I recently read a powerful analogy about the dynamics between children and parents and technology. Michael Lewis, in Next: The Future Just Happened, describes the bewildered parents of a 15-year-old charged with stock fraud because of his online activities:

Greg and Connie were born in New Jersey, but from the moment the Internet struck, they might as well have just arrived from Taiwan. When the Internet landed on them, it redistributed the prestige and authority that goes with a general understanding of the ways of the world away from the grown-ups and to the child. The grown-ups now depended on the child to translate for them. Technology had turned them into a family of immigrants.

Those of us who were born into a world where the Internet didn’t exist, will always have a longing–spoken or unspoken–for the old country. The fact is, that’s a world most of our children have never visited. Neither is it a world to which we will return.