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How the Golden Years Disappeared by Marc Freedman, Salon, April 2, 2012. This is an excerpt from the Big Shift, a book written by Marc Freedman, the man who started Civic Ventures about 10 years ago. Perhaps the WLStudio takes on this social imperative and this is how we get funding? "The new migration is across time and the life course, as tens of millions (8,000 a day, one every ten seconds, are turning sixty) reach the spot where middle age used to end and old age once began, the new territory where a resurgent purpose gap, and gulf in identity, stands. Opportunity is there as well. The surge of people into this new stage of life is one of the most important social phenomena of the new century. Never before have so many people had so much experience and the time and the capacity to do something significant with it. That's the gift of longevity, the great potential payoff on all the progress we've made in extending lives. Realizing these possibilities will require the courage to break from old and familiar patterns that once were our friends but just don't work any longer. It means considering ideas like "gap years" for grown ups, new kinds of internships and fellowships for Americans moving beyond midlife, remodelling higher education to help retrain people who have been working for 40 or 50 years, even the creation of new kinds of investment accounts to help cover the costs of transitioning to new careers. What we're facing is not a solo matter; it's a social imperative, an urgent one that must be solved as the great midlife migration gathers scale and momentum."

Interview by Andrew Leonard, February 22, 2014, with danah boyd on Salon on findings from her new book--It's Complicated: the social lives of networked teens. The "why" they hangout and their actual skill levels excerpts are below. "What exactly is it that teens are trying to do with social media? They're looking for a space to hang out. When we grew up it was the mall or cafes or a variety of other physically grounded spaces. Teens today don't have access to those kinds of spaces and what they've done is they've turned to social media to regain some kind of access to public life. These new "networked publics" - places like Twitter and Facebook - are spaces that are created by digital technologies but they are really about people - the broad network of people that teens have learned to negotiate and socialize around." Teens seem to embrace these new "networked publics" very rapidly, but one chapter of your book annihilates the notion that teens are somehow "digitally native" - that they somehow understand these new technologies more readily or more naturally than their forebears. Teenagers are much more willing to experiment with these technologies to service their end goals - their social goals. There is no doubt about that.. Teens are always much more willing to just try things out. But just because they are willing to try things out doesn't mean that they understand how it works. That doesn't mean that they are inherently technologically sophisticated or understand technology in the ways that are often implied by "digital native."