On Monday, I talked to a business communication class at UMKC about business communication as it pertains to social media. I told them the story about how a commenter on this blog tried to get me fired from H&R Block years ago. I told them about how I started this blog anonymously and how I evolved to using my real name as my username for pretty much everything. I talked about strong language and politics and privacy.

They asked why I hated Facebook. And I tried to explain how it is when you don't grow up with something -- how that degree of visibility feels different to me. I know anyone with a screen can read my blog, but I also know that most people I know or am related to in real life don't. Or at least not every day. But I know people who are glued to Facebook for hours every day, lots of people, including, probably, from the looks on their faces, these students who I can't help but think of in my mind as kids, though they were sophomores and juniors in college.

Standing there trying to explain how I came to my job in Internet publishing back in 1999, what it was like to pop in the bubble, how this recession is maybe longer but not so different from that pop if that was your industry, going from a career started with very different public and private Ritas to just one now, what it used to be like to have the people with whom you worked really know nothing you didn't want them to know about your personal life, back when you could go to work without everyone knowing who you went to high school with or what you got for your birthday -- it's not so much that I oppose this information being out there -- obviously I don't, I think you take the chaff with the wheat -- but it's different than what they're growing up with. It's been something of a hard adjustment that varies by personality type, but it's one thing to grow up talking to your friends in this way from the get-go and another thing entirely to have started one way and had it evolve before the rules were established. Exhilerating, yes, exciting -- my life would not be the same without this technology -- but also at times disconcerting. It must be what it was like to start life riding in a carriage and end it changing your oil. To start life with only a radio and end it with a flatscreen.

I barely restrained myself from saying "when I was your age." I do think I also restrained from explaining I had a typewriter in college. It was an electronic typewriter that had this new-fangled thing in the side called a disk drive, which I never used. 

Okay, I have to go to my job on the Internet now before I find myself reaching for dentures.