"I am 19 years old. You could say that my generation is the first to have grown up with the internet."<p>I remember when I was 19 and felt like nothing in the world had existed before me. I'm 31 and was using the internet before this guy was born.<p>To whoever the fellow is that wrote this, become a little less inwardly focused. Shit changes fast, and your "generation" is being ruined as much as mine was by Nintendo in the 80's or my parent's with that "rock and roll". That's to say, not at all.
<poking_fun>Facebook is ruining a generation. I am 25 and by middle school every girl and boy was on AIM and had awesome and deep quotes in their profile info. We all also had fantastic buddy icons and used unique smiley faces.<p>Now on Facebook, all I see are post like "If I get X people to join this group, I will do Y and Z." What happened to those creative icons? Where are the lyrics from Nirvana? Isn't that what the internet should be about?</poking_fun><p>My real point is that (IMHO) for every person who has something original to say <i>and</i> it's worth listening to, there is between 100 and 10,000 people who only are willing to repeat something someone else said. Being original is hard work carries risk. The Internet just gave a voice to all the people who are not willing to be original. Maybe the OP went to a particularly special middle school where the concentration of the former type was way higher than usual.
I wouldn't go into a panic, as if EVERYONE is using tumblr and doing this. It's just like those spam emails, where its a forward of a forward.<p>Relax, like all trends it'll run it's course and the next hip thing will happen. I don't see any problems with this because you are making a HUGE assumption. That if you use tumblr you are lazy and shallow because you didn't take the time to write out your thoughts? How do you know they aren't using other medians? It's just a big conclusion to make....unless you have the data to back it up.
Interesting problem to have. Consider that it was just a few years earlier than you where people didn't have blogs to share their high-school and pubescent rants on. Some how they survived :).<p>I do think it is unfortunate that well thought out blog posts have been replaced by sound bites. Tumblr isn't completely to blame either. Twitter and facebook have also contributed to this.