Shirky describes this generational shift in terms of pidgin versus Creole. “Do you know that distinction? Pidgin is what gets spoken when people patch things together from different languages, so it serves well enough to communicate. But Creole is what the children speak, the children of pidgin speakers. They impose rules and structure, which makes the Creole language completely coherent and expressive, on par with any language. What we are witnessing is the Creolization of media.”

Article is craze-amazing and it's available here;

Say Everything: As younger people reveal their private lives on the Internet, the older generation looks on with alarm and misapprehension not seen since the early days of rock and roll. The future belongs to the uninhibited.

Some very strong social analysis of generational behaviour practices with respect to revealing personal details online.

Latterly I would have written a long response to the article about how chillingly accurate some of it is using many personal examples. I can't anymore, I wish I could, I miss the tell-all-ness of my writing from two years ago. Instead I am going to quote an email I received last night from an anonymous source and then maybe tell a very well disguised story, as I am suffering from some kind of online maturity and I can no longer blog about relationships without feeling that I am doing a disservice to the other people.

Call!?! What are you, nuts!?!

I operate behind the thin and deadly veil of "the internet", so as to keep my identity and motives hidden.

So that's it folks, where do we go from here. When you know that most of the people you connect with, do so from behind that (albeit tongue in cheek) veil, including yours truly. When it feels sometimes that all the emotional risks we take are asynchronous, mediated, or worse yet archival. When we roll out of bed in the morning rubbing our eyes and brewing some coffee, it's not just done to the pleasant memory of the cute person we met the night before. We take the coffee go into the next room for a quick search on MySpace. Or better yet, if you're a late riser, maybe it's to find a friend request or two. Suddenly the next step isn't further reflection or a phone call, or a walk in the park, it's an erudite but not too intellectual comment...