Yes, I have already wrote a piece about Facebook (oh crap, I just inadvertently gave away "Facebook Whore's" identity!), but I feel that Facebook is becoming an overwhelmingly large aspect of life in general, it surely deserves more than the maybe-half-page-long essay I wrote before. This is important, and this is changing our lives.

So to begin, I will provide a very brief anecdote: I went home for lunch one day, and caught my brother (now 12 years old), red-handed, on Facebook. Here is where I say, and everybody agrees, that this is just wrong. He is entering middle school. He has a Facebook. A brief history of Facebook: first it was only Hah-vahd students, then only college students (ok, logical leap), then high school students (well... that's okay, not a bad leap), then anybody older than 16 (well ok...) and now kids are lying about their ages to get onto Facebook (wait, what happened here?). This makes me very sad. It makes me think that all this technology and internet business is sucking away at childhood. I am only 18 and I have already begun to feel old - I remember the days without internet, and the excitement when we discovered dial-up internet! The days before YouTube, when Google was just getting started... Now all these young'ns have their fancy DSL and wireless and they done stopped bein' in the real world and start'd using them fancy social networks instead of the good ol' days when if'n ya want to be with yer friend ya go out into the real world and trek ten miles in the snow uphill both ways to be with them. Oh but it doesn't stop there. He has a blog! A blog! Since when do 12-year-olds need a blog?

Now first I will justify my Facebook addictio-ahem i mean account - it's a good way of keeping in touch with people. I only got a Facebook after some of my friends left for college. And I rarely use it to talk to somebody currently in the same town as me, except for the occassional "Heya! let's get together soon!" message. So this leads me to question - why do barely-middle-school-aged children have a Facebook? It seems wrong. They don't really have anybody to "stay in touch with."

Hold on, I'm not done with this yet! If it were only Facebook I really would care less, but it's more: I didn't get email until high school, let alone really use it until a year or two later, and now it's just natural for first graders to have an email address. I didn't get my cellphone until close to college, and am regularly seeing gradeschool kids talking and texting on their cellphone (and I didn't text until college, and not very much at that!). My little brother reads his fancy e-books. I can't believe I'm old enough to remember what books actually look like!

But I digress.

I understand the internet provides ease of access to everybody, including kids. But I feel that they should not be concerning themselves with the internet until around high school (when one's need of procrastination reaches it's highest point) - that is, with the exception of an occasional elementary school web-quest. The internet is a marvelous thing - I would not think of bashing it on this extension of the great webs. But the functionality of the internet should not appeal to children, who should be more concerned with playing in mud and biking around town being king of the block. I may be old fashioned in thinking so, but kids should be experiencing the world, not the soft glow of a monitor. For us older types, we actually find the need to manage our lives on this thing - work collaboration, college crud, and staying in touch with those other older types (for some reason, having a different email address for each), and escaping all the work and drama that surrounds our lives by watching a stupid YouTube clip or two, reading a stupid Onion article or two, and then continue with our somewhat boring lives. And I do not see a real function the internet has for children. At 12 the only website I ever regularly went on was "NeoPets" and even then only briefly and not very often. My need to Wikipedia every name I hear and every interesting subject I come by only started in the last year or so.

The point I have to maintain is that although my life is thoroughly integrated into the Holy Internet, I can imagine life without it. I've experienced life without it. I know how to function without the internet, and I use it out of convenience and efficiency. But I can live without it (even if it's grudgingly). To be raised with the constant presence of the internet destroys just that, and it creates an almost fundamental reliance on it. I know there are proponents arguing social evolution, progress, and that's all the natural order of things. But the internet is unnatural, and manmade, and increasing reliance on such a thing I cannot bring myself to believe is a "good" thing for mankind. I am not a luddite, but knowing life without the internet, without a car and (oh my God) walking to school, I appreciate what technology has done. Without the experience of not having the internet, there is no more appreciation, there is blind reliance. And when there's a massive server shutdown they'll be running around like headless chickens.

I am unsure what is driving this shift into the digital realm. I imagine that my sentiments are not unlike when television first became publicly available. There was definitely much outcry against how the television has reshaped the meaning of childhood. The same thing is happening with the internet - it is reshaping what childhood is. But I dislike it. I dislike it a lot. I cannot fully articulate how much I dislike it. I cannot fathom how childhood occuring in the virtual realm could be at all a good thing, and I invite anybody who thinks otherwise to explain.

Perhaps I am just old and jaded.

I blame Disney and Cartoon Network for making the first "kid-friendly" sites. They brought this all on. Damn you!