UNIVERSITIES OF THE NEXT MILLENNIUM
What role for the universities of the next millennium,
just laboratories, research centers,
cobwebbed hubs for
Web-Streamed Everything?
Will cyberpunks and cyborgs
(the next several generations of each)
have saturated the surf with
individualized opportunities
for further fractualization of the hominid’s
penchant for groupiness?
Will familial anything be necessary?
Is intercourse
(of any kind)
to become only “entertainment”?
Will simulacrum have its way?
Yes! No! I do not know!
Will the post – postmodern era
be one of increasing groups of young minds
having feasted too long at the teledildonics table
they are so obese with hedonism
they will not be fit for potato salad?
Will the thin film of the past
be shaved into still thinner slices of the now,
becoming a single frame
of compressed reference?
Not so much
because no one can check into history,
but because we are creating so much data.
Who will have time to “turn their back”
on the cresting waves of
Data Smog*
and spend time reflecting on what is
really real?
Where to for those individuals choosing
to wear their personhoods?
And what is it called
when something goes so fast it leaves itself behind
and becomes nothing staring at nothing?
Will there be only background noise
and the eclectic movement of electron’s darting shadows?
Or…
is this to be the golden age where higher education precipitates
quality and fraternalism,
a paradise of pilled pleasures without inspiration
– the genome having bequeathed all her secrets –
who will know the meaning of dis-ease?
* Data Smog, David Shenk
From Always Extolling: A Collection, Don Davison