Gotta love Russ. A few days after exposing his utter-non-hipness and confessing he doesn’t “get” MySpace he signs up for an account and starts trying to grok it.
I’m pretty glad my job doesn’t involve trying to fathom the fickle youth market. Like Russ, I don’t feel especially old, but the stuff that the kids are into (communities like Helgon and of course MSN chat) is out of my radar. I understand it in principle, but I don’t grasp the finer points. This blog is basically a personal broadsheet, the model is a hypothetical online journal from perhaps the nineteenth century — genteel, feelings under wraps, “stiff upper lip” etc. I can’t imagine letting it all hang out here. That’s not the kind of guy I am.
It should cheer him up that older people have consistently made money from younger ones throughout the ages (or at least since “teens” appeared as a consumer group) and if you just try your best you can probably manage.
At least with the older kids I have some kind of cred. My 5 minutes of manual reading have enabled me to use BitTorrent effectively, which is something my so-called internet literary youngsters have not figured out. But I shudder to think of what kind of fuddy-duddy I will appear in the four-year old’s eyes in about 7 years…
Yeah, I’m getting old, and it sucks.