Kansas State anthropology professor Michael Wesch apparently recorded this stunning presentation on culture, life, modernity in the YouTube community mere blocks from DIA world headquarters.

(You might remember him from such video phenomena as this, whose virality he discusses here.)

This is 55 minutes long, but you won't notice the length one bit. Here's the project's blog.

Full fathom five thy father lies:
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
-William Shakespeare, The Tempest

And just when we were getting comfortable.

Via the couldn't-be-more-aptly-named Sea Change comes this fabulous chart of different online activities by age group.

Take a look at that thing.

While "Collectors" are strikingly distributed throughout the population curve, there's an amazing phenomenon in every other category of engagement:

Under-27s are qualitatively more participatory than everyone else, even their immediate elders.

You'd probably expect folks born in the Truman Administration to rock the geek a little less than the Wii-implant generation. No surprise, that.

But across the board, half of the dropoff from "Generation Y" to "Older Boomers" occurs between ages 26 and 27.

You ever have that moment -- where you think, what the devil did people do before the Internet? What did I do? And, "I'm one well-placed electromagnetic pulse from "Omega Man"?

I debated in high school, moderately competently. Research was the coin of the realm in forensics, and I presume still is although I haven't been in the game in forever. Are those faint recollections of card catalogue lookups, photocopying magazine pages and then cutting and freaking pasting them -- like kindergarten -- really right? Dragging around several enormous tubs full of profoundly anti-ergonomic evidence to make sure of having the right sheet of paper to whip out and read?

That world's information management seems closer to cloistered copyists than the life I lead at the moment.

"Lomans not Shamans," says stavrosthewonderchicken, taking stock.

"Conversation as intercourse. Intercourse as commerce. You know somebody's getting fucked. I think it might be us. Ad copy tattoed on our lover's forehead, and we're so inured to it that we don't even notice anymore. We're trying to make love in the middle of the marketplace, but we're just getting screwed."

(Via Wealth Bondage.)

Crazed rantings there. Best to put that one on the watch list before his next trip to the Dallas-Fort Worth airport Travelodge.

Resuming for a moment my professionally ironic role of nptech skeptic, I can't recommend highly enough this video (or this audio) of Stanford prof Fred Turner discussing his new book.