"The End of Solitude"

            "The End of Solitude" by William Deresiewicz was one of my favorite pieces that we have read in class thus far. Although I myself take part in the online social networking world by using facebook, I have always thought that it creates a false feeling of how many "friends" one really has and prevents the close relationships people had before the technology developed. My generation has also disposed of many other aspects of life that existed before myspace and facebook such as the privacy of their private thoughts, longer attention spans, and the opportunity to immerse oneself in their own creativity and thoughts whenever boredom creeps upon us. Many of us have accepted checking for updates as a healthy substitute for activities as natural to the growing mind as thinking.

    Not only does this take a toll on our creativity, it raises the question, what will our generation be remembered for? All the great literary periods had their unique characteristics, as the article pointed out, but what kind of great style of writing will emerge from our generation when everyone is too busy online to express their ideas through literature? Unless we can manage to compose great poetry in less than 160 characters to "tweet" on twitter, it seems that people need to close their web browser and open their word processor and get to typing. Otherwise, we may become the real Lost Generation. 

   This is not to say that we are completely hopeless and that there is absolutely no form of art that can emerge from our constant updates about what we had for lunch. I am not proposing that we must return to feather quills and parchment in order to achieve pieces of timeless philosophy, technology changes and our means to express ourselves can change with it. The technology we have available enables us to communicate much faster than in the days of Henry David Thoreau or Oscar Wilde, and this can work as a double-edged sword. We can recieve and send ideas across the world in seconds and this gives us an advantage not even Mary Shelley could have imagined. We just need to concentrate less on artificial popularity and more on our or attention-craving psyches. 
-Bobby Rodriguez