Schmoozing, I guess, is a requisite to survive in the social media realm? I'm an introvert who values face-to-face, deep connection with a few rather than a generalized template mass-forwarded to many. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find the former, because too many people nowadays only want the latter. It's practically impossible to make friends with other introverts — especially painfully shy, solitary ones such as myself — because we simply aren't out there "networking" and really don't care to bother.

Then there's the issue of math (yuck), which I can't do at all. I was a remedial student who never got the hang of even fraction-decimal-percent conversion, yet excelled in terms of written communication. Programming is a kind of math, and these days you have to know at least basic HTML to be *really* involved in the social sphere. Ironic, when considering the programming geeks were always shunned as antisocial, and yet the programmers and the schmoozers seem to have forged a partnership against anyone who doesn't match with either of these skills. In other words, I'm too shy to be a marketer yet too much of an artist to be a programmer. As I read this I'm seeing a blurb on the "Latest Tweets" scroll that says "science and math is trumping art, through influence." How sad that everyone will someday either be a sociopathic cyborg programmer or a plastic supermodel marketing expert. Either way there's no room for soul and heart in social media. It's quantity over quality and that's something I just don't want to participate in. Shy and introverted as I am, I care more about people than I do about algorithms or self-presentation. I guess that makes me a 21st-century, female equivalent of Willy Loman, and we all know what happened to him.

(I hope we all know what happened to poor Willy or even who he was.)

Generation Y, meanwhile, thinks the Internet is the greatest thing since Uncrustables because it's like a 24/7 sandbox they can all play in and do whatever they want with. Except the foundation of the internet — as a project developed by MIT with funding from the good ol' Dept. of Defense — speaks volumes about its underlying potential and possibly current use. But the kids are just too stupid and self-absorbed to realize the true implications of what a government-sponsored network can really be used for, especially with all this proposed surveillance legislation masquerading as a "resolution" against internet piracy. The Final Solution is what it is. Dumb, stupid kids just think they're downloading Lady Gaga for free, because they don't know their history and don't care to learn the truth.

But the truth is out there, and knowledge is power — it's just not "cool" to go against the grain.

Is "best and brightest" supposed to mean innovative? Because all Marky Marx did was steal the database of Harvard's student yearbook, just like all Bill Gates ever did was copy off Steve Jobs (and Jobs himself pull a Xerox on… Xerox). Twitter is just IRC for dumbf*ck celebrities and superficial, get-rich-quick marketing "gurus" and self-help bloggers. Pinterest is no different from sticking real-life yellow Post-it notes on your monitor, macaroni art projects on mom's fridge, or photos on a corkboard with actual thumbtacks. Blogs, meanwhile, are no different from the "old school thought" of op-ed columns or letters to the editor. It's just the fact that it is in fact open to *everyone* and that it's primarily immature Gen-Y folks *leading* rather than learning that's made it so much worse.

Used to be, someone Zuckypants' age would still be doing an apprenticeship rather than running his own company, unless that independent franchise was a lemonade stand or the boss died or he proved legally that he was 27 in leap years. Now he's practically CEO of the world, even though he's nothing more than a screwed-up a**-burger who has no sense of professional decorum, and doesn't have to, because he's the boss, and if you're not on Facebook, you're square (Google "circles" notwithstanding). He's a spoiled brat who wears hoodies to meetings and has given a new meaning to "board room"; I believe there's a skateboard ramp — a skateboard ramp! — leading up to the central office at FB HQ. Social media's popularity with young people is the "decline of old school thought" — for the first time, kids are becoming the boss and making their parents and grandparents'(or at least their parents' and grandparents' respective generations) adapt to their whims or perish. In that regard it's also a harbinger of the decline of Western civilization. (Read Lord of the Flies if you want to know why children should not be in a position of authority.)

Social media? No thanks; I'd rather learn viable, worthwhile skills and put in my time than visit YouTube for skateboarding tutorials with supposed six-figure potential. Methinks one or two Gen-X'ers must have felt nostalgic and sold their respective souls to gen-Y just to make Rick Astley popular again. If I was alive in 1987 I wouldn't have liked "Never Gonna Give You Up" then, and I hate that song even more today.

I have dyscalculia, which is like dyslexia only with math, so I struggled with math in school but excelled in English. However, having come of age during the rigid NCLB rote-memorization era of education — and the misguided belief that high school should be a boot camp for potential MBA candidates or MIT grads, I struggled even more with the required courses in "technical literacy" that included social media. The ones who excelled at this tripe were, no surprise, the ones who already had internet accounts coming out of their ears and other (already-used) orifices (and we're not talking a serial port). The shy nerds did well with programming, but the wordsmiths, like me (and… me?) either dropped the course or took an F. The only thing I felt comfortable with, the arts and theatre, were cut in favor of technology upgrades and even faculty training seminars on use of social media in the classroom. (Not to mention sports. No money would ever be docked from football. Especially where I'm from, where one of its most infamous residents — a former governor turned two-term President — made headlines nation- and worldwide for his own very public lapses in verbal cognition. Any guesses as to where? Bueller? Bueller?)

Needless to say, I dropped out, knowing I'd never meet the over-the-top requirements that none of our parents or grandparents had to bother with — you studied, did your homework, and went home; "socializing" was for the frat brats, and "taking one for the team" was relegated to sports (or the military). The introverted study-duddies were always thought of as odd, that is until *computer* nerds became more accepted and books, themselves, and those who preferred "old school thought" in print to the flash-bang medium of the Web became, well, weird.

I still cannot (and refuse to) fathom the supposed necessity of 140-character blurbs and cheerleader-level self-aggrandizing in an effort to gain attention from some mop-top pop star. Sorry, Dave, but I tend to disagree on the point about Gen-X'ers and Boomers; our parents did become idiots because of television and video games; just like Twitter and texting being vilified as an "overly compressed" form of linguistic communication, so too, was television lambasted as being the sandwich-pack version of a feature-length movie, and movies themselves believed anathema to the comprehensive Canterbury-esque journey of reading books. While the merits of visual/multi-sensory media as storytelling or message-delivery format are debatable at best, I believe that a line does need to be drawn somewhere, and that social media — and the mentality of those who use it — are indeed just plain stupid. So too is this generation of which I am ashamed to be a member chronologically — perhaps called generation Y because "why" would have required too much thinking power to type. But unlike high school, where the foolishness is at least somewhat self-contained, social media opens up new opportunities for the in-crowd (including the elitist geeks) to unleash their insufferable stupidity unto the whole world. And make it popular, too.

Then there's the Catch 22 of needing experience to get experience…For those of you who don't understand, that's the employers who post a job, say 3 to 5 years on-the-job experience needed….How will you get the on-the-job experience if you can't get hired in the field? A college education will only get you so far…College won't give you the skilled hands God gave, college won't give you the work ethic and the drive you wake up with every morning…Experience should never be needed to gain experience, if you stick to that, you will hire no one.

How does connecting the global environment substitute for the ability to perform true research?

What exactly do you mean by connecting the global environment? Chatting on a fiber optic cable with someone in another country in and of itself does not advance civilization.

"Did radio and TV completely erode the minds of Gen X and the Baby Boomers? Did we see a lack of control when Generation X spent a ton of time watching TV throughout the day?"

Yes. TV is a life consuming waste of time. So are video games. I would estimate 95% of internet content is either wrong, incomplete, and/or useless. I say this as a Gen Xer who wasted too much of his youth with pointless things.

On the up side, your grammar seems ok.