Roger Cohen has an inspired piece in the New York Times this morning about those of us of a certain age who bemoan the short attention spans and addiction to social media of the younger generations. He's got us dead to rights, we're just old-fart whiners.
Remember, boomers, born, say, in the mid-1950s, that you were lucky, arriving midway between the atomic bomb and the release of the Beatles’ “Rubber Soul,” at the start of a postwar boom that would endure for decades, on the free side of the Iron Curtain, in a Europe embarking on the “ever closer union” that stopped the self-destruction of the first half of the 20th century, safe from the Nazi death factories, too late for the trenches, not too late for flower power, in time for the hippie trail to Kabul, and in line for the sexual sweet spot between the arrival of the Pill and the onset of AIDS. As Philip Larkin noted, “Sexual intercourse began/ In nineteen sixty-three.”
The piece goes on about Twitter and how those of us who don't use it, don't understand it, and can't abide it are no different than the oldsters who gave us so much grief about our hair, our music, and our sexual mores in the '60s. We're the new oldsters, and we're boring when we get on our rants about how the new social media are destroying the art of the written word, and blah blah blah.
It's almost enough to get me to use Twitter. But not quite.