Ion’s blog

Mr. Navarro[, who is 30] lives with his parents in Queens. His mother packs lunch for him a few times a week. His bedroom still has his high school baseball trophies and a giant stuffed bunny that was a present from a former girlfriend. On
weekends, he plays touch football and goes drinking and clubbing with his
two best friends – both about his age, fully employed and living with their
parents, too.

“When I was in college, I thought I’d be married by 24 and have a house and
kids by 30,” Mr. Navarro said. “Now I think the idea of being an emotionally
developed male by 24 is ridiculous. I want to get married and have kids
someday. But I don’t feel any pressure that it has to be soon.”

Mr. Navarro is no loser: he is funny, good-looking, charming – and typical
of his generation’s slowed-down approach to adulthood. To some extent, the
data tells the story. Nearly all the traditional markers of adulthood,
including marrying, getting a college degree and moving out of the family
home, are occurring later than they did a generation ago.

The shape of life for those between 18 and 34 has changed so profoundly that
many social scientists now think of those years as a new life stage,
“transitional adulthood” – just as, a century ago, they recognized
adolescence as a life stage separating childhood from adulthood.

Back then Sergey could say “when users come to Google.com all they want to do is search. And that’s our product” and mean it.

Now his search engine is the equivalent of programmes on ITV, there solely to attract eyeballs for advertisers. They may not do banner ads, popups, interstitials or flashing multimedia monstrosities, but more and more of the page’s real estate is taken up with paid-for content, and the ads are getting more and more intrusive.

They have even extended their reach far from simple web search, with the Froogle shopping service and the recently announced book site. Both of these are commercial ventures that trade on the Google brand.

Golden days

In my opinion, Google today is far from the great search engine it was in those far-off days, yet I still use it.

Even knowing that it indexes only a small proportion of the web using a technique that too often gives precedence to pages that lack authority or coherence, that it is skewed by multiple blog links and can be manipulated by unscrupulous advertisers, doesn’t stop me typing search terms into my toolbar and feasting on the results.

Perhaps it is simply that Google has become the Coke of the web. Sweet, available everywhere, and the first choice of the consumer.

The fine wines and elegant cordials are still available, of course, but Coke outsells them all, just as Google outranks other, more refined, search tools.

Like that other dominant American brand, McDonald’s, you seem to know where you are with a Google, and for some people familiarity will always be important.

In the jagged cities of science fiction, there is a God — or at least a Wizard of Oz — and his name is Thomas Pynchon. ”Pynchon is a kind of mythic hero of mine,” William Gibson has proclaimed. Gibson, who must be tired of hearing himself identified as ”coiner of the term ‘cyberspace,’ ” has gone to worlds not yet reached under Commander Pynchon’s rule.

Critics of science fiction grouse that Gibson can’t get far while steering the same old postmodern spacecraft, and dismiss his inventiveness as mere bells and whistles. But some die-hard fans lament that he’s deserting the mother ship every time he tries something off the flight path of his first novel, ”Neuromancer” (1984). All of which puts Gibson in the unenviable position of being able to displease many of the people much of the time.

If his elegant, entrancing seventh novel offers an answer to his detractors, it could be roughly translated as: so sue me. ”Pattern Recognition” is almost nose-thumbingly conventional in design. Despite the requisite tech toys, it’s set squarely in the present. But then the dates of Gibson-action have been creeping steadily backward. Predicting the future, Gibson has always maintained, is mostly a matter of managing not to blink as you witness the present.