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Bostonist Was There: StarChefs.com Gala Tasting at The State Room 11/3/2009
Berkman Center Open House
50 Church Street, Cambridge
7pm
Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet & Society is having an open house tonight. We may or may not make it, but we did make it to a discussion of two Center pals' new book last night, and we have a couple things to say about it. In their talk, Urs Gasser and John Palfrey discussed their new book, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, and its implications for digital natives and those who must deal with them as parents, teachers, or even colleagues. The evening began with Charlie Nesson, Berkman Center founder and ruddy-cheeked gent (somehow we can easily see him sipping wine at a wedding on Martha's Vineyard), giving opening remarks on digital natives' "need to understand their own selves... and their rights." Gasser and Palfrey didn't go very in-depth on any issues in their talk, but presumably everything's covered in greater detail in the book--which, by the authors' own admission, was "obsolete the minute it was printed." Fortunately, it came out on the Kindle first--though for more money than the hard copy. Go figure.
A classic instance of digital "nativism" occurred early on in the talk: one young audience member (conveniently sitting in front of us) rushed to look up both speakers on his laptop even while listening to them. Examining both faculty and Wikipedia pages, the digital dude checked up on the background of the speakers as he listened to them, providing the perfect example of digital culture intersecting with reality. This Bostonist felt a little guilty for taking notes on the Berkman Center brochures handed out at the event, but hey, we can't all be all digital all the time (or can we?). Also, as Palfrey pointed out about 100 times, Robert Scoble was totally in attendance, but he was way in the front row (VIP section, apparently) and we couldn't see what, if anything, he might have been looking up.
Gasser (who looks sort of like a very German David Foster Wallace, at least with the hair) opened the evening by raising a few fundamental questions. The main question that drove Gasser and Palfrey's research was, "What's special about the internet?" The main question they are (understandably) getting from reviewers is, "Why write a book about the digital age?" The answer is the book was written for teachers and parents of the digital natives, not necessarily the digital natives themselves. (They don't say that digital content still lacks a clear business model and certain ring of respectability, but one suspects that has something to do with the book decision as well.) In addition to publishing the book, Gasser and Palfrey asked Berkman Center interns to create videos summarizing various chapters, recognizing that the book content would appeal more to digital natives in video form. Thus they've effectively reached two audiences with one set of research: not bad, fellas.
Early on in his part of the talk, Palfrey made the important point that not all young people are digital natives--it's a digital "population," not a digital "generation." Additionally, he asserted that only about a billion of the six-ish billion people on earth are digitally equipped--so as much as the internet seems important to us, it hardly exists to most of the world. That's something to think about.
Three digital native myths debunked by Palfrey and Gasser after the jump!
Okay, it's actually a bit of a stretch to say that Palfrey and Gasser "debunked" myths, but they did try to reframe traditional thinking about some online issues. The three main issues they addressed were privacy, intellectual property, and credibility. Rather than "debunking" any of these per se, or even actually defining them as myths, the duo recast them in a more "digital" light. Instead of privacy issues, we have networking and collaborative opportunities. Instead of copyright problems, we have a chance to teach young people what can and can't be used under a Creative Commons license or by fair use. Instead of a credibility problem, we have information sharing and improved access to knowledge. It's an idealistic perspective, but an appealing one
During the Q&A session, some cynical lawyers from Washington grilled Gasser and Palfrey on Section 230, saying the authors' desire to lay some reasonable degree of liability on social networking sites for their users' actions is ludicrous and will be the death of all startups (since the startups won't be able to afford lawyers to defend them against suits over users' misdeeds). Palfrey clarified that he and Gasser do not want to overturn Section 230, but that they urge some degree of responsibility on the part of website providers, particularly when it comes to use by children. Digital natives though we may be, Bostonist remembers when we were wee ones--our mom said we couldn't even tell online folks what state we lived in, much less what our name was. Of course, we were also visiting AOL chat rooms then, which are arguably way more scary than MySpace. And hey, lawyers--you can always work pro bono, or for a measly $200/hr instead of your usual $800. Think about it?
As Palfrey observed, "no one has lived cradle to grave in a digital age" (not entirely accurate, to be sure, but his point that 80-year-olds weren't born Twittering is well taken). Though the internet has its drawbacks, he celebrates the fact that it enhances the "ability of more people to participate more actively in the making and remaking of their culture," and we think he's hit on something important there. The internet may open us up to big problems, but it also opens us up to big possibilities. We can choose to fear change and difficulty or embrace potential.
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