By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

The decision by President Obama to participate in Wednesday’s first Twitter town hall meeting, live from the East Room, is a reminder that the White House is eager to exploit whatever technologies will help get out his message, unfiltered.

But the forum, an hourlong “conversation” between the president and millions of Twitter users, is also remarkable for the ways in which new media companies are taking on roles that used to be the sole province of traditional news organizations.

And it raises interesting questions for everyone involved: Are the hosts from the social media companies journalists? Do the companies involved, which all lobby the federal government, have a reason to shape the conversation? Are the questions posed by Twitter followers — and trending on the social media service — a better representation of what people want to hear from Mr. Obama than those asked by reporters at last week’s news conference?

In a conference call with reporters on Tuesday, Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, made it clear that Mr. Obama’s advisers believe that the exchanges are valuable.

“We’ve entered a different information age, where people get news and information in a different way than they did in the past,” Mr. Pfeiffer said. “If you’re going to communicate with the broad public, it is no longer sufficient to simply do it through traditional mainstream media.”

He added: “You have to go beyond that because people are getting their information in different ways and from different sources. And we’re always on the lookout for ways to have a productive interaction with the public in new and exciting ways.”

The Twitter town hall meeting is just the latest example of the new political reality for politicians like Mr. Obama.

In April, Mr. Obama sat down with the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for a similar exchange that featured questions from Mr. Zuckerberg and Facebook users. In January, Mr. Obama answered questions from YouTube users in a forum sponsored by Google.

On Wednesday, the president will answer questions submitted during the past several days from Twitter users. The conversation, questions asked in 140 characters or less and answered in Mr. Obama’s typically extended manner, will be moderated by Twitter’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey.

Hoping to avoid any accusations that the White House is managing the news, Mr. Pfeiffer and other aides repeatedly noted that questions would be selected in part by 10 Twitter users around the country who were picked by the company.

Those “superusers” will help cull the thousands of questions to pick the ones put to Mr. Obama. The company will also use its own filters, officials said.

“That’s all Twitter,” said Macon Phillips, the director of digital strategy for the White House. “So Twitter came up with a list of people that they felt had good geographic distribution and that they could include in their process of identifying popular themes and representative questions.”

The real change may not be in the desire of the White House to use any means possible to advance its agenda. Throughout Washington, political figures are turning to Twitter as a way to get formal — and less formal — information to their supporters and adversaries.

But the social media companies are now becoming a competitor of sorts to the more traditional means of putting the president on the spot — the on-camera interview by a network anchor, the yelled-out questions by a reporter at an event or the full-blown news conference in the East Room.

The social media companies are now firmly established as an alternative means of getting a president to respond to the big — or maybe not so big — questions of the day. Rather than being up to a journalist or blogger, the direction of the questioning will be largely guided by the broader interests of the Twitter community.

That’s not to say that the traditional political establishment is about to let the questions meander wherever the Twitter users might want them to go. Republicans took to the online service on Wednesday morning, offering tough questions for Mr. Obama on the economy.

“Under 8 years of George W. Bush, the unemployment rate was never above 7.3%,” the conservative blogger Jim Geraghty proposed as a question. “When will it be that low again?”

House Speaker John A. Boehner suggested: “Will you outline a plan #4jobs – other than more spending – for the American people?” He helpfully included a link to jobs.gop.gov, where House Republicans have detailed their proposals.

And Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and a Republican presidential hopeful, suggested that Mr. Obama be asked, “Where are the jobs?”

Will he?

That’s up to Mr. Dorsey, the 10 Twitter users who are culling the questions, and the broader online universe of millions of Twitter users.

It’s a new world.

“My e-mail?” The boy looks at me as if I had just suggested staying in touch by carrier pigeon. “What, you don’t have an email?” I ask, insecure now. “Sure I do. But I only use it for my parents and my grandparents,” he says. “Aren’t you on Facebook?” I am. Phew. Of course I mostly check my Facebook profile when I’m prompted by an e-mail notification, but I don’t tell him that. Trevor Dougherty is 19 and to him, I am a geriatric 36-year-old who belongs to that amorphous generation of people-who-don’t-really-get-social-networking that stretches all the way back to, well, his grandparents.

I met Trevor in January, during a dinner debate on social networking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he was by far the youngest and most eloquent speaker on the subject. I have perhaps 100 people in my life I call friends. Trevor has 1,275. At one point he tried to add someone called Trevor in every capital so he would have friends to visit across the world. He chats, posts, tweets and consults “his community” on important decisions: “I’m going to start producing/DJing electronic music. What should my stage name be? #youtellme.”

The encounter made me curious: what does it do to teenagers to be “on” all the time? Are they just doing what we did 20 years ago — gossiping, dating, escaping pubescent solitude — and simply channeling those age-old human urges through this new technology? Or is this technology changing humanity in a more fundamental way? What kind of citizens, voters, consumers, leaders will kids like Trevor grow up to be?

I decided to go back to the place I was a teenager in the days before cellphones and e-mail:the Ratsgymnasium in Osnabrück, an average school in an average town in northwest Germany. For three days in April I embedded in the everyday lives of 13- to-19-year-olds, hanging out in and after class, watching them interact and interviewing the adults in their lives.

Their teachers say they have poor spelling and short attention spans. (“This is an ADD epidemic in the making,” one muttered darkly.) I found them hyper self-conscious, narcissistic and a little superficial. Memory is on a hard disc — many of them don’t even know their own mobile number by heart.

But most of the Facebooking teens I met among the 1,280 students here are also infinitely more international-minded, flexible and tech-savvy than we were 20 years ago. They can study for a math test whilst IMing and listening to music; they take piano tutorials on YouTube and battle monsters in virtual games with virtual friends from all over the world. They share everything, from their latest break-up to prized study notes.

The social networking addiction may be accentuating the worst in youth, but I also saw it bring out the best: this is not Generation Y, this is Generation Why Not? — multi-tasking and crowd-sourcing, collaborative and open-minded. The kids of today may not be able to spell Zeitgeist but they are fundamentally of their time. And after getting to know them a little I came away reassured that the many daunting problems previous generations are bequeathing on them might just be in good hands.

Clash of Generations “None of them are on Facebook,” Dietmar Volkers says confidently. It’s Monday, 9.30 a.m. and we’re walking across the schoolyard to room D083, a bike shed in my days and now a bright new classroom where he teaches English to 9th graders. “They’re on a local social networking site called OScommunity.”

He is wrong. When I ask the 25 students in his class, all but two are on Facebook, a ratio confirmed in every snap poll I conduct over my three days here. OScommunity? “That was last year,” says 15-year-old Eva Hempel.

Volkers is popular. At 41, he is one of the younger teachers here and is respected by students as someone “who can actually operate the screen projector” installed in most classrooms. But even he is a year behind.

As the half-life of technological innovation shrinks, so do the generations.

My Walkman accompanied me throughout high school. I got my first e-mail address in college and my first cellphone when I started reporting, a clunky Nokia with an antenna sticking out that I thought looked terribly avant-garde. These days the 15-year-olds barely keep up with their 13-year-old siblings (who apparently prefer Skype video conferences to Facebook chats).

The main gateway to the Internet for today’s teens, social networking seems to have deepened a technology rift that has always divided young and old. In 1991, teachers asked us to help get the video recorder to work; in 2011 technology has in many ways become a generational battleground for completely different concepts of how to communicate and deal with information.

My old school has banned the use of all electronic devices (save calculators). If a phone so much as vibrates, it is confiscated for 24 hours. But sitting in on one class, I see at least half a dozen students tapping away at deliberately dimmed smartphone screens. The transgressions are chronicled in comments posted squarely during school hours: “Physics is soooooo boring.”

When the school encrypted its Wifi code so only teachers could get online during class, a student cracked it and posted it. When teachers ruled that phones had to be put on their desk during exams, students started bringing in their old phones and kept the new ones hidden. When one boy was caught cheating in a Latin test, his punishment was to give a workshop to teachers on how students use technology to fool them.

Teachers worry about cheating, plagiarism and a casual attitude toward online sources. (“Students believe that everything on the Internet is true,” grumbles my old geography teacher Dagmar Rösner, who is still teaching at the school. “Teachers suspect that everything on the Internet is made up,” counters 17-year-old Johannes Bommes).

But most of all they worry that students today have more trouble learning than we did.

Headmaster Lothar Wehleit is waiting for me in his office with a little pile of photocopied articles: Computers make children “Fat, Stupid and Violent,” the first proclaims. “Classwork didn’t used to be buried under so much cognitive material,” Wehleit laments. “At the end of one class they all seem to get it. But at the beginning of the next class it’s no longer in their memory. They leave school, play with their phones, turn their computers on and put their earphones in.”

The subtext is clear: when teenagers are ‘on,’ their brains are off.

Two decades ago Attention Deficit Disorder was barely on the radar in Europe. But in recent years the number of cases has gone up, and not just in my old school. Studies by psychologists and educators have linked excessive screen time to a loss of concentration and deep thinking. In one of them, published in the journal Pediatrics last year, Douglas A. Gentile of the Media Research Lab at Iowa State University studied 1,300 school-age children and found that more than two hours a day in front of a screen raised the odds of exceeding the average level of attention problems by 67 percent.

Many teenagers I met say they spend at least two hours every day in front of some electronic device. But not all that time is wasted. I witnessed an impressive capacity for self-directed learning. Arne Thate, 18, got bored with his classical piano lessons so he started teaching himself pop songs with YouTube tutorials (Praise You by Fat Boy Slim is a favorite.) Marcel Sievers, a 14-year-old fan of computer games, taught himself Camtasia, a screencasting software. Many more are members of interest-driven groups on Facebook with peers in far-flung places whom they have never met.

Like most teachers and parents here, the headmaster is not on Facebook. And I can’t help wondering: Are teachers who do not understand the way their students communicate able to effectively teach them?

Dating 2.0

The young couple is kissing. Her left leg rests on his right thigh, his arms are wrapped tightly around her waist. They are sitting in the park behind the school during break time amid clusters of chattering, giggling students. But just as I’m feeling the warm glow of early ’90s nostalgia coming on I see the outstretched hand with a nail-polished thumb scrolling down the touch screen of an iPhone4. Without detaching her lips, the girl is surveying the hallmark blue-and-white of the Facebook app.

Social networking has penetrated just about every aspect of teenage interaction, not least dating etiquette. When you like a girl, explains 19-year-old Leo Laun, a teenage heartthrob who reminds me of Robert Pattinson minus the messy hair, it’s much easier to send a friend request than to ask for her phone number. Then you can check out her photos, her profile information and her posts. “You know whether she is single, what she looks like in a bikini and what music she likes,” he says, counting these clearly crucial points off on one hand. “If you’re still interested, chances are she’s worth pursuing.”

It all sounds a little unromantic to me, but also pretty efficient. They court each other with studied casualness in one-liners on their public walls (and no, spelling is not a priority) before moving on to chatting, texting and eventually — this at least hasn’t changed — a date at the movies. They post a heart-shaped icon to publicly declare a new relationship and then change it to a broken heart when it ends.

In many ways this isn’t new. I remember feverishly trying to find out a boy’s name, looking through the phonebook for his address and riding my bike by his house to glean some — any — nugget of information. But does the fact that so much of their fragile teenage egos is on public display make a difference? Sometimes it’s not clear whether the kids today control the information or the information controls them.

“Deciding what to put on Facebook is a bit like deciding what to wear,” says Leo’s friend Arne, the one who likes Fat Boy Slim. “You try to impress people, maybe with an intellectual-sounding comment or a video in a different language. When you decide what to list as your music taste you think “what kind of music do my friends like and who is the coolest of them?’ ”

After he posts something, he says, he sits in front of the screen and waits for reactions.

“When you get 10 likes and 8 comments you’re on top of the world. When no one reacts, it’s a bit embarrassing.”

Leo and Arne check their girlfriends’ profiles obsessively, scanning posts and counting “likes.” Facebook jealousy can eat him up, Leo admits. “That boy Alex,” he groans, “he ‘likes’ everything she writes, it drives me nuts.” Cleaning up the data traces of former sweethearts on your profile is a whole other challenge, Arne says.

Mean Girls

Zita Kantus knows all about managing data traces. The school counselor, she is the first point of contact for bullying complaints and 80 percent of those now involve social networking sites, she says. In one recent case a girl became the target of an elaborate plot by a group of classmates. They created a fictional boy character online and started courting her. When the girl eventually agreed to come on a date, she found a crowd of mean girls laughing in her face. Facebook has empowered the bullies who in my days were largely confined to nasty little notes handed around in class.

“It has taken the phenomenon to a whole different level,” says Kantus, pointing out that there was police involvement in three cases last year. “It now happens at all hours and not just on school premises. And it has become meaner. I think sitting in front of a screen has reduced inhibitions.”

But it’s also a case of the kids not always grasping the implications of what they are doing, she says, recounting an episode where a student was caught just as he was uploading a friend’s picture onto a gay site “as a joke.”

Privacy concerns divide the generations almost as much as technology. “They have a very casual attitude to privacy,” says Wehleit. But that’s just it: The flipside of this attitude is that teens like Eva, Johannes, Leo and Arne are much less selfish with their knowledge than we were. They share their study notes not just among friends or in their class, but across the country: Abiunity.de is a goldmine of shared files on every exam subject on the German syllabus. Unlike us, many of them study regularly in groups and seem to be much better at it.

“They are much less hierarchical than you guys were,” observes my former biology teacher, Gerd Schiefelbein.

Arne plans a trip around the world after graduating from high school this summer and dreams of studying marine biology in Australia. Leo wants to move to Britain.

Today they use social networking to rally around the coolest band of the day and organize ad hoc parties with amazing turnout. As adults they will have the tools to rally large communities around the causes they care about at unprecedented speed. They don’t mind small tailored ads, but abhor big intrusive ones. They trust one another more than politicians and big companies. My bet is that they will be demanding customers and demanding voters.

At my old school I was struck by how much teenagers have changed. But I was also struck by how little the school had changed, and I don’t think it’s an exception. Teachers are right to fret about attention deficits and lazy thinking. But no fundamental rethink seems to have occurred about how teaching and learning should take place in the age of social networking.

“The problem is with adults,” says Leo.“If they say we’re becoming more stupid, it’s perhaps because we’re in a school system they invented.”

“We need better teachers and talk about more relevant stuff in class,” he adds. “Maybe they should ask us for some advice.”

By BRIAN STELTER

Not too long ago, theorists fretted that the Internet was a place where anonymity thrived.

Now, it seems, it is the place where anonymity dies.

A commuter in the New York area who verbally tangled with a conductor last Tuesday — and defended herself by asking “Do you know what schools I’ve been to and how well-educated I am?” — was publicly identified after a fellow rider posted a cellphone video of the encounter on YouTube. The woman, who had gone to N.Y.U., was ridiculed by a cadre of bloggers, one of whom termed it the latest episode of “Name and Shame on the Web.”

Women who were online pen pals of former Representative Anthony D. Weiner similarly learned how quickly Internet users can sniff out all the details of a person’s online life. So did the men who set fire to cars and looted stores in the wake of Vancouver’s Stanley Cup defeat last week when they were identified, tagged by acquaintances online.

The collective intelligence of the Internet’s two billion users, and the digital fingerprints that so many users leave on Web sites, combine to make it more and more likely that every embarrassing video, every intimate photo, and every indelicate e-mail is attributed to its source, whether that source wants it to be or not. This intelligence makes the public sphere more public than ever before and sometimes forces personal lives into public view.

To some, this could conjure up comparisons to the agents of repressive governments in the Middle East who monitor online protests and exact retribution offline. But the positive effects can be numerous: criminality can be ferreted out, falsehoods can be disproved and individuals can become Internet icons.

When a freelance photographer, Rich Lam, digested his pictures of the riots in Vancouver, he spotted several shots of a man and a woman, surrounded by police officers in riot gear, in the middle of a like-nobody’s-watching kiss. When the photos were published, a worldwide dragnet of sorts ensued to identify the “kissing couple.” Within a day, the couple’s relatives had tipped off news Web sites to their identities, and there they were, Monday, on the “Today” show: Scott Jones and Alex Thomas, the latest proof that thanks to the Internet, every day could be a day that will be remembered around the world.

“It’s kind of amazing that there was someone there to take a photo,” Ms. Thomas said on “Today.”

The “kissing couple” will most likely enjoy just a tweet’s worth of fame, but it is noteworthy that they were tracked down at all.

This erosion of anonymity is a product of pervasive social media services, cheap cellphone cameras, free photo and video Web hosts, and perhaps most important of all, a change in people’s views about what ought to be public and what ought to be private. Experts say that Web sites like Facebook, which require real identities and encourage the sharing of photographs and videos, have hastened this change.

“Humans want nothing more than to connect, and the companies that are connecting us electronically want to know who’s saying what, where,” said Susan Crawford, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. “As a result, we’re more known than ever before.”

This growing “publicness,” as it is sometimes called, comes with significant consequences for commerce, for political speech and for ordinary people’s right to privacy. There are efforts by governments and corporations to set up online identity systems. Technology will play an even greater role in the identification of once-anonymous individuals: Facebook, for instance, is already using facial recognition technology in ways that are alarming to European regulators.

After the riots in Vancouver, locals needed no such facial recognition technology — they simply combed through social media sites to try to identify some of the people involved, like Nathan Kotylak, 17, a star on Canada’s junior water polo team.

On Facebook, Mr. Kotylak apologized for the damage he had caused. The finger-pointing affected not only him, it affected his family: local news media reported that his father, a doctor, had seen his ranking on a medical practice review site, RateMDs.com, drop after people posted comments about his son’s involvement in the riots. Other people subsequently went to the Web site to defend the doctor and improve his ranking.

Predictably, there was a backlash to the Internet-assisted identification of the people involved in the alcohol-fueled riot. Camille Cacnio, a student in Vancouver who was photographed during the riot and who admitted to theft, wrote on her blog that the “21st-century witch hunt” on the Internet was “another form of mobbing.”

In the New York area, the commuter who was the subject of online scorn last week shut down both her Twitter and LinkedIn accounts once her name bubbled up on blogs. Though the person who originally posted the cellphone video took it down, other people quickly reposted it, giving the story new life. The original video poster remains anonymous because his or her YouTube account has been shut down.

Half a world away, in Middle Eastern countries like Iran and Syria, activists have sometimes succeeded in identifying victims of dictatorial violence through anonymously uploaded YouTube videos.

They have also succeeded in identifying fakes: In a widely publicized case this month, a blogger who claimed to be a Syrian-American lesbian and called herself “A Gay Girl in Damascus” was revealed to be an American man, Tom MacMaster.

The sleuthing was led by Andy Carvin, a strategist for NPR who has exhaustively covered the Middle Eastern protests on Twitter. When sources of his said they were skeptical of the blogger’s identity, “I just started asking questions on Twitter and Facebook,” Mr. Carvin recalled on CNN. “Have any of you met her in person? Do you know her at all? The more I asked, the less I learned, because no one had met her, not even the reporters who had supposedly interviewed her in person.”

Mr. Carvin, his online followers and others used photos and server log data to connect the blog to Mr. MacMaster’s wife.

“Publicity” — something normally associated with celebrities — “is no longer scarce,” Dave Morgan, the chief executive of Simulmedia, wrote in an essay this month.

He posited that because the Internet “can’t be made to forget” images and moments from the past, like an outburst on a train or a kiss during a riot, “the reality of an inescapable public world is an issue we are all going to hear a lot more about.”

By BILL KELLER

Last week my wife and I told our 13-year-old daughter she could join Facebook. Within a few hours she had accumulated 171 friends, and I felt a little as if I had passed my child a pipe of crystal meth.

I don’t mean to be a spoilsport, and I don’t think I’m a Luddite. I edit a newspaper that has embraced new media with creative, prizewinning gusto. I get that the Web reaches and engages a vast, global audience, that it invites participation and facilitates — up to a point — newsgathering. But before we succumb to digital idolatry, we should consider that innovation often comes at a price. And sometimes I wonder if the price is a piece of ourselves.

Joshua Foer’s engrossing best seller “Moonwalking With Einstein” recalls one colossal example of what we trade for progress. Until the 15th century, people were taught to remember vast quantities of information. Feats of memory that would today qualify you as a freak — the ability to recite entire books — were not unheard of.

Then along came the Mark Zuckerberg of his day, Johannes Gutenberg. As we became accustomed to relying on the printed page, the work of remembering gradually fell into disuse. The capacity to remember prodigiously still exists (as Foer proved by training himself to become a national memory champion), but for most of us it stays parked in the garage.

Sometimes the bargain is worthwhile; I would certainly not give up the pleasures of my library for the ability to recite “Middlemarch.” But Foer’s book reminds us that the cognitive advance of our species is not inexorable.

My father, who was trained in engineering at M.I.T. in the slide-rule era, often lamented the way the pocket calculator, for all its convenience, diminished my generation’s math skills. Many of us have discovered that navigating by G.P.S. has undermined our mastery of city streets and perhaps even impaired our innate sense of direction. Typing pretty much killed penmanship. Twitter and YouTube are nibbling away at our attention spans. And what little memory we had not already surrendered to Gutenberg we have relinquished to Google. Why remember what you can look up in seconds?

Robert Bjork, who studies memory and learning at U.C.L.A., has noticed that even very smart students, conversant in the Excel spreadsheet, don’t pick up patterns in data that would be evident if they had not let the program do so much of the work.

“Unless there is some actual problem solving and decision making, very little learning happens,” Bjork e-mailed me. “We are not recording devices.”

Foer read that Apple had hired a leading expert in heads-up display — the transparent dashboards used by pilots. He wonders whether this means that Apple is developing an iPhone that would not require the use of fingers on keyboards. Ultimately, Foer imagines, the commands would come straight from your cerebral cortex. (Apple refused to comment.)

“This is the story of the next half-century,” Foer told me, “as we become effectively cyborgs.”

Basically, we are outsourcing our brains to the cloud. The upside is that this frees a lot of gray matter for important pursuits like FarmVille and “Real Housewives.” But my inner worrywart wonders whether the new technologies overtaking us may be eroding characteristics that are essentially human: our ability to reflect, our pursuit of meaning, genuine empathy, a sense of community connected by something deeper than snark or political affinity.

The most obvious drawback of social media is that they are aggressive distractions. Unlike the virtual fireplace or that nesting pair of red-tailed hawks we have been live-streaming on nytimes.com, Twitter is not just an ambient presence. It demands attention and response. It is the enemy of contemplation. Every time my TweetDeck shoots a new tweet to my desktop, I experience a little dopamine spritz that takes me away from . . . from . . . wait, what was I saying?

My mistrust of social media is intensified by the ephemeral nature of these communications. They are the epitome of in-one-ear-and-out-the-other, which was my mother’s trope for a failure to connect.

I’m not even sure these new instruments are genuinely “social.” There is something decidedly faux about the camaraderie of Facebook, something illusory about the connectedness of Twitter. Eavesdrop on a conversation as it surges through the digital crowd, and more often than not it is reductive and redundant. Following an argument among the Twits is like listening to preschoolers quarreling: You did! Did not! Did too! Did not!

As a kind of masochistic experiment, the other day I tweeted “#TwitterMakesYouStupid. Discuss.” It produced a few flashes of wit (“Give a little credit to our public schools!”); a couple of earnestly obvious points (“Depends who you follow”); some understandable speculation that my account had been hacked by a troll; a message from my wife (“I don’t know if Twitter makes you stupid, but it’s making you late for dinner. Come home!”); and an awful lot of nyah-nyah-nyah (“Um, wrong.” “Nuh-uh!!”). Almost everyone who had anything profound to say in response to my little provocation chose to say it outside Twitter. In an actual discussion, the marshaling of information is cumulative, complication is acknowledged, sometimes persuasion occurs. In a Twitter discussion, opinions and our tolerance for others’ opinions are stunted. Whether or not Twitter makes you stupid, it certainly makes some smart people sound stupid.

I realize I am inviting blowback from passionate Tweeters, from aging academics who stoke their charisma by overpraising every novelty and from colleagues at The Times who are refining a social-media strategy to expand the reach of our journalism. So let me be clear that Twitter is a brilliant device — a megaphone for promotion, a seine for information, a helpful organizing tool for everything from dog-lover meet-ups to revolutions. It restores serendipity to the flow of information. Though I am not much of a Tweeter and pay little attention to my Facebook account, I love to see something I’ve written neatly bitly’d and shared around the Twittersphere, even when I know — now, for instance — that the verdict of the crowd will be hostile.

The shortcomings of social media would not bother me awfully if I did not suspect that Facebook friendship and Twitter chatter are displacing real rapport and real conversation, just as Gutenberg’s device displaced remembering. The things we may be unlearning, tweet by tweet — complexity, acuity, patience, wisdom, intimacy — are things that matter.

There is a growing library of credible digital Cassandras who have explored what new media are doing to our brains (Nicholas Carr, Jaron Lanier, Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan, William Powers, et al.). My own anxiety is less about the cerebrum than about the soul, and is best summed up not by a neuroscientist but by a novelist. In Meg Wolitzer’s charming new tale, “The Uncoupling,” there is a wistful passage about the high-school cohort my daughter is about to join.

Wolitzer describes them this way: “The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but no longing.”

Bill Keller is the executive editor of The New York Times.

The “Facebook revolution” line has been used endlessly in the Middle East. However, things in Syria are taking a more sinister turn–think Facebook cyberwarfare. Within a 24-hour period, Facebook shut down the Syrian military’s official page, and Syrian Facebook users began encountering a primitive certificate-forging scam seemingly carried out by the government. Syria’s now encountering a novel variant on cyberwar–the battle for information supremacy, Facebook style.

On May 10, Facebook removed an official government fan page called the Syrian Electronic Army from the site. According to the highly influential “We Are Khaled Said” Facebook group of Egyptian revolutionary fame, the page contained a mix of pro-government propaganda and calls for Syrians to spam opposition Facebook pages. The Syrian Electronic Army had more than 60,000 “likes” on Facebook.

Syrian authorities promised retribution against Facebook almost immediately. The country’s state-run Al-Thawra newspaper ran a piece in which unnamed figures threatened to attack Facebook. While little noticed outside of Syria, the news eventually made it into the pan-Arab daily Asharq Al-Aswaq (Arabic-language article). According to Egyptian paper Al-Masry Al-Youm:

Al-Thawra, one of Syria’s three main state-run papers, accused Facebook of having “double-standards” and of “collusion with the alleged Syrian revolution.” It denounced the closure of the military’s page, which had more than 60,000 members, without prior notification. […] Al-Thawra quoted the administrator of the Syrian military Facebook page as saying that a surprise is being prepared for Facebook in coordination with a number of programmers and engineering students. Further details were not given.

All this talk of a “surprise” occurred at exactly the same time as a primitive new cyberattack was launched against Syrian Facebook users. A pseudonymous Syrian Tumblr user named Ana Souri (“I Am Syrian”) claimed that the Syrian Telecom Ministry was faking Facebook security certificates for Facebook’s HTTPS site. The certificate weirdness appears to be a classic man-in-the-middle attack.

The forged security certificate, if accepted, allows outsiders access to passwords and otherwise-secure personal information. However, the scam is primitively executed. Most browsers generate warning messages almost immediately; man-in-the-middle attacks generally draw in only the most inexperienced Internet users. The Electronic Frontier Foundation notes:

The attack is not extremely sophisticated: the certificate is invalid in user’s browsers, and raises a security warning. Unfortunately, because users see these warnings for many operational reasons that are not actual man-in-the-middle attacks, they have often learned to click through them reflexively. In this instance, doing so would allow the attackers access to and control of their Facebook account. The security warning is users’ only line of defense.

It is important to note that despite the Tumblr page’s allegations that the Syrian Telecom Ministry is behind the man-in-the-middle attacks, no conclusive evidence can be found connecting the two. However, Arabic-language Twitter messages report hundreds of similar Facebook certificate fraud scams emanating from Syria within the past week, indicating that whoever was behind the attack was perpetrating it on a nationwide scale. Credible reports that Syrian secret police have been torturing pro-democracy activists to find out their Facebook passwords have also surfaced.

By Parag and Ayesha Khanna

In order to grapple with the future, we must first take a big step back and understand the historical pattern of technology disruptions. The story begins by recalling the original meaning of the word “technology.” Before the advent of the Web, technology referred to all the basic and engineering sciences: everything from the wooden wheel to the nuclear bomb was considered a technology. However, in the last two decades, we’ve begun to think of only the Internet and communication services as technology. As powerful as these tools are, this limited approach grossly underestimates technology’s influence over us. Instead, what we are witnessing is the many diverse technological fields (IT, bio-technology, computer science, physics, etc.) coming together and reinforcing each other, creating a meta-shift on a world-historical scale.

To date, mankind has experienced four major technological revolutions, each of which has spawned an age more disruptive in overhauling life as we’ve known it.

The Stone Age: When homo sapiens first roamed the earth 250,000 years ago, our hunter-gatherer ancestors used simple stone tools to dominate other species while moving as nomadic bands.

The Agrarian Age: 10,000 years ago, inventions like the plow and wheel enabled humans to cultivate crops and raise livestock, making us sedentary farmers. Small agrarian communities eventually gave rise to the first cities approximately 5,000 years ago.

The Industrial Age Renaissance breakthroughs like the printing press and mechanical clock finally reached the masses in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, at which point the Industrial Revolution leapt to life with technologies like steam power and large-scale manufacturing.

The Information Age: In the late 1970s, the emergence of the personal computer heralded a new era. The World Wide Web and the mobile phone further accelerated the instant creation and communication of data and gave birth to the knowledge worker. In 16 years, the personal computer spread to one-fourth of the US population. It took 13 years for the mobile phone to reach the same percentage of Americans, 7 years for the web and just 3 years for social networking media.[1] The incredible speed and reach of information technologies has transformed America from a manufacturing to a mass service economy that now accounts for over half of the national GDP.

The Hybrid Age: Mankind is now experiencing its fifth and most intense technological revolution, and we are transitioning into the Hybrid Age. Most people believe we are still living in the Information Age, but in fact we have already reached an inflection point, a brewing storm that will once again drastically change individual life and society. The revolution in the nature of technology is fundamentally distinct from previous ones in five ways:

Ubiquitous. Computers have exponentially become more powerful and cheaper at the same time.  This trend is expected to continue for at least another decade, after which molecular computer is expected to accelerate the trend for even faster, cheaper and nano-scale computers. (Already today’s smartphones used by teenagers to text friends have as much computing power as the Apollo spacecraft that traveled to the moon in 1969.) Soon extremely small computing machines and sensors will move from our smartphones and laptops into every single object we encounter in our daily lives, including being embedded in our own bodies. Hewlett Packard estimates that by 2015, there will be one trillion devices connected to the Internet constantly recording and sharing information. By 2020, we will literally live in technology.

Intelligent. Technologies will no longer be just dumb repositories of information that require humans to understand and process them. They will be intelligent, able to understand the data they collect and work autonomously and in concert with each other. The ability of IBM computer Watson to trounce two human competitors on the game show Jeopardy in February 2011 was a great breakthrough in artificial intelligence: by answering questions that required contextual understanding, Watson exhibited language comprehension, the highest marker of human intelligence.

Social. Both the shape and form of technologies will become anthropomorphic. Voice and gesture based commands will make interaction with machines more natural, and they will respond and react to us almost like humans. Even though their intelligence will be inferior to ours, we will find ourselves forming emotional ties to them.

Integrated. As scientific fields ranging from neuroscience and biology to mathematics and physics mingle and mate, they produce new technological offspring capable of unimagined prowess. Biomechantronics, for example, is a combination of Biology, Mechanical Engineering and Electronics, and has led to the most sophisticated prosthetics in the world.

Disruptive. Finally, the number of technologies has reached the critical threshold after which thousands of new technologies can be constantly created through different combinations of existing ones. The evolution of technology is going to accelerate in the Hybrid Age, which will bring new products and services to the masses very rapidly. In the process, they will disrupt older business models and labor markets and force us to adapt at a faster rate than is comfortable for us.

For all of the negative side effects of history’s technological revolutions, such as sweat-shop labor and nuclear war, few regret that we have gone down this path. To the contrary, what truly differentiates the Hybrid Age from previous revolutionary periods is that it will become global very quickly. Billions of the world’s poor from Africa to India are already participating in technological experimentation and have themselves become the innovators of paradigm-shifting services. In India, 8 million new mobile connections are activated every week. In Kenya, local engineers developed the mobile phone banking system Safaricom and M-Pesa that made traditional banks in the country immediately redundant. Chris Anderson, founder of TED, calls such disruption “crowd accelerated innovation.” Thus the poor who have access to technology will play an unexpected role in the Hybrid Age, using technology to create opportunities for themselves and unexpected disruptions for the developed world.

The changing nature of technology, the geopolitics of technology access and the inclusion of the bottom billion will make the Hybrid Age a hotbed of opportunity and prosperity, but also chaos and uncertainty. How can you prepare yourself?

Ayesha’s interview in the New York Times on the Hybrid Age.

Ayesha and Parag Khanna explore human-technology co-evolution in the Hybrid Age and its implications for society, business and politics at The Hybrid Reality Institute.