> There's also a "Logan's Run" effect in play where if the population of newbies is so overwhelmingly large, they set the norms and elders don't even get a voic

> There's also a "Logan's Run" effect in play where if the population of newbies is so overwhelmingly large, they set the norms and elders don't even get a voice in many discussions - they may not even be in the same circles. I think this holds for both the internet and gay examples: young people do what is convenient to them and don't ordinarily look forwards or backwards, so you ended up with norms for, e.g., social media, shifting on cycles of about 4 years as new user cohorts entered and tried new products with no awareness of the previous ones. Yup. The ratios are just bad. On the 'understanding the impact of living on the digital world on one's life stages' aspect, we're looking at ratios of about one elder per 20,000 students at best. Then consider of us 5000, there are plenty of variables that might mean somebody can't help teach. Either they have no education background, aren't people people, aren't alive anymore (RIP Aaron Schwartz), or can't understand the average person's life experience well enough to offer any practical advice (I can't see Zuck having many good ideas here; he's too busy exploiting the situation for personal gain). Which is another problem: The people who would be most helpful for this particular problem are those in the 5000 kids/earliest adopters who spend the most time around normal people (as opposed to academia or SV), because they're going to have the best ideas of how to adapt the digital world to work for the average citizen who has to work around things like trying to keep up with tech while raising 3 kids and working 2 jobs. But those people are also the group with the least resources, time, and ability to find each other. I'm surprised it isn't more of a shitshow, honestly. > And I think that's kind of suggestive of what a healthy culture is, really: it's the part that can survive to old age, which by its nature means it is usually a little more buttoned-up than what a young person craves. I'd expand this and say a healthy culture can be transmitted and has something to offer for different stages of life. Which is where I think geeks have some issue: Because we're so forward thinking/future oriented + our greater social acceptance is so new, we don't even conceive of ourselves as being a culture, and we can be kind of disdainful of tradition and history efforts.