The Loud Talker

Facebook has been a wonderful addition to my life the past few months. Sure, I probably spend too much time looking to see if anything has changed since the last time I looked five minutes ago, and sure I may be addicted to Mafia Wars and Scramble, but besides that I’m having a blast finding old friends.

I’ve always been a pack animal. I enjoy socializing, winning others over, being the life of any party or scene I can jump into. Anyone that knows me knows I can’t shut up. At parties I glide from group to group, table to table, mixing it up with everyone I can. Facebook lets me take this concept to a whole new level.

In the few months I’ve been online I’ve managed to find about 30 high school friends, 60 college friends and a slew of others from various jobs and organizations I’ve been associated with. These friends have shared pictures and memories that were long forgotten.

Then I started thinking — My kids are both under 10 and this is their reality. They can:

• Pause television whenever they want (TiVo)
• Record multiple shows at once and not lose any video quality in the process (U-Verse)
• Interact with video games using their entire bodies and actually get a workout (Wii)
• Look anything up at any time thanks to the Internet (Google)
• Call friends from anywhere with phones far more powerful than our early space ships (Blackberry / iPhone)
• Watch their home television anywhere via the Internet (Slingbox)
• Carry their entire music collection around with them (iPod)
• Drive in cars and know where they are at all times (Garmin)
• Take an unlimited amount of pictures and see them instantly (digital cameras)
• Search family history records and build family trees without leaving their desk (ancestry.com)

And we thought we had it good in the 1980s when we could carry a five pound jam box on our shoulder. I wonder what my kids will have access to in ten years when they are in high school.