never watch NBA anymore; just lost interest. I follow the Hawkeyes a bit more because my wife is a big Hawkeyes fan. But as far as the NFL or the NHL, or other sports? I usually just leave them on for background noise. All I know about the Packers and the Chiefs are who their quarterbacks are and that’s about it.
Writing Equipment
- Childhood: I relied on the big spiral notebooks you used in school and conventional pens and pencils. I dreamed of having my own working electric typewriters like a true professional writer would have, but that never happened.
- YA: By the time I could afford typewriters, the desktop computer became ubiquitous. I relied on a series of personal computers both at home and at my professional work for writing of all kinds.
- Nowadays: I’m sticking with laptops for my writing – I can barely compose anything on my phone. I’ve gone to smaller notebooks like Moleskine to write and do initial planning for my projects. I’ve found sifting through those ideas by hand is a better way to engage my brain.
AI is the devil, more or less. If I use AI to write my work, what’s the point of doing it in the first place?
Music
- Childhood: When I was a kid, I listened to my Dr. Seuss records and some of my dad’s old albums on the old record player downstairs. My teens was the midst of the cassette era, and I found out about music from the radio and MTV like all kids in America was supposed to, but every now and then I’d find about outsider groups like the Velvet Underground, Iggy Pop, the Ramones, and others. It was an interesting time.
- YA: Same, although the albums in our collection stayed on the shelves and I started getting CDs. The first CD I remember buying was Little Earthquakes by Tori Amos, which was one clue I was trying to listen to different things even back then.
- Nowadays: My cassettes are long gone and my CD’s are in storage. I find and listen to most of my music on YouTube nowadays, from old groups I never heard of such as Richard Thompson, Fairport Convention, and Stan Rogers, to a few new groups like Amyl and the Sniffers. I’m trying not to be one of those guys that just believes no good music is being made anymore.
Video Games
- Childhood: I was one of the early adopters. I was playing Atari 2600 and Nintendo NES from childhood, and sometimes my parents had to drag me out of the basement to get me back into the world. (My mom was into Zelda herself for a bit.)
- YA: I continued playing Sega, Nintendo 64, and also PC games as well once I got computers which performed well enough to play them.
- Nowadays: After playing some Playstation and XBox with my son as he grew up, I’ve fallen away from many video games. No more consoles for me; too much time wasted. I want to write more. I honestly waste enough time (and money, oops) on mobile games as it is.
The Internet
- Childhood: Never existed. Next question.
- YA: I was literally the last college student in America not to get email. I had dial-up but not AOL, and I think it was the best. The Internet was sort of fun before people decided they had to monetize the hell out of it like they did everything else.
- Nowadays: I’m very wary of algorithms, propaganda, bots, and AI crowding out all the actual human beings online (and not all those human beings are prizes either). The only real reason I’m still on social media is to promote my books and connect with other writers. Otherwise I’d just set up a Discord for all my friends and settle for that, or get them to join me on Signal or whatever the new replacement is.
In Conclusion
I’ve gone to believing in technology to openly wondering whether “Uncle” Frank Herbert wasn’t right about thinking machines when he wrote Dune sixty years back.
Touch grass and/or open water when you get the chance, kids. You’ll thank me for it.
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- I’ve written more about procrastination more times than I can count. ↩︎
- This was the whole idea behind my debut book. ↩︎
- This is the “working title” only – I’ll reveal the actual title after we get closer to publication. ↩︎