Wikipedialyte

In response to Cape Town's lament about growing older:

I need to preface my comments on the feeling of getting old too quickly by pointing out that they are tainted by my position as a 24 year old teacher of 18 year old students. I've become old before my time, and have all kinds of father/big brother issues. Many guys my age hear about two eighteen year old girls twirling around in short skirts and respond with an enthusiastic grin. My first thought is "Jesus, ladies, this is a family show. Sit back down." Suffice to say that "barely legal" pornography is wasted on me.

Nothing makes you feel older than referencing pop culture to a clueless audience, and my senior government class is a daily exercise in aging. These are people who don't watch VH1's "I love the 80s," not because they are above commercial nostalgia, but because they don't know what a Thundercat is.

But I have to disagree with the idea that we are forcibly polarized, that "we're either left lamenting progress or shouting down any who stand in its way. " I consider myself squarely in the middle of these collective issues. I certainly do feel that music is worse, crime has increased, etc. but I fight constantly with people who suggest that "kids these days" are worse as a whole. I spend all day with these kids, and they're no worse than the people I went to school with ten years ago. I don't watch American Idol, but I watch 24 religiously. I have informed opinions regarding the possible entry of Gore into the presidential election, but I'm also kind of curious about how Justin Timberlake feels now that Cameron Diaz is banging Djimon Hounsou.

It's not the internet that's forced this public discourse on us, as you suggest (in your best old man voice.) It's us! It's the eye rolls we give each other when someone suggests that they like Ludacris. It's the look from you other merry Dissentators when I mention JT and Cameron Diaz. It's the more ridiculous look you give when you realize I called him JT.

We're not getting old, we're just as snobby as we were in college. I get the same "what a moron" thought in my head when someone references the OC (which, in case you geezers didn't know, went off the air this week) as I used to when someone admitted they listened to the Backstreet Boys.

On the subject of wikipedia as a research tool, I have to say fuck the man. If you want to use wikipedia, go right ahead. It might be wrong. In high school, you're learning more about how to write with evidence and support your arguments with sources. It's not as important that the essay be factually correct as it is that the essay shows understanding of how to form an argument. In college, if the professors don't know enough to find the mistakes in your essays that you transcribed from wikipedia, that's their fault and your grade won't reflect it. If you publish something and it turns out that you believed a user edited encyclopedia and got burned, that's you're own fault. I'll leave you with a latin phrase: caveat emptor. That being said, if you don't know the definition look it up on wikipedia. I'll bet it's correct.

To (youtu)be or not to (youtu)be

I had a conversation with my students today about the popularity of media sites like Youtube and social networking sites. For college bound high school students, by the way, social networking sites start and end with Facebook. When one of them asked what I thought of Facebook, I told them that I didn’t have an account, so I wasn’t really sure. He said “I know,” but he said it in a way that would make just about anyone shiver. He had spent an hour the night before searching for anything about me online, just because he was bored.

I mention this because it highlights the permanent and shockingly accessible amount of information that floats around the internet. This is far from groundbreaking, but I’m looking at it suddenly from the eyes of high school students. Picture every bad decision you made along the lines of:

1. Pictures or video of you doing something illegal / unattractive
2. Writing (poetry, humor, hatred) that should never see the light of day
3. Angry comments delivered to others without full consideration of their impact
4. Professions of never-ending love

Some of the students that sit in my class everyday may end up someday running for political office. The possibility of a bad decision being dug up by their opponents may be much larger than just finding someone who will testify to seeing / hearing that decision. Some have argued that without the macaca debacle, George Allen would have retained his Senate seat and the current Democratic majority would not exist. The world of politics is in no way ready for the day that a presidential candidate realizes that the pictures of him hitting a beer bong are in hundreds of hard drives because he shared it as an eighteen year old on his Facebook page. Slate put together a pretty clever video on the subject of politician ambush during campaigning but it doesn’t address my concern, that information can be put into the public domain before someone even knows how many Representatives are in the House, let alone whether or not they’ll run.

There’s something tragic about ruining your life by saying something inappropriate to a small audience that is then broadcast to a large one. If you’re old (read: 30 or older) though, it’s your own damn fault. When you’ve not even finished high school or college, you should be able to speak without worrying about it costing you a job when you’re old (again, 30 or older.) Watching the Borat movie I relished the humiliation of the old rodeo director advocating the execution of homosexuals. But I felt sorry for the meathead, frat-rat, douchebag jocks. Those are the type of guys that I hated in college, but now I feel some pity for them. The fact that those guys may not get a job because they got drunk and made some (admittedly heinous and racially insensitive) remarks as 20 year olds strikes me as unfortunate.