It’s a well-know fact that children learn from their elders. In some cases (like racism and the harmonica) this is a bad thing. But most of the time (for example, crapping in a toilet, or not saying racist things...out loud) these lessons are important and good. Thanks to our parents, teachers and bosses, we kids have learned that it isn’t appropriate to walk around poking strangers. That you shouldn’t rank your friends in terms of hotness, or show your coworkers pictures of yourself doing a kegstand. While it’s nice to buy a friend a drink, giving her a beer, friendship tea, chocolate cake, a snow globe, cuddly hugs, spring tulips, sushi, cowbell, and good karma, in the span of an hour it is a bit overkill. These are lessons they impart to help us to be healthy, contributing members of society who do not get beat up on street corners or fired. In the alternate social network of the internet, however, our elders are all sorts of clueless. Like Brendan Fraser unleashed in New York, or Eddie Murphy unleashed in New York, or Will Ferrell unleashed in New York, or Adam Sandler unleashed in New York, they’ve enthusiastically stumbled into the world wide web, licking every shiny object that falls in their path.

Behold the era of the wisdom of youth. The communication age has fucked up the time/space/generation continuum. Grandma may remember when everyone addressed letters by hand, but does she know what it was like to get your first hotmail address? Sure, the Vietnam protests are an important part of our history, but so is the nationwide panic that happened when high schoolers were allowed to join facebook. Depression? How about the 6 hours that YouTube went down in ’06!? Numa numa whaaaaat? We have a whole generation of people who don’t remember when myspace was cool, or when lonelygirl15 wasn’t (known to be) scripted. A generation of people who have no idea that facebook.com was once thefacebook.com. Generation old. These adults join our community with reckless abandon, with no respect or regard for the ones who have come before them. They have no knowledge of the etiquette of the land, and they don’t care. They think that photo albums are an appropriate place for delivery room photos. They try to network in places where networking was never meant to go. Al Gore may have founded the internet, but we were the settlers, dammit. I will stop wearing flipflops to the white house when you stop forwarding me poorly designed “funny” powerpoint presentations.