The dumbing down of America

The Washington Post has an article by Jose Antonio Vargas about the latest White House networks:

The White House announced yesterday that it had established a presence on Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. The news came in a blog posting on WhiteHouse.gov. In a nod to the informal tone of the Web, Obama's Twitter username is an all-lowercase whitehouse.
The White House new-media team wrote in the posting: "Technology has profoundly impacted how— and where— we all consume information and communicate with one another."
About two hours after the announcement, Obama's Twitter account already had 2,281 followers. It had sent five updates, two of them related to the swine flu outbreak. The official White House pages on MySpace and Facebook also link to flu-related information. As of Friday afternoon, the White House had nearly 400 friends on MySpace and about 490 fans on Facebook.
The White House also maintains an active presence on Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube, and iTunes. But questions remain: What will happen, for instance, when a Facebook user voices displeasure on the official White House page? During the presidential campaign, Obama was forced to respond to users of My.BarackObama.com, his own social networking platform, when they organized and conveyed their opposition to one of his policy positions.

Rico says he refuses to look at, much less link to, any of these sites. Facebook has a nasty reputation for being hacked, and the others he's at least thirty years too old to even attempt... (And what's the point of being a curmudgeon if you can't act like one once in awhile?)