Dan's Papers - October 12, 2007 - Twentysomething...By David Lion Rattiner

Technology is amazing to me these days. Take the iPhone for example. It has completely changed my view on what we are capable of. Watching a movie on your phone after downloading it off the Internet is crazy. The future is here. What's next? Teleporting to Chicago? I wouldn't be surprised.

Something that has been around for a relatively long time is MySpace.com. I didn't sign up for a MySpace.com account until last year, and I didn't sign up for a Facebook.com account until three years ago, but I can tell you that these two websites take up way too much of my time.

What the hell is wrong with me? I spend at least an hour a day at my house browsing through my "friend's" pictures, completely fascinated. "Oh my God, Austen's vacation to China looks amazing. I want to go to China, I'm putting that on my list of things to do." Or, "Holy crap, I can't believe those two broke up! I need to find out what happened," I'll say while simultaneously browsing for the perfect e-card to send to express my condolences, while at the same time e-mailing other friends to get the dirt on what happened.

And then an hour goes by and it's over and I've accomplished a whole lot of nothing. I turn off my computer and enter reality, but right before I get up off the couch, I decide that it is time to change my personal profile on my MySpace.com page. God forbid I decide that it is time to change my personal profile picture. That could take an entire day to do. I have to make sure that I pick the very best one that makes me look like the coolest person ever, but so that I'm not trying to look like the coolest person ever, I just naturally happen to be the coolest person ever.

My MySpace.com page takes me about eight days to design, working three hours a day. I'll spend hours uploading photos, tagging photos, commenting on other photos, searching for background wallpaper and exploring turnkey websites that make a huge living designing MySpace.com backgrounds for their customers. Most of the owners of these websites are MySpace.com freaks themselves, and the freakier they are, the better their services are, kind of like, oh never mind.

Without question, the reason that there aren't more protests in the streets about the countless issues facing young people day, solely falls into the hands of MySpace.com and Facebook.com. The youth of today are simply too busy playing on the Internet to handle those unimportant issues of the past.

I saw Across The Universe the other day at the East Hampton Movie Theater with my friend and co-worker Vicky Cooper. I was amazed at its rendition of how the Sixties were in America and how many young people were involved in protesting the war. Where did they find the time to do all of this? When do they have time to check their MySpace.com pages? And then it dawned on me that there were no MySpace.com pages back then. That was the only glaring difference I could see between then and now, besides the draft and they had way cooler music back then.

Exiting the movie theater, I saw my little sister Molly, who is not so little anymore, driving a car packed with other teenaged girls just like her. They had just gotten out of the movie theater themselves and were excited because they just saw 3:10 To Yuma and apparently it was pretty good.

"Drive carefully," I said.

I really meant it. For crying out loud, in my eyes she looked like a three-year-old behind the wheel. Granted she's seventeen and will soon be applying to colleges, but that didn't matter to me. For the first time in my life, I saw a teenager as a very, very, unbelievably young person. It made me feel kind of old, which was kind of weird.

I got home and spent the next eighteen hours on the Internet researching car accidents from various newspaper websites across the country and emailed one after the other to Molly.