Not to get too personal, but your wife writes as well as you do. Of course, this makes me wonder what your kids will be like.

That's a brilliant piece Clive. Congratulations to Emily!

I wonder whether it's really an age gap that we're looking at here though - I keep seeing huge online social groupings of 30-50 year olds who live their lives through special interest forums, Flickr, YouTube and so on. Maybe it's more like a class divide, between those who for whatever reason 'get' the social web and those who don't? Admittedly, the huge majority of those who do 'get' it are young!

Jonn, woo! Yes she does. The kid, who knows -- maybe he'll rebel by refusing to read or write!

Tony, great question. Being 38 years old, I know a lot of folks in their 30s and 40s who are hardcore users of social software, for sure. But there's undeniably a qualitative difference in the way someone of my age uses this stuff, and someone who's 19 does, because someone who's 19 does not even really remember a time when these technologies weren't around. That always produces different user habits -- just as it did with the telephone. The first bunch of users in their 30s/40s/50s regarded it as a sort of business tool, a precious resource to be used sparingly, and with formal protocols. The generation of kids who grew up in the 50s with phones had a totally different way of using phones -- more informal, for casual conversation, etc., to the obvious horror of their parents ... who went on to produce endless hackneyed jokes about their daughters having "a telephone receiver growing out of her ear." To which one could reply: Yeah, well, pal, your parents probably regarded you as having "a motorcar attached to your ass." When you grow up with a technology, it's invisible to you.

This actually reminds me that I think that joke -- "my daughter has a phone growing out of her ear" -- is probably dead by now, or at least dying, killed by much-more-convenient forms of teenage communication: Multiple IM windows, texting, reading each other's Myspace blogs. So that's the new arena to which the jokes have migrated.

Dude, I hear that. I've had this residual notion that I'm in a sitcom since I was five, and have been thinking about my public image very actively ever since I started publishing a little over a year ago.

By the way, are you the saint who agreed to review Play With Fire? If so, I'd like to speak with you about autuerism in game design.

Rock 'n roll userhed in an age of liberation of sorts. The social web ushers in an age of ennui even while its exponents frantically attempt to keep up with its many obligations. I think it is evident to anyone with a brain that the telephone, ultimately is a curse. This is a double curse.

Not so much a curse as chaff. If you wander around dumping information left and right, it's a lot harder for the casual punter to reach the stuff you want to keep secret. And all of this stuff is ephemeral; most of these online logs are dependent on the interest of the corporations who provide the websites, and even though Google and Murdock might appear to be invulnerable giants today, they could be dead or dying 20 years down the line (if I wanted to find my postings to Citadel BBSes 20 years ago, I couldn't because most of them are gone without a trace or mutated past any sort of archive of the old PC-based versions.)

I know this phenomenon well, and actually it's caused me a bit of personal trouble. I first got online at a time when both the web and I were still growing up. Most people were calling the web a fad, as online commerce hadn't really kicked in yet. Usenet was in major use. And I participated in the discussions using my real name, not knowing any better. I was immature, and I wrote immature things at a rather low scholarly level. At my young age, it didn't occur to me that one day someone in the future would come back and index these things I was saying, and that they might impact whether I got hired for a job after college. The Internet just seemed to small and fringe for that to ever happen. But that's exactly what happened... not only has Google indexed everything it can, but sites from long ago have been popping up, finding ways to put their old discussions in index-able formats. And the really bothersome part is, even though today most business people know how to use Internet Explorer, I doubt they will be thorough enough to check what date something was posted... so it will look like my rant about the comparative worth of the BFG versus the rocket launcher may be something that's seriously on my mind today. Most of my peers didn't get online until they were a little older, and it was clear the Web was not going away, and, oh, by the way, you probably shouldn't use your real name most of the time if you're a kid. I imagine this lesson will appear (has appeared?) in most parenting books soon enough, but I wish someone had had the foresight to swoop down and stop me before I put my early-teen years online.

That's a great article. Hooray for Emily! I love Clay and danah's take on things -- although Clay's take "You didn't behave like that because nobody gave you the option," seems so simple and true, yet so easily argued away by the older generation as adolescent indulgence (wait! do I mean me? Us? I'm 38, too?!? WTF?).

And Peter, I hear you. I have a few grouchy usenet postings that can rumble up. But like the kids in the article, I didn't like my google juice with that as a main ingredient, so I made sure to flood it with goodness that I'd prefer to have out there.

Unfortunately, I do have friends who I fear have been blacklisted for exactly the same thing -- kept out of jobs and appointments for their extremely pointed, perhaps argumentative...okay, freakin' hostile postings in mailing lists and usenet. But for today's kids in the job market in a few years -- I doubt it will have *much* effect.

Although the first presidential candidate to have his old Facebook pages purged before announcing his candidacy will be fun to watch (oh, golly, wouldn't it be great to have faux-MySpace/Facebook pages for all the candidates?)....