I just read a post over on BoingBoing, where Cory Doctorow is offering high-school newspaper editors a crack at advance copies of his new teen novel, Little Brother. It’s such a simple idea, but yet it smacks of good old-fashioned genius. Not only is this hitting the exact target market for a product (literate teens – let that sink in for a bit), but it also supports a valid news outlet that has historically gotten the shaft with access to P.R. lists. Hopefully it will be a nice win-win for all involved, and will get at least one publisher more connected with an outlet for promoting their products, both with this isolated case and future related books.

All of this reminds me of my own days on the high-school newspaper staff, and how I would have been all over an offer like this. But I never would have heard about it, because it’s a spontaneous idea dreamed up by an author to reach new fans, and is dependent upon our current “always connected” world of information and communication to work.

At the risk of instantaneously morphing into an old man at the donut shop with hair growing out of his ears who’s always mumbling about “the kids, and their damned hula-hoops and tractor pulls…” while downing his twelfth cup of coffee (he only paid for one), I will proceed. Because really, this wouldn’t have worked back in the day. We were just happy to have computers with graphical interfaces instead of the Apple IIEs that we were forced to trudge through while in junior high.

When I was a kid… We used to write our articles out longhand, type them into the new and spiffy Mac Classics (they used mice! you could point-and-click to move around! we had to share two of them!), arrange said articles in an antiquated version of PageMaker, print them out on a laser printer, cut them out and arrange them on large, handmade sheets so that we could take them down to the local newspaper offices and have them print off hard copies for our monthly rag.

The idea of the Internet was starting to come together, but mainly something reserved for an exhibit at Epcot Center. Even just a few short years later in college we were starting to get more adept at communicating and finding scant shreds of news online. But that’s because I hung out with geeks as we agonized over the countless minutes it took for a single page to render out on America Online’s demonic, but necessary at the time, pages.

I now take for granted that I can email/facebook/text whomever I want, whenever I want. I take for granted that I can google/wikipedia/rss a constant stream of information and news. I take for granted that I can fit my entire music/movie/photo collection on my ipod, which slides ever so carelessly into my pocket (and as soon as I get an iphone I’ll be able to do everything in this paragraph on the same hunk of sexified plastic, glass and metal).

It’s sickening how underprivileged I was as a youngster. It’s equally sickening how the kids today, with their Hannah Montana pokemon cards and crack-favored bubblegum, have no idea that they’ll be thinking very similar thoughts to these fifteen years from now.

And with this post, I am now officially old.