Explaining The 'Sphere

EXPLAINING THE 'SPHERE....LizardBreath asks:

I've got a question for the married/long-term-involved commenters, particularly those who, like me, are either slightly too old or way too old to be part of the Facebook/Myspace/Twitter/Whatever generation where everyone's used to conducting their social life online. What does your spouse know about Unfogged, and how much of an effort of it was to convey it?

On the other hand, explaining this very short comment to my sister was a real pain. First you explain that the president does a radio address every week and that the Democrats get to give one too. And that particular week the Dems chose to talk about SCHIP — detour here for a nickel summary of what SCHIP is — and that furthermore, in an effort to be cute, they chose a 12-year-old named Graeme Frost to deliver their speech. Deep breath. And then a bunch of right-wing bloggers went crazy, because SCHIP has eligibility requirements and they suspected that Graeme's family didn't comply and the whole thing was a gigantic DNC scam. And one of the craziest of them, Michelle Malkin, decided to visit the father's rental property and then drive by his house to take a close a look at the Frost family lifestyle. And that's why there's a joke about Michelle Malkin "keeping a vigilant(e) eye on Mr. Drum's household."

Anyway, after all that everyone is exhausted and realizes that asking questions about the blog is way too much trouble. What normal person wants to sit through an explanation like that just to understand some offhand one-line joke?

As for the Facebook/Myspace/Twitter/Whatever generation, the part I don't get is not that they live out much of their social lives online. That's easily graspable. The part that boggles me is that, at least for many of them, they literally seem to want to be in touch with their social network every single minute. What does that mean for the future of Western civilization?