The Information Revolution is inarguably the most distinct and defining aspect of our generation.

As children, we played with primitive computer systems like the Commodore 64 and marveled at the machines, which, experts announced, would someday have practical applications in everyday life. Now, as young adults, we’ve seen the advancement of technology bear its precious fruit; we live in an era dominated by instruments of technology which, 15 years ago, were still the stuff of Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury.

Personal computers. Complex filing systems for business operations. The Internet. With these tools, the face of our society has permanently changed.

And I think it’s a bunch of crap.

Which, as you can expect, does wonders for me as a journalism major in COM. The theme of my very first class in college was, in the words of Dean Baker himself, “the medium is the message.” We were schooled in the changing technologies and promised that the Information Revolution would change forever how Americans consumed their news. It was the typical optimism that immediately follows a major breakthrough: this changes everything, the world will never be the same, and, of course, learn this new technology or you’ll never make it.

Which is somewhat true, if you can ignore the exaggerations. You can’t make it in journalism, I’d assume, if you don’t know about the Internet. If you can’t do proper research without visiting the local library. But after that, the truth ends; and blind (though educated) guesses begin circulating as rumor. Someday we won’t have physical magazines or newspapers or books, people say. We will enjoy computerized imitations that replicate the experience of these items, from the font style down to the actual feel of a newspaper in your hands. Even the smell of ink will be artificially reproduced.

This makes me wonder.

And, as with imitation newspapers, we should question all of technology. Why do we need this? Is this technology for the betterment of our lives? Or is it, as I suspect, technology for its own sake? After all, the new methods of communication have, so far as I can see, done little but complicate our lives while simultaneously inhibiting any depth in our contact with other humans. Quantity has replaced quality.

I receive about a dozen emails a day. Subtract the amount of junk in there, and add up the amount of material from friends, and I probably get a couple of paragraphs. I treasure the one or two real letters a month I get in my mailbox, on paper and not pixels, so much that I have a hard time taking emails seriously.

A letter, even beyond how personal a hand-signed goodbye can be, is a physical form of contact that can be kept forever, and read at anytime without dependence on an outside web program. Have you heard about them? If there’d been email back in the Civil War or World War II, we wouldn’t have all these love letters and all these amazing books of prose from the scene of battlefields. We’d have a whole crop of quick, ill-written messages that don’t say much. Emails are a dime a dozen.

America Online Instant Messenger is a similar monstrosity. I used to do it, when I first came to school. Then I realized how innately repetitive online conversations are and I quit.

The only medium prone to more meaningless communication is, of course, the cellular phone. Although I’ve never owned one myself, I hear (everywhere I go) many users are prey to mindless banter, and conversations that somehow say absolutely nothing in the course of an hour.

These new technologies seem to tempt us with convenience and very little commitment. It takes no time at all to fire off a three-sentence email. But by taking the fast route we sacrifice our abilities to write, to talk clearly and with meaning, to engage in any sort of social interaction. It’s not overnight, certainly, but these technologies chip away at our skills.

And for once, it isn’t our fault. Our generation is much more rational with the encroaching technology — we’ve adapted to it, we’ve mastered it, we’ve known very little else. I blame the advancements in technology that nobody needs on the older generations. They’ve grown trigger happy with technologies that were never around when they were our age. And although it’s difficult to blame them for being excited, all too often they take it too far and credit it with too much. And they won’t be around to take responsibility when the consequences emerge.

What will our generation look like in 30 years? For me, it’s a horrifying scene. Look at how little time we spend involved in meaningful interaction. Look at how little anybody reads for pleasure anymore. Look how ignorant in the most common, most fundamental elements of everyday life we’ve become.

America’s youth can’t fix its own cars anymore. It can’t paint its own walls. It can’t even write a letter. We’re too used to having what we want at a click of the mouse, and we’re too accustomed to having somebody else fix our problems for us, while we try to become millionaires overnight. We’ll be the most greedy, specialized and helpless poor saps the world has ever seen.

How did we get this way? Overly comfortable upbringings have spoiled our work ethic, as have dreams of instant fame and money. But the nail in the coffin was the computer, a dynamic system, which combined entertainment with education, fun with business, all from the ease of a posh chair and a hand-controlled mouse. Our current state is the result of spending so much time with an imaginary system, a complex progression of functions that, in actuality, does not exist. Not like a road does, or a mountain.

The computer age has given us convenience and a historically unparalleled ease of contact. It allows us to work in cubicles and offices instead of the physically crippling jobs our ancestors held. But all of this information and all of this technology threatens to rob us of our livelihood. We are sentient beings who underestimate the degree of animal in us; we need physical contact, and we need physical exertion. To deny ourselves this is unhealthy.

The concept of an imitation newspaper is absurd, but the foundation has already been poured. We have online magazines, newspapers and yes, books. Very convenient, yes. Great for research, sure. But everything dot-com is temporary. Websites are updated, continually changed, and I get the feeling this makes people lazy. Unlike the publication of a book, there’s no need to be a perfectionist; you can always fix it in the morning.

Because, unlike those stacks of National Geographics we all have in our basements, things aren’t made to last anymore. Everything is doomed to a fleeting, transient existence, splashed across a computer monitor. We’ve got to learn where to drawn the line.