I was watching Amanda’s little sister the other day. She’s 14, she’s going to public school/high school for the first time next year, she knows everyone in the county, and she talks to them all through the internet and social networking sites.

A big part of me is proud of her for being a little social butterfly and an overachiever in academics, but an equal part of me is mad that she gets to use the internet as a communication medium and be cool, and I couldn’t even get peer acceptance in college for the most part.

Yes, those of us in the MSUR OLD SCHOOL crew were good at talking that way, and I even had a few friends that went to other schools that used IM or forums, but widespread acceptance? I think not. Frat boys didn’t use IM, social sites were still in their infancy, and we geeks hung tight to older established mediums of the internet like *cough* forums.

Times have sure changed since we were young, huh? Would I have been such an internet nerd in High School if it were openly accepted, or did my teenage angst and need to be “unique like everybody else” trigger my probing the depths of the seedy underbelly of cyberspace?

I guess the point is that I harbor some envy and some resentment over the geek culture becoming commonplace. Yes, we will always have real geeks because they’ll be on the leading edge, but to see the internet – that golden place that I surfed alone for the most part in high school – be so common that it replaces phone calls and to see 12 year old communication in short-hand 1337 speak is kind of sad in a way.

Anyways, these two thoughts probably aren’t as completely connected in your head as the are in mine, but with WordPress’ acquisition of BuddyPress I wanted to put out there again that it might be time to re-think the format of MSURacers.com