November 2nd, 2005
Right on! Now I have two reviews of my website, and both positive (but one by a homey, so maybe that explains the 5/5s all around :-) )
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So a co-worker and I were talking about kids these days—or perhaps I should say, ķ1Ч ЋêËz ΔæÝз—and, in particular, what was different between teenagers now and us as teenagers.
(I almost always get the sense that when she and I talk about our childhood or teen years, or high school or whatever, we definitely "click" because she grew up two blocks from where I grew up and we went to the same elementary and high schools. We grok, 'cause we had the same neighborhood of origin. If you can dig it.)
So, we sort of reflected on the differences—primarily the kids today have tonnes of those little gadgets that we didn't have to help us through teenagerizing and learning at school (and synching up with our parents), and we also commented that teenagers are just more crude in language. And I also reflected earlier this year that they are not as literate as previous generations because, with all those little extra gadgets of theirs ... well, they don't really need to be. I mean, my generation never learned Latin and we haven't fallen dead to the ground.
Which all got me thinking about the cyber punk language (an attempt at which I made above) and as I scanned the websites I discovered that, without anyone telling me, we are now in the Post Cyber Punk era. Oh. Okay. I guess all those script kiddies got jobs and are now too busy commuting to work every day to worry about writing arcane messages to each other. Hackers are no longer the group mostly comprised of social misfits who spend 40 solid hours at the computer in their parents' houses with early-onset arthritis from fingers curled over keyboards. No indeed. Now the bulk of hackers are harder and more serious criminals. Thieves, information purloiners, and terrorists. When compared to "hardened criminals", the spammers and script kiddies seem kind of quaint and quirky now, don't they? 1
When it comes to the Internet, it's the Wild West all over again, son. Go East. Go faaarrr East. In fact, screw it: Go West instead, you'll end up in the same place, but it'll take less time. Because the Far East (as we like to call it) is on the upswing, the West is in those beautiful but increasingly menacing days of Fall, and the folks who survive will not be the muscleheads with the armies and superior firepower, it'll be the folks who can find enough humility to become second fiddle after ruling the waves for so long. Empire may be far from dissolved, but the decline is apparent everywhere. I don't think anyone doesn't know about the existence of Great Britain, but I think everyone—including the Britons themselves—will agree it's not the world superpower it once was. In a similar vein, Æ^^3®1©Ã—er—America is starting to lose its footing. And before any Americans reading this get all up in arms about that statement and the whole sentiment, citing us snooty Canadians with our little brother "me too" attitude, let me point out that Canada follows America the way Scotland followed England. So Canada must necessarily suffer the same (or similar) fate as America. I just think our natural resources may fuel the East for a short time (probably until the end of my lifetime), but eventually we'll slide into disrepair like a formerly trendy area of town no longer on the front page of the Real Estate Gazette. 2
So back to the kids: Cruder in language and less literate, more gadget-savvy (and enabled) than my own generation, but they seem all right despite the crumbling empire around them. I said this the other day: We are all products of the environment.
Kids don't seem any worse or better than my own generation ... seasonally adjusted, that is.
(1) So how does a criminal get "hardened" anyway? Do they use the heat-and-carbon method? Or chemically treat them?
(2) I just got back from lunch with a friend who described the condos we walked by as "yesterday's real estate". Amen, brother.
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