Plugged In And Tuned Out

If you're more than 35 years old, things are more different with young people than you probably realize. While many of us were upset as teens because our school cafeterias didn't offer an alternative to milk, our younger folks have much more high-tech concerns on their minds. At South Florida Community College, some students are angry that the college's Internet system doesn't allow access to Myspace.com, YouTube and Facebook.

SFCC President Norman Stephens explained that it wasn't a matter of censoring these sites, but, rather, the college's limited bandwidth. That means the information superhighway is down to two lanes at the college. But that will change soon, and students should have access to any of these sites soon.

For those of us, uh, older folks, we are left scratching our heads about the level of concern by some students about not accessing these sites. Few of us have actually been on the MySpace site to read people's profiles and look at their sometimes embarrassing photos.

Perhaps a few more of us have looked at the YouTube site, where just about anything that's ever been videoed pops up on screen. We have to admit it's a cool, happening, far out, groovy site. Wait, do those words date us?

As most of us with children in school understand, it's a whole new world for our young people. They are the most "connected" generation that have walked the earth. At their fingertips they can access almost anyone by cell phone, find Web sites for every interest under the sun, play video games with special effects we could not imagine 20 years ago, and with every expectation of greatness for what's coming next.

For most of us, we thought eight-track tapes, and then cassette tapes, were beyond cool, and boom boxes pushed the edge of technology. How many of us marveled at the Flying Toaster screen savers the first time we saw them on a computer screen.

Ironically, although our children are more connected than ever, we fear they are also more isolated. Perhaps they are not kept away from the bigger world, but they seem to be separated more and more from human interaction. They communicate, but mainly through electronic means. And that doesn't make them any smarter about what's going on in the world, although that information is out there too.

Few read newspapers, watch TV news or even care about the events of importance going on around them. To be fair, not all of us were policy wonks at age 15, but we probably knew quite a bit about the space race, the Vietnam War, civil rights and the feminist movement. That doesn't seem to be the case today.

So while our young people are plugged in with access to everything, they are missing a lot of what's important. And those things aren't necessarily found on YouTube, MySpace and Facebook.