THE NET HEARTS HALLOWEEN
In America,
holidays have their essential foods…and their essential media.
New Year’s Eve,
for example. Essential food: champagne. Essential media: television. It’s hard to even imagine
this holiday prior to the time when you could watch the ball drop from Times Square, live...as…it…happened. (Of course, the
experience must seem multidimensional for those living outside the Eastern U.S. time zone.)
Christmas, of
course, has many essential foods, but at least one essential media: movies. (Sorry, but we’re at a loss for similar media for either Channukah
or Kwanzaa…plenty of foods, though.) Can you anymore imagine Christmas without
“It’s a Wonderful Life” or “Miracle on 34th Street,” than you could imagine
it without eggnog? We can’t.
For Thanksgiving…duh…the
turkey is king. And the media is, well, cookbooks.
This holiday requires printed recipes as much as drumsticks.
And a July 4th
without a radio blaring at a cookout
is as unthinkable as one without hot
dogs or hamburgers.
Which brings us to the holiday at hand, Halloween. (See PingRay’s Issue 2.)
Halloween food: so many to choose from, but let’s start with
candied apples…plus, of course, every kind of candy the world has ever
known.
The most essential Halloween media? Ok, let’s look at the essentials of Halloween:
Participants don masks of characters they’ve always wanted
to try out for fun … often going from portal to portal looking for free goodies… and
escaping, for a while, from what can only be called “the real world.”
Sound like any media you know?
The Net is
already teeming with Halloween things…masks and stories and special “haunted” sites…but,
arguably… the same is true for other holidays.
The difference, we suggest, is that all those broadband
avatars and video blogs and serial podcasts and interface skins and massively
multiplayer online role-playing games and morphing programs and transmitting
video phones are making Halloween-like behavior…looking for treats, creating
live stories in alternate worlds, “dressing-up” as someone you’d like to be…more and more abundant on the Net.
Broadband, and the need to dress up, are enabling parts of
the Net to become a fulltime Halloween
party.
Or, to paraphrase the best Internet cartoon ever:
On Halloween…as on
the Net… nobody knows you’re a dog.
Has anyone figured out the music room in the scavenger hunt? I have most of the rest of it solved, but can't figure out that room.
Posted by: Cindy | October 28, 2005 at 02:44 PM
Hi.
In the music room you click on the piano.The instruments will go in a pattern.Click on the instruments to repeat the pattern. Keep doing that until you've won that music game and you will get a surprise....
Posted by: carletta | October 30, 2005 at 04:34 PM