This morning, Jim Romenesko offers his readers an interesting snapshot of what it looks like to be online in the fall of 2009. In his first post of the day, the veteran media guru shared a Howard Kurz column that, as the headline noted, offered details about how the “[c]ountry’s growing hunger for information is ‘being met unequally.’” The basics? Vast swathes of the poor and rural sections of the United States exist sans Internet, and, thanks to that fact, they are robbed of access to what has become the otherwise most convenient method of personal news gathering. Then, just above that snippet, Romenesko clips an L.A. Times recap of a “Google exec’s talk at the UC Berkeley Digital Media Summit,” which included the sentiment, he writes, that “[c]onsumers might be drowning in media, e-mail and ‘the social stream’.” Put together, this reads something like: Now, even as U.S. citizens of any real means may have access to too much media, their have-notted counterparts have access to none at all. Anyone else see a nifty parallel here? Maybe one that has something to do with the widening gap between U.S. rich and U.S. poor?

What does this say about the thing’s prospects as the ultimate democratizer?

So today, we here at Unfit would like to try an experiment. We realize that this will probably offer something of a small-sample-sized, totally unscientific look at things. But, we’re curious: Is the Internet for rich people? We’d like you, loyal readers to help us figure this out. Please tell us a bit about yourselves (broad strokes here, people — we’re not data-mining), and your feelings on the subject.

If this doesn’t work, we promise that we won’t ask you a question ever again.

Philip Roth

Once not so long ago, it was understood among those who thought about such things that writing was a dying art form, a relic from an era when things like time, opportunity, and audiences were available and things like authority, expertise, and artistry mattered. Scholars and critics and other old sticks in the mud mourned the death of the written (and read) word in American culture like other old sticks in the mud in other times mourned the death of gas-powered lamps or the art of conversation or the silent movie. Writers no less important than Philip Roth, who felt his influence waning along with everyone else who made a living behind a typewriter, once told David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker – another relic with waning influence – that the evidence “is everywhere that the literary era has come to an end.” And stodgy pundits and cultural critics like John Humphrys and John Sutherland attacked texting as “bleak, bald, sad shorthand which masks dyslexia, poor spelling and mental laziness” and texters as the linguistic heirs to Genghis Kahn. Even this author may have said a thing or two about the dangers of our “tweeting” culture – all 140 characters of it – in a moment of pre-middle-aged grumbling.

This was the sad reality of the situation. But as disheartening as circumstances were for these defenders of the word, at the very least they all knew that their point about the less-than-slow death of written language was indisputable, that they were unheeded prophets in a decadent age. And they found comfort in their sanctimony.

But then Clive Thompson – a writer himself – came along with a shocking bit of news: It turns out, according to a study by Andrea Lunsford, professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, that college students’ writing isn’t getting worse as a result of all that texting, tweeting, and Facebook-updating; it’s getting better. According to Thompson, “[f]or Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.”

Just look at all the writing these “young people” are doing, Lunsford argued: more than any generation before. “That’s because so much socializing takes place online,” Thompson wrote, “and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it.” Like the fella said, you add 140 to 140 to 140 to 140 and pretty soon it starts adding up to something.

Turns out these kids weren’t putting the written word to bed with all their grammatically indifferent updates about the emotional state of their goldfish or their preference for pizza over hot dogs as it relates to an upcoming lunch break; rather, they were rivaling the ancient Greeks with their mastery of the rhetorical art of kairos – “assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across” – and creating a new golden age of literacy in the process. Sure, it seemed to many that they were squeezing all the life-blood out of the language – leaving trifles like beauty, subtlety, ambiguity, and syntax dying on the floor in the name of quasi-confessional narcissism – but actually they were mastering a new kind of prose, one based on “haiku-like concision” that was designed with its audience (of one or millions) in mind. In interviews, this new generation of Bashos declared that the best prose was the prose that had the greatest effect on the world, whether that effect meant convincing a friend to see this movie rather than that or letting the world know that, indeed, you are bored at work and, yes, you are looking forward to the weekend, and, quite right, you plan on spending the weekend  making tiramisu.

And with that all the grumbling stopped. Suddenly the Roths and the Remnicks and the Humphrys and the Sutherlands of the world were satisfied. They too picked up their iPhones and started grousing about the weather and Brad Pitt’s new hair-do to their friends all over the world. All of a sudden, they ceased to see the point in flaying themselves for months, even years, at a time, in some garret somewhere, trying to map some hidden corner of the human tragedy, when they could let the world know what they were feeling right then and there and still have time to make it home to watch the season finale of Mad Men. They came to the realization that we aren’t living in an artistic age but an age of access, where aesthetic notions like “good” and “bad” and “beautiful” and “meaningful” seem almost comically geriatric and the only thing that matters is availability. They realized, like the Catholics did thousands of years ago, that confession is good for the soul, and so they traded their lonely writer’s rooms for the warmth and comfort of the modern electronic confessional booth that is the Internet, and they were happier for it. And the written word lived to fight another day.

One day when I was 12-years-old, word got around school that a copy of Hustler magazine had been spotted in the woods behind the soccer field. Five minutes after the final bell rang, dozens of my male classmates and I were back in those woods scouring the ground for evidence, like forensic experts at a crime scene. We were a group of confused kids taking our first steps into the world of sex – which to us symbolized all the mystery, terror, deviance, darkness, seediness, and freedom of adulthood – so it seems appropriate that those first steps would be taken in a patch of muddy woods on a rapidly darkening winter afternoon, like a scene out of a Dennis Lehane novel.

Stalking through the forest that day, I was plagued by questions I was too self-conscious to ask out loud. Questions like: What kind of person would throw a copy of Hustler away? Would I one day do the same, for reasons I couldn’t understand with a seventh-grade education? Is the cultural stigma against smut really so great that it will force a man to try and alleviate his sense of shame and self-loathing by tossing magazines into the woods when no one’s looking? And also, why not just use a trashcan?

Answers to these questions didn’t come that day, but we did eventually find the magazine. It was tattered and muddy and missing pages, but we passed it around reverently like it was a holy relic. And that night, we all went home and remembered it fondly in the privacy of our own bedrooms, bathrooms, and hallway closets. Just on the cusp of adolescence, we had participated in a rite of passage as old as humanity itself: young men going to great lengths to come in contact with naked women.

These days, however, those great lengths have been shrunk down to nothing, and that rite of passage is as irrelevant as a boy’s first saber-tooth tiger hunt. Now any 12-year-old with a computer, an Internet connection, and the presence of mind to click on a “Yes, I’m over 18” link is granted full admission to a world boys of my generation had to shed blood to even get a glimpse at. Gone are the days when the accumulation of “dirty” materials actually required you to get dirty. Gone is the sense of illicit adventure and deviant camaraderie. Gone are the potential for metaphor and the willful push into murky psychic territories. With the rise of the Internet and digital cable, pornography has become commonplace. It’s become societal wallpaper. It’s become about as rare and mysterious as sitcoms or car commercials.

Kids these days don’t realize how bad they have it.

See, when you’ve got no barriers between you and your heart’s desire, your mind and your body deteriorate from lack of use. You know how people who grew up in the Depression always talk about how soft Baby Boomers are because they never had to suffer for anything? Well, it’s same thing with this latest generation of teenagers: Their minds and personalities are soft from the constant, instantaneous satisfaction of their desires; they’re totally self-indulgent (which I’m fine with) but unaccustomed to and unappreciative of the work and sacrifice needed to properly indulge oneself.

The thrill of striving has been replaced by the blandness of possession. Gone are the days of teenage boys robbing stores and lying to their parents and fumbling around in the woods after school in an effort to understand a little better life’s greatest mystery. Gone is the need to connive, collude, cajole, flatter, hustle, conspire, and scheme to get your hands on pornography in a time of wanting. Here to stay is the impassive, entitled, predictable consumption of stimuli … leading to numb, bloated indifference and a life of boredom. Boredom?!! My God, when I was a teenager, I never would have dreamed of using the words “boredom” and “pornography” in the same sentence. It would have been sacrilegious, disrespectful, a violation of some kind of code.

These days all kids have to do is turn on a computer, and bam! – instant access. No fuss, no muss, no shame, no skulking – just simulated carnality. Which sounds good, I know. But think about what’s being lost: an understanding of the relationship between risk and reward; an appreciation for the art of getting over, getting past, and getting by; a belief that success is contingent upon adeptness and adaptability, strategy and temerity, the conquering of your fear and shame and guilt and the acceptance of your own moral flexibility.

What other lessons do we want life to offer us?

Today’s kids don’t even have to suffer the bittersweet pain of settling for soft-core melodrama on late-night premium cable, an act of ritual maturation that taught me and my friends the thrill of unfulfilled desire, of deferred dreams, of implication and suggestion and seduction: the simple joy of making do with what you have, just like our grandparents did during the Depression and World War II.

They had bread lines and rationing; we had Cinemax.

In America, we’ve all had to make sacrifices.