25, going on irrelevant?

I was sitting at a recent Butler Basketball game and I happened to look over at the young girl sitting next to me. She was texting on her slide-out keyboard cell phone, and my friend also took notice of this and made a comment about youth. It was then that I realized something… I think I might be falling out of touch with today’s youth.

I’m not saying I don’t text, I do quite often, but it was just the catalyst that spurred this thought. When I was young, I just assumed I would always be young, or at least in touch with the young crowd. I still remember how cool I felt when I set up my first e-mail account on Hotmail! Now, I’m not so sure I’m 100% in touch. Instead of moving with the times, I sometimes feel like I'm just trying to keep up.

I’m on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, I write comments about news stories, post to online discussions, I obviously have a blog, etc… but these are supplements to my every day life, bonuses if you will. For today’s youth, it’s a necessity. It’s an extension of their everyday interactions and it flows seamlessly into their day-to-day life.

As many thoughts do, this got me thinking down another path. Isn’t it amazing what the internet has done to our society? When the first computers – the ones that filled an entire room – were invented they were going to change the world as we knew it, and they did! They kept getting smaller, and smaller, and soon every home and office had one. I remember our first Compaq Presario, it was the bomb! Pre-Pentium, it rocked a 486 processor, blazed through Doom with 16 mb of RAM, and had endless hard drive space with a whole 500 mbs!

But, the true impact of computers – albeit big at the time – was nothing until one single phone line cable was plugged into the back. The internet has changed the way we think, the way we interact, our knowledge base, heck, it’s changed everything. The world is truly a different place than it was pre-internet.

Whether it’s for the good or for the bad will be determined in time, but anything that can bring me a hilarious video of a little girl screaming obscenities at Will Ferrell can’t be all that bad, right??