temporary distraction?

I can hear my son yammering away in the other room on xbox.  He spends so much time on there chatting with friends, playing games, sharing cheats..etc.  I think to myself, "it's just a temporary distraction, he will out grow it".  The same with texting, "it's just a phase". I dawns on me with horror...he may never out grow either!

He doesn't spend hours on the phone the way I used to as a teenager.  I assume guys did things like that too.  Talk on the phone?  Didn't they?  I know I talked to guys on the phone when I was a teenage girl.  We also met up to just go "walking around"  large groups of us would go "walking around"  We had no destination in mind, just the aimless shuffle from house to house collecting friends, saying "hi" to a Mom or Dad at home, then walking blocks to nowhere or perhaps the local park.  We would also go outside and find a friend.  That "seeing who's out"  happens less and less.  They seem to make all plans via text or xbox live before they ever set foot outside to go do something.  Even when the doing something involves boxing in our basement there are rituals they adhere to, texting, xboxing, time syncing, dressing, putting on cologne but not brushing one's hair or teeth.

Other horrors radio, television, movies, rock n roll (all things said to be a fad or passing fancy) are all most of us know now, it's how we grew up.  I have never known life without all those things.  My Mom knew life with out television, telephones and rock n roll.  My Grandparents knew life without cars, telephones, televisions and not every one had a radio.  I look back at my own life, I knew life without a color tv for years, a home with only one tv  until I was in my late 20's, telephones on the wall, a one phone home,  no cell phones, a computer wasn't in many homes, there was no access to the internet even in the 80's with a computer. All we used computers for in school were to type word processor documents and fill in some answers on a math quiz.  I don't recall it actually checking the math.  I'm sure it could.  We were just too amazed that we were typing on something that didn't clack and have a piece of paper in it.  Saving work to a floppy disk and printing it out later was kind of weird. Working on a paper little bits at a time, coming back revising it? Mind-blowing   I remember our first computer in the late 90's.  Search engines were a strange thing to navigate, I knew of metacrawler, hotbot and some nameless search engine that the emachine 300 or whatever it was had.

Maybe x-box live, texting and skype are all here to stay and aren't temporary distractions.