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present millennium too.
    The first MMOs—“massively multiplayer online” games such as World of Warcraft or Second Life, which generally involve simulation and role-playing—started appearing around the time my stretch marks did, in the early nineties. High-speed Internet—the fast and furious kind that has made it possible to live in cyberspace—has been available to domestic users for little more than a decade, and much less than that in Australia. In September 2008, the number of broadband subscribers in Australia was 5.7 million, having grown by 90 percent over the previous six months. 2 In the United States, despite an economy barely edging toward recovery, some 73 million American households, or about 60 percent of the total, held broadband subscriptions in 2010. 3
    TiVo (2000-ish) and even DVDs (1995-ish)—initials, its founders insist, that stand for nothing at all—seem like old technology already, though they’re far from obsolete. But tracking down a VCR to watch your old home movies is like trying to find a Bakelite phone at the Apple Store.
    Okay, what about e-mail? We can’t talk indispensable, omnipresent, and omnivorous without talking e-mail.
    I remember vividly the first e-mail message I ever received. It was from my girlfriend Pat who worked at Princeton and it was hand-delivered to me as hard copy (ironic, I know) by the IT technician at the university department where I was then employed. The year was 1994. Up until that day, I had only the fuzziest idea what e-mail was ; I certainly didn’t know I’d been allocated an account. I was thrilled. Deeply confused, but thrilled.
    In fact, although e-mail was first demonstrated at MIT in 1961, it wasn’t really until the late nineties that the ranks of business- and then home-users began banking up—particularly after the launch of Hotmail in 1996. And I know all this thanks to Wikipedia, of course (formally launched in 2001, in case you’re offline and want to know).
    Speaking of monoliths, Internet search site (and so much more) Google, which as I write employs a full-time global workforce of 20,222 and is regarded as the most powerful brand in the world, was registered as a domain in 1997. The ubiquitous verb “Google” was added to both the Merriam-Webster’s and the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006. (For 1,490,000 other sources of information on this topic, just Google “history of Google.”)
    As if these statistics aren’t startling enough, consider that Facebook, which as of this writing has 400 million active users—half of whom, I swear, are “friends” with my eighteen-year-old—was launched in 2004. 2004, people! If Facebook were your child, it would still be in first grade. Today, Australians spend nearly one-third of their entire online time budget Facebooking. Admittedly, that’s a world record. (Something to do with the ozone layer?) The rest of the global village isn’t far behind. A Nielsen study published in January 2010 showed social networking increased internationally by 82 percent over the previous year. 4 A GFC (global friending crisis) appears unlikely anytime soon.
    So new, and yet so far, eh? And if 1996 seems like the Stone Age even to someone like me—who can remember when the transistor frigging radio was cutting edge—is it any wonder that our kids can’t imagine life without media? Or that on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (teenage edition), access to Internet browsing, an e-mail account, Facebook, iTunes, Nintendo, and a cell phone sits somewhere between “Safety” and “Love/Belonging”?
    And yet, if the Digital Bill of Rights increasingly governs family life, and I would argue that it does, it’s important to recognize who ratified it in the first place. Actually ... and this is kind of embarrassing ... we did. Especially those of us for whom the Information Age has coincided with our coming of age as parents, producing excitement, confusion, and a weird eclipse of attention. We’ve been