Natalia,

The reason Ocean MacAdams calls it the "natural order of things" when old people shake their canes in disgust at apolitical, ignorant young people is because -- here's a shocker -- we are.

Think about it. Who catapulted Paris Hilton into TV stardom in the first place? The gentlemen from the nursing home down the street? Your pop-culturally obtuse parents? Not so much. The guilty demographic stands before us with bloody hands.

Young people are, indeed, the only kind of people who could find taped segments of Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey's married life more compelling than live video feeds of American naval and air forces unleashing "shock and awe" on Saddam's Iraq.

It's not sensationalism (the media have always operated on the principle that "if it bleeds, it leads") or a constant barrage of criticism aimed at young people that has driven Generation Next away from the heart-warming smile of the late Peter Jennings and toward the mind-dulling vacuity of Paris Hilton. In the natural order of things, we tune out because, as my friend Jake informs me, "We're lazy, and we don't care."

My parents' generation was the same way when they were in high school and college, as was my grandparents' generation (until, like a thief in the night, the draft came). There are just so many better things to do with your time than follow current events when you're young, it seems.

So why does the data suggest our generation is worse than others? Because most analyses are traditional-media focused, and the traditional media are no more. It's true most teenagers won't even grab a newspaper to swat a fly.

Yet, in the technologically driven, new media-dominated 21st century, who would? Daily newspaper circulation has been falling steadily since 1984. Viewership of the Big Three news networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, has similarly tanked.

According to author Brian Anderson, "The average age of a network news watcher is now 60; only about 8 percent of viewership is between 18 and 34. Ten years ago, 60 percent of adult Americans regularly tuned in to one of the network newscasts. Now it's only about one in three."

The kingdom of The New York Times and Dan Rather has crumbled, and, through the smoke and rubble, an entire alternative media network has emerged. Technology has transformed the Internet, once merely a passing thought in Al Gore's mind, into a fast-rising starlet of the information industry.

Whether by reading blogs, perusing the online editions of The Washington Post or National Review, or simply checking Yahoo! News, people of every demographic -- especially young "dot-com'ers" -- rely heavily on the Internet for their regular ingestion of current events.

With the rise of the Internet, the U.S. has also witnessed over the past couple decades the explosive popularity of talk radio and cable news, notably Fox. Yet, in light of the rise and fall of the old media, one cannot explain the influence Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh now wield merely in terms of technology.

Indeed, the names "O'Reilly," "Rush," "Hannity," and "Instapundit" now register in many readers' minds precisely because today's audience for what one might call the center-to-right media had previously gone ignored and snubbed for decades during the reign of the Big Three networks and the establishment newspapers.

Now, Fox dominates all of cable and network news because, as columnist Charles Krauthammer once joked, founder Rupert Murdoch recognized a small market that had been under-served: half the country.

Natalia, I maintain that partly because we young people, as you argue, "want our voices heard" and "the truth from all perspectives," today's media landscape looks nothing like it did 25 years ago.

--Ryan