Maybe I'm just too old to get it? NO WAY you snippy little whippersnappers!

With all the hype surrounding DIGG.com these days I decided to post my critical notions of the service at DIGG.com and see what response it got. Not a lot of Diggs but it got a lot of comments - about 8 within hours. Some thoughtful, some flames, but what interested me was the one that said "he can't get it, he's too old".

My first reaction was "hey, maybe he's RIGHT!" I'm as immersed as most of the young crowd yet I obviously don't have the same feelings about many of the new "cool" things coming online.

My second and correct reaction was that the comment was actually a microcosm for both the problem with Digg and the problem with many in the new crop of young American tech folks.

I think for many in the tech rank and file, wisdom has been replaced by unhealthy skepticism and social concern by hedonism. Their attention span is getting dangerously short, is often hostile to thoughful discourse and analysis, and most importantly most young people have fallen out of touch with many of the realities of modern productive life and global turmoil.

I searched Digg for Darfur and got 2 articles, while "xbox" returns over 270....PAGES.... of articles.

Hopefully maturity will prevail, as it seems to for those few who make it to the big leagues, because I certainly make an exception to this criticism for most of the folks I've met from Google, Yahoo, MSN. They tend to be very globally sophisticated, very sharp, and many have a great sense of world priorities. I'm actually optimistic as the highest levels of the tech corporations - for example the Omidyars of Ebay, Bill Gates of MSN or Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google - express strong ideas about "changing the world" in very positive ways. But in important ways these folks represent the OLD timers rather than the new folks.

So, are we resigning our future to experts in gaming rather than globalization? Well, sort of. The globalization experts are out there, but they are not watching Digg or MTV very much. They are in China and India, studying their asses off in demanding school environments, and getting ready to take over the world.

Based on the lifestyles and superficial drivel coming out of the mouths of many of our young whippersnappers here in America maybe those guys and gals DESERVE to take over the world.