Dinosaurs of the 21st century

I thought I was hip and trendy, and was reasonably caught up with technology-- until about six months ago, that is.
What's when our subscription to "Wired" magazine kicked in, and I realized that I was so offline.
I had never seen a video on YouTube, nor was I on MySpace -- two things that seemed to decide whether you were "in" or not.
There was a little sidebar on whether or not collective intelligence was good or bad -- wasn't even sure what that meant. Is that just a bunch of people talking?
I was slightly taken aback, as my ignorance would be ratified every month, as soon as the issue came in the door.
There was another cover story about gaming, and I had not even set sight on a Play Station, let alone play on one.
And yet, I asked myself, why do I think of myself as "in" with the digital?
In the office, the three people sitting closest to me are always listening to music on their headphones while working, something I still cannot bring myself to do. I did try to bring my headphones in once, but was paranoid about missing a call, or getting too distracted by the music, that I had to get rid of them.
Since subscribing to the magazine, I have seriously begun to contemplate the future of the newspaper. Now, how much news does a fairly retro person like me get on actual paper? Actually, probably none.
My attention span has decreased to automatically spam block any article over 2,000 words (unless the headline seems fascinating), and in the library, my hands automatically reach for the short stories.
And almost all my news comes to me online. And all the people I know in the United States are doing that -- getting their news online.
In 15 years, when I'll be looking forward to my retirement (as I am now), what choices might I have? Will my career be forced to change course automatically? Will the skills I learn as a journalist be relevant in this blogging, MyTubing world?
How fast will I have to adapt?
Perhaps it's all relative, I thought. A lawyer friend of mine resisted buying a cell phone for the longest time, and would ask his wife to store numbers, because he couldn't figure out how to do them. Now I was better than he, wasn't I?
But then, there's my father, whose learning curve on computers must have have been real steep, but he caught on amazingly -- perhaps by necessity. He would get in and out of chat rooms, and voice chat with us all the time, until, I believe, he hit the ceiling. Of learning and boredom, that is.
Yahoo! forever asked him to update to its newer version, and with falling telephone rates, he just thought it was easier to call us! He is probably not going back to the Internet for anything that he needs, probably just for entertainment.
The Internet may just be a pastime for my father, but for people like us, it is imperative to keep up. The future is indeed very digital, and analogs must die, for sure.
Even if some still believe that computers are not the god they are made out to be.
My mother-in-law, who worked in a bank her entire life in India, retired early, but finds her colleagues struggling with learning computers. These are people in their early 50s, and I can only imagine how difficult it must be for them, to just take that leap into computerdom.
"It's much easier, actually," said my mother-in-law recently, "to just do it by hand."


PS: Just after I wrote this, I wondered about how people are able to maintain blogs regularly -- and I realize I might not have adapted my message to the medium. A blog, perhaps, needs to be more chatty and writing a blog like I would a report (replete with AP style) may not be what this medium is all about!
But writing as a conversation may be a forced style for me, and it might require a whole different style of writing-- catch my dilemma? Change, my friends, change!