I'm thinking of two episodes that lately brought home the shifting sands of online communication. In episode one, I sign my son up for the SAT exam. Peter set up a yahoo e-mail account several years back and occasionally I'll forward things to him, so I put down that address when setting up the exam. But a funny thing happened on the way to the information. Peter stopped using e-mail. "I haven't checked that in years," he told me. "I don't even know the password." And then our conversation: me suggesting that teachers and the workplace are constantly using e-mail, nostalgically reflecting on how the ubiquity an ease of e-mail made a huge difference in bringing technology into education during the last decade.

Episode two bubbles up from observations of e-mail lists during the last week. The two writing-related lists I'm on both featured the passing around of youtube URLs. I perceived an odd bit of excitement in the tenor of the messages--this is so interesting, you've got to check out these videos, etc. Of course the videos were already viral in the blogosphere, so the combination of using this (I think I'll call it lagging) medium and the enthusiasm in the e-mail messages for the emerging space just amplified my sense that a generational shift is taking place--generational in revealing the different habits of adults and children or teachers and students, and generational in helping us discover what really matters about communication.

Hint: It's not just (really) about the exchange of information. Some of the best e-mail discussion list threads bob and weave with dozens of messages building upon one another. All those commingling ideas. Wow. But still, e-mail as a message sharing technology is not all that dazzling, is it? All those separate inboxes. All that prose. It's the social energy that matters when e-mail is working and that energy is clearly moving elsewhere on the net. If I were to don my cynic hat, I'd observe the irony in recognizing that move in the slippage space of e-mail discussion lists devoted to communication and rhetoric. But, I'm still not all the way acclimated to the new spaces myself, so for now I'll embed an image into this message and let it float onto the Web.