Where did it all begin?  Where was that first quarter dropped into that first arcade machine?  While I’m sure my Dad must have walked me past a boardwalk arcade when I was a toddler Down the Shore, there’s really one place that you could call the Event Horizon for my enthusiasm for arcade games: Time-Out.

“C’mon.  It’s no big deal…”

It’s staggering how many childhood dares involved that line.  And that includes the dare that involved some older friends trying to get me to enter a dive bar when I was still in elementary school.

When the last Mario succumbs to a barrel – when Pac-Man finally gets cornered by the ghost monsters and there’s no place left to go – when a kid reaches into his pocket for the last quarter and comes up with nothing but lint, a silent wish goes out into the 8-bit aether.  “Man, I wish I had an arcade at home.”

One of the things that many folks don’t realize about Facebook the social network is that it took its name from The Face Book, a physical sort of yearbook that many colleges and universities publish in order to help socialize incoming freshman classes.

Referring to it as “the Face Book” is something of a colloquialism and colleges would refer to it by some other, more official-sounding name like “The Freshman Record.”  But students referred to it on campus as the Face Book, and everyone knew exactly what they were talking about.

I arrived at Washington & Lee University in the fall of 1990 as an emotionally immature freshman with almost no idea of what I wanted to do with my life, nor any idea of how college was going to help me figure out who I was going to be.  The only thing I was sure of at the time was that Things Needed to Be Different when I got to college.

Nothing quite matches the nuclear meltdown that follows on after taking my kids’ iPads away for a day.  Well, maybe telling my oldest son he can’t play Xbox…

Any responsible parent witnesses how kids react emotionally – and sometimes, physically – when we take their electronics away, and wonders if they’re in the grips of some awful addiction.  It’s hard to come reasonably to any conclusion other than yes, they are addicted to their screens and the windows those devices provide into other worlds.  While parents my age are mindful and cautious, we also deal with kiddie addicts by taking a step back and remembering that we’ve seen all of this before.