«I JUST READ EVERYTHING»

The change also represents something of a shift in the way society, and the family, is organized.  With both parents working, the kids were left on their own, and so the kids got to inventing.  Boomers may have given them the tools, but there was nothing inevitable about the way the internet was used and is being used.  The kids grasped long before anyone else that the real power of the online universe is its self-determined nature, so that social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook are not really about networking at all (it's a phrase some marketing hack came up with), but rather about creating a new identity in cyberspace, or multiple, conflicting identities.This last bit of invention has also begun to creep up on the last great bastion of centralized, mediatized thought: political ideology.  If one can be a raging right-winger on one issue, and a rationalizing progressive on another, and if one can challenge whatever the centralized consciousness has to say--regardless of content--then the hypnotic effect of centralized media like TV and radio begins to fade.  And the strategies of response to this challenge have all turned out poorly. 

-Salon
Oct 21 2009