Technology is so weird.
Being an elder Gen Xer, I distinctly remember Life Before.
Life that included typewriters and White Out. Phones that attached to the wall. Damp copies of school handouts that were
printed in purple ink and smelled funky. Friendships that were pretty much only
made in person.
These days I am doing my best to embrace Life Now. A contraption that is smaller and lighter than the raddest Sony Walkman allows me to talk to people, send immediate notes to people, take photos, listen to music, and answer just about any oddball question that meanders through my brain (recent Google searches include “llama in car“ and “words of love that start with j”).
This Handheld Magical Wonder allows me to see
my front door and talk to delivery people from the comfort of, well, anywhere.
It connects me to my entryway lamp and my cooling mattress pad and a fancy
cooking implement and my car. Thanks to its mystical powers, I have friends I
have never met and strangers who follow my musings from across oceans.
I’ve done a pretty good job learning and accepting and trying to keep up, albeit through the bottom portion of my progressive lenses.
But this. This I just don’t get.
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Follow @its_the_fair for all your Fairing needs! |
I have an Instagram account that is public, viewable by anyone
who wants to see photos 4-H animals, stage hypnotists, grade school art
masterpieces, and me eating ridiculous quantities of calorie-laden Fair Food. A
little less than 150 people follow my Fair-dedicated account, which is pretty
small (baked, loaded) potatoes for anyone seriously trying to have a social
media presence (spoiler alert: I am not).
Back in September, I posted an innocent little video of a
team of draft horses expertly parking their wooden carriage in a dirt arena at
the Washington State Fair in Puyallup. It’s all of 23 seconds long and ends with
somewhat thunderous applause if you have your volume at its highest level.
Click this link to view The Almost-Viral Draft Horse Video
For reasons I can only amuse myself to conjure, this short video
is apparently all the rage in India. Every day, more draft horse fanatics “Like” my “Reel”
– mostly men and mostly in India based on their names and the randomly selected
profiles I occasionally stalk. As of
this writing, this innocuous video of 6 horsies parking a cart has been “Liked”
by 734 people. And in the 3 hours since posting the video on my "It’s The Fair" YouTube channel in preparation for this ramble, another 3,600+ people have
viewed it.
What the heck?!
I wish I understood why some videos pick up momentum while others fall flat. I mean, my channel also has the most adorable 6 seconds of a fluffy bunny twitching its nose, enjoyed by a rock solid 5 fuzzy-bunny-lovers. The world demands drafting horses over twitching bunnies?
Maybe a Millennial can explain it to me.
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