The kids I think of as my baby cousins are the ones who, about 15 years ago I realized, didn’t know who Mr. Hooper was. At 28 and a half years old, it is getting more and more difficult to deny the fact that I am, in fact, an adult… maybe even a grownup. Any my baby cousins… well, they are clearly no longer babies. They are in high school and college and even graduated, some of them. And they now inhabit many of the same worlds of culture and media as do I. They’ve caught up with the online world I’ve watched develop through my own adolescence and young adulthood, and I’m encountering them on Facebook and Twitter, giving me a window into their lives, and them a window into mine, that was once screened from mutual view by the venetian blinds of age discrepancy. Now the blinds are open, which leaves me pondering a glaring question about my own status as a member of the first wave of the Internet Age.

We all remember when our parents and even *gasp* our grandparents started to figure out email and AIM and slowly started to trickle onto Facebook. Many of us felt threatened, invaded, even a bit disgusted at the prospect of sharing online space with the generations above us. We were embarrassed by their clumsy mass-emails, forwarded jokes, tactless comments, as they tested the waters of this new pool we’d grown up splashing about in. Even for those of us whose parents were part of the development of the technologies we used with such dexterity, it was our generation that made a culture of the internet, who made it a home. Our parents’ halting forays into this world seemed child-like to us as we are reminded of our first clumsy websites written in awkward HTML with blinking text and primitive clipart at age 13 or so.

So for my 12-year-old cousin Sam, my 18-year-old cousin Daniel, or even my 22-year-old cousin Rebecca, what is it that they see when they notice a friend request from their older cousin Gella? How do they experience my comments on their statuses and pictures? Do they have the same awkward feeling we had when Mom or Dad or Uncle Paul wanted to be our internet buddies? Do they cringe at our ability to see the pictures of where they’ve been, what they’ve done and with whom, with whom they are currently in a relationship, the sort of language they use with their friends? Are we, the former young and hip internet generation the old fogeys of this world already?

I can’t help but ponder the differences in how we developed with the internet, we and the internet growing up together like classmates, learning as we went. We who started with Bulletin Boards and IRC and Prodigy and listservs, we who remember the start of AOL, we who learned to type on Apple IIe computers in elementary school… whereas these kids today, they are coming into maturity a world in which the Internet is already grown up and established. They learned URL along with ABC. And whereas we grew up in an Internet of which our parents were largely ignorant, they are growing up in an Internet which their parents have learned to regard, to use, and to try to monitor. It’s a different world for them, but I’m troubled by the question of how different.

When I first saw my kid cousins had gotten themselves Facebook accounts, I must admit, I had mixed feelings. A combination of “Oh, isn’t that cute!” and “They’re growing up so fast!” and “I’d better watch what I say” and, I’ll confess, a measure of the same sense of invasion that I felt when Mom figured out how to create her own profile. I find myself now, somewhat pathetically, wondering if I am the embarrassment to Sam that Grandma was to me when she sent that first IM, formatted like a letter, opened and sealed with salutations “Dear Gella” and “Love Grandma.” We are not clumsy, we know what we are doing. But do we know better or not as well as the young’uns now joining our ranks?

I have no answers.