So here's *another* story about some dumb celebrity teen who ends up naked on the Internet. I don't know her story, but that awful pretty Gabriella from HSM (I'm trying to avoid being a link-whore) whose singing we all enjoy so much here in the effing household, has a picture of herself in her altogether-way-the-good-Lord-made-her on the Internet.
I don't know Bluetooth or all the ways you can suck up data from someone's cell phone or laptop or what ports need to be secured or default passwords that should be deleted or anything about that. But I do know that kids use technology, but don't know a damn thing about it.
It's basically a copy/paste generation. They can mimic someone else doing something so we assume that kids understand. But in Bloom's Taxonomy, these kids haven't made it to "Application." I spend hours showing kids how to shorten a URL to get to a root page if the link they want is dead; I show them how to crop photos and how to download a whole web page to get their hentai images if the right-clicking has been disabled by javascript. These same kids who grew up on computers, don't know how they work. Or at least the ones who come into the library don't. The smart ones are at home using the WOPR to launch nuclear strikes against Las Vegas and being totally oblivious to Ally Sheedy wanting to jump their bones.
Technology has exploded in such a way over that past few years that I no longer understand it and have even grown to fear it. Which is why everything I post on this page is actually typed on a Commodore computer which is stored in the basement inside a chicken-wire mesh cage that has no modem or wireless anything, but a blind eunuch transcribes every word I say, as I say it, or else HE DOESN'T GET HIS COOKIE (you hear me, Neal? No, you don't need to type that). And then saves the file in ascii to an IBM punch card which is then snail-mailed to a service in Greenland where it somehow ends up here. It's a monthly service that I haven't figured out yet how to cancel.
That's why, between the voluntary (MySpace) forfeit of personal data and the involuntary (stupidity) loss of privacy, kids will have had their identities stolen 10 times over before they turn 18. And there will be a period of time in the U.S. when a whole generation of mojons will need to be forcefully removed from the grid just to clean up the mess.
And I have that date circled on my calendar: January 14, 2009. There'll be a party, and I'm bringing the pasta salad and absinthe. I'll see you then.
