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Is youth wasted on the young?

A July 20, 2012 NextGen Journal blog post by a Cathryn Sloane (Why Every Social Media Manager Should Be Under 25) argues — and I paraphrase and grossly oversimplify — that no one born prior to 1987 should be given the keys to the corporate Social Marketing Department.

As I write this, the post has earned 452 comments, 2.4K Facebook Likes, and countless rebuttal posts.

As for rebuttals, here is mine — in two words:

Dial-up BBS

(Ok, maybe that's 4 or 5 words, depending on how you count hyphens and initialisms.)

News flash for twenty-somethings: Facebook did NOT inaugurate the age of Social Media.

Back in the early eighties, many of us endured the "pshhhh SHIHHHH pshhhh" of our 300 baud Hayes modems to dial into bulletin board systems (BBSs) at quaint places like Prodigy, CompuServe, and, yes. AOL. We were social networking way back then, with really cool screen names like "11,4559287" and "9,3930172". And media was shared. True, the media was limited mainly to GIF and JPEG images (some of which were NOT pictures of Cindy Crawford, by the way), but it was media. And it was social.

Keep in mind: This was back when young people like Ms. Sloane weren't even yet twinkles in their fathers' eyes. (How could they be? We were too busy shmoozing on BBSs.)