The Times Are A'Changin' (Again) by Debbie Bennett

I was looking for something to repost this month - way too much real-life going on at the moment with both parents incapacitated in various ways and a big birthday (and party) coming up in the next couple of weeks. I first posted this blog below in December 2016 and it struck me how little really has changed. Plus ça change and all that, but 2026 is scarily close now in early 2024 ...

2016. A year of change. I wonder when they look back on 2016 in the years and decades to come, whether they will say that 2016 was the turning point, the pivotal moment when the world reached some kind of critical mass? I say they because I’ll be 53 in January and while I’m not planning on leaving anytime soon, this isn’t my world anymore – this world belongs to my daughter and her generation, to make the best of as they see fit with whatever legacy we’ve left them.

Brexit and the US elections. Neither gave the result that was expected and both, I think, made people sit up and realise the complacency with which we live our lives. Whichever way you voted in either election or referendum, we are on the cusp of something new – and we won’t know what it is, or what it may become, for a good many years yet.

On a smaller scale, the indie revolution is turning and changing. Music, arts, ebooks – whatever your flavour – I believe it’s becoming harder now to make your mark. Those who built their platforms in the heady days of the noughties are reaping the benefits; firmly embedded in Google, they pop up at the top of searches and they seem to know effortlessly how it all just works. I wish I knew the magical formula. Those of us who followed after have found it harder, and those who are only now beginning their self-publishing journey will be scrabbling for a slice of the Amazon pie as the crumbs get even smaller.

And online isn’t forever – no matter what I've said in other posts about protecting your privacy. The digital footprints in the sands of the internet are washed constantly by the waves of technology and what was once permanent is now obsolete. How many of us have photos on CDs? I have footage from my wedding from 1990 – back then not many people had video cameras and I was lucky in that my boss was a bit of a geek and had all the latest technology. His camera was a huge thing you had to balance on a shoulder, and my video is on VHS tape. I no longer have a VHS player and my new pc doesn’t even have a DVD or CD drive. These days we store everything on USB sticks and SD cards. Easily lost and easily forgotten.

What of our ebooks? How long before mobi and epub formats are unreadable and we are simply a mass of digital code somewhere. Our own kindle ‘libraries’ aren’t even our own – they are simply licenses to read certain books – so when our kindle is obsolete, what of the thousands of books stored on it? Paperbacks at least have a permanence about them. I have some treasured paperbacks from my childhood and despite my book-cull earlier this year, I still have several hundred physical books I couldn’t bear to lose. As well as my own paperbacks, of course!

Various prophets and predictions have always imbued times of great change with tales of second comings, of apocalypses and revelations and the end of the world as we know it. Society has never been more secular and yet fiction loves to deal with pre- and post-apocalyptic worlds. An omen, maybe? Can we all be Katniss or Triss? Horror is fashionable once again – exploring our fears within the ‘safe’ world of fiction?

What will the world look like in 2026?