The Digital Divide

by Mark Bauerlein

  Taking their cue from old-school Internet discussion groups like Usenet, websites such as MetaFilter let people begin discussions about almost anything they’ve found online. Each conversation begins with a link, then grows as far as its participants can take it. This is the real beauty of hypertext, and it’s finally catching on. Although hackers have used bulletin board interfaces on sites such as Slashdot since the Web’s inception, more commercially minded endeavors—e.g., Plastic—are adopting the same model to generate dialogues about culture and media.

  On Yahoo! the biggest growth area is conversation. Yahoo! Groups, a set of bulletin board discussions and mailing lists, contains thousands of the best discussions happening online—and almost all of them have been started by real people. Based on an old but still widely used style of e-mail conversation called Listserv, it allows group members to read postings and add to the conversation without ever opening their browsers. Some of these specialinterest groups are narrowcast to a degree possible only on a global network where people interested in anything from absinthe drinking to zither tuning can find one another across great distances.

  And now that international trade and open markets are no longer the Internet’s chief global agenda, more humanitarian efforts are taking shape. Back in 1999, my friend Paul Meyer helped launch Internet Project Kosovo (IPKO) just days after NATO stopped shelling the Serbs. A single satellite dish let Albanian refugees find lost family members, and enabled aid agencies to allocate their resources. Today, Meyer and others are helping people in this and other war-torn and developing regions to network, and even open businesses.

  For those whose refugee status ended long ago, Ellis Island has teamed with the Mormon Church to create a database containing arrival records for the 22 million immigrants who came through the New York port between 1892 and 1924. Linked databases, accessible to anyone via the Internet. Is this starting to sound familiar?

  Or remember how the Internet was supposed to provide us with alternative sources of news and information? Although it was almost lost under the avalanche of content during the dot-com gold rush, AlterNet has emerged as a vibrant source of news and opinions you won’t see in your evening paper anytime soon. It’s the ultimate alternative newsweekly, available on the Web or by e-mail, using the Internet to collect and syndicate content from sources that just couldn’t get published any other way. And it’s free.

  It’s not that the original Internet community went into some sort of remission. No, not all. While e-commerce customers were waiting for return authorization numbers for misordered merchandise from Pets.com, the participants in AOL’s chat rooms were exchanging tips on caring for their Chihuahuas. While DoubleClick was reckoning with plummeting click-through rates on its banner ads, the personal ads in the Nerve singles classifieds were exploding. While the value of many E*Trade portfolios was falling into the red, people who’d never sold anything before were making money peddling items through the auctions on eBay.

  Likewise, as headlines panicked investors about the failure of broadband, the massive communities built on IRC chat channels and other early live networking platforms were finding new, more advanced avenues for social and intellectual exchange. For-profit streaming media companies like Icebox may have failed, but the streaming technologies they used have survived and flourished as social tools such as iVisit and NetMeeting. And while the client lists of business-to-business service companies have shrunk, peer-to-peer networks, from Napster to Hotline, still grow in popularity and resist all efforts to quell the massive exchange of data, illegal or not.

  In fact, the average American home now has more information and broadcast resources than a major television network newsroom did in the ’70s. A single Apple laptop is a video production studio, allowing even for the complex editing of independent films. Add a fast Internet connection, and a home producer can broadcast around the globe. My own Aunt Sophie, armed with a scanner and e-mail account, has inundated the family with photos of all our relatives’ new babies.

  Independent radio stations run through DSL and cable modems out of studio apartments around the world find loyal audiences through Shoutcast and other amateur media networks. And, as the word “amateur” suggests, these stations are born out of love for a particular genre of music. They allow aficionados from anywhere to enjoy their favorite styles—from raga to reggae—round the clock.

  The early Internet was often compared to the Wild West—an anarchic realm where a lone hacker could topple any empire—and that spirit of independence still dominates the culture of the interactive space. Any group or individual, however disenfranchised, can serve as the flash point for an extraordinarily widespread phenomenon.

  Online sensations—such as the spoof of the Japanese video game at All Your Base Are Belong to Us! and the parody of Budweiser’s “Wassup?” commercial at Budwizer.com: Wassup Page—are launched by teenagers and distributed by e-mail to millions of office cubicles, eventually finding their way to the evening news. Think about it: The mind-melding of some fourteen-year-old kid and his computer—such as Neil Cicierega, who created the brilliant parody of consumer culture called Hyakugojyuuichi!!—becomes a conversation piece around the water cooler in thousands of offices all over the world. Powerful stuff.

  It gets better. Thousands of hackers worldwide still represent a threat to major software companies, the DVD industry, and any corporation whose interests rely on closed-source computer code or encrypted files. No sooner is a new closed standard released than it is decoded and published by a lone hacker—or by a team of hackers working in tandem from remote and untraceable locations. Activists of all stripes have also seized upon the Internet to cultivate relationships across vast distances and promote new alliances between formerly unaffiliated groups. The Internet-organized demonstrations against World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle and Quebec are only the most notable examples of such networking.

  In spite of the many efforts to direct its chaotic, organismic energy toward the monolithic agenda of Wall Street, the Internet can’t help but empower the real people whose spirit it embodies. I’ve mentioned only a few of the thousands of equally vital new buds blooming on the Internet today. They thrive because they promote the life of the Internet itself. They are not parasites but fruit, capable of spreading their own seeds and carrying the Internet’s tendrils even further. They are the Internet.

  They share the very qualities that make the Internet so compelling and valuable: transparency, participation, openness, and collaboration. Theirs are the ideals and communities that allowed the Internet to fend off efforts to harness its power for a single, selfish objective. They are also what will keep the Internet resilient enough to withstand the next attack.

  So do not mourn. Rejoice. While you may never be able to sell that great dot-com name or make a bundle on that tech stock you bought last year, you’re getting to participate in something that no civilization in the history of the planet has ever had the privilege of experiencing until now: the Internet.

  < Douglas Rushkoff >

  social currency

  Originally published in TheFeature.com (2003).

  NO MATTER HOW COLORFUL you make it, content will never be king in a wireless world. It’s not the content that matters—it’s the contact.

  Wireless providers are busy investing in content. Or, more accurately, in deals with content “partners” who can provide data with file sizes huge enough to justify the industry’s massive expenditure on multimedia-ready platforms and networks. Cart before the horse, as always, the cellular industry may have just speculated itself off yet another cliff.

  Like the lunatics responsible for the dot-com boom and bust, these entrepreneurs still don’t get it: in an interactive space, content is not king. Contact is.

  What made the Internet special was not the newfound ability to download data from distant hard drives. No, none of us were so very excited by the idea of accessing News Corp.’s databases of text, for a fee. What made the Int
ernet so sexy was that it let us interact with one another. First asynchronously, through e-mail or bulletin boards, and then live. It was the people.

  Content only matters in an interactive space or even the real world, I’d argue, because it gives us an excuse to interact with one another. When I was a kid, we’d buy records not solely because we wanted to hear whoever was on them; we wanted an excuse for someone else to come over! “What are you doing after school? I got the new Stones album. . . .”

  In this sense, our content choices are just means to an end—social currency through which we can make connections with others. Jokes are social currency. They help break the ice at a party. “Hey, let’s invite Joe. He tells good jokes.” We’re not even listening for the punch line—we’re busy memorizing the joke so that we’ll have something to tell at our next party.

  Or consider the history of bubblegum and baseball cards. When my dad was a kid, a clever bubble-gum card company decided to give themselves a competitive advantage by offering a free baseball card inside each pack of gum. That’s how baseball cards started. The cards did so well that by the time I was a kid, a pack of ten baseball cards would only have one stick of gum. Today, baseball cards are sold with no gum at all. The free prize has replaced the original product! That’s because, to use industry terms, baseball cards are a stickier form of content than bubble gum.

  Meaning, they are a better form of social currency. They can be traded, played for, compared and contrasted. They create more opportunities for social interactions between the kids who buy them.

  As the wireless industry begins on its long, misguided descent into the world of content creation, it must come to terms with the fact that the main reason people want content is to have an excuse—or a way—to interact with someone else.

  Ideally, this means giving people the tools to create their own content that they can send to friends. Still, cameras are a great start. Some form of live digital video would be fun, too. (“We’re at the Grand Canyon, Mom—look!” or “Here’s the new baby!”)

  But elaborately produced content—like prepackaged video shorts, inscrutable weather maps, and football game TV replays—are not only inappropriate for a two-inch screen, they are inappropriate as social currency. Sorry, but people won’t use their cell phones to buy content any more than they used their Internet connections to buy content—unless that content is something that gives them a reason to call someone else.

  And that kind of content better be something that can be translated into simple mouth sounds—meaning spoken language, the natural content of telephony. Movie schedules, restaurant addresses, stock quotes, sports scores. No, it’s not sexy. But data never are.

  It’s time for the wireless industry to come to grips with the fact that no matter how sleek the phones or colorful the pictures on their little screens, nobody wants to have sex with either. They want to have sex with each other. Either help them, or get out of the way.

  < Don Tapscott>

  the eight net gen norms

  Excerpted from Grown Up Digital (pp. 73–96).

  DON TAPSCOTT is chairman of Moxie Insight, a fellow of the World Economic Forum, and Adjunct Professor at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World (2010, coauthored with Anthony Williams) follows 2007’s best-selling business book in the U.S., Wikinomics (also coauthored with Anthony Williams). Other books include Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World (2009), a sequel to Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (1997). He holds an M.Ed. specializing in research methodology, and three Doctor of Laws (Hon) granted from the University of Alberta, from Trent University, and from McMaster University.

  WHEN Growing Up Digital was published in 1997, my daughter Niki had just turned fourteen. She did her homework on the computer in her room and, like most girls her age, she loved to talk with friends on the phone. We had a phone curfew of 10 p.m., and after a while we noticed she wasn’t talking on the phone anymore. That seemed like a good thing, until we discovered that Niki was talking to her friends on the Internet via ICQ—one of the early instant messaging systems—from the moment she walked into her bedroom until she turned out the light. As her parents, our first reaction was to feel like she had tricked us, and the issue of ICQ became a sore spot for us all. But my wife and I were torn, because she was getting very good grades, and it was clear that all her friends were connected this way.

  Since I was in the business of observing the impact of the Internet, I started pestering Niki with questions at the dinner table about what she was doing online. She was checking her horoscope, downloading music, researching for her homework, playing games, checking the movie schedule, and, of course, talking with friends. Niki tried to put an end to it, with a plea: “Can we have a normal conversation at the dinner table?”

  For Niki, her link to the Internet was a sweet taste of freedom. She could talk to whomever she wanted, find out whatever she wanted, and be who she wanted to be, without interference from parents or other adults.

  We all want that sense of freedom, but this generation has learned to expect it. They expect it because growing up digital gave kids like Niki the opportunity to explore the world, find out things, talk to strangers, and question the official story from companies and governments. When teenagers in my era did a geography project, they might have cut out some pictures from their parents’ National Geographic and included some information sent by the PR department of the foreign country’s local consulate. Niki, on the other hand, could find significantly more interesting information just by tapping her fingers on her computer in her bedroom.

  Niki and her younger brother Alex, who started playing games and drawing pictures on the Internet at age seven, were the inspiration for Growing Up Digital. It seemed that every week they would do something amazing with technology or through technology that I had not seen before. Through my experience with them and the 300 other youngsters we studied, I concluded that these kids were very different from their boomer parents. I refer to these differences as “norms”—distinctive attitudinal and behavioral characteristics that differentiate this generation from their babyboom parents and other generations. These norms were tested in the nGenera survey of 6,000 Net Geners around the world. The list stood up pretty well.

  >>> freedom

  When my generation graduated from college, we were grateful for that first job. We hung on to it like a life preserver. But times have changed. Kids see no reason to commit, at least not to the first job. High performers are on their fifth job by the time they are twenty-seven and their average tenure at a job is 2.6 years.1 They revel in the freedom. My son Alex, for instance, is thinking about getting an MBA or a law degree. But when I asked him about his immediate plans for a job, he put it this way: “A commitment of three years or more would make me hesitate. I don’t want to get locked in to something I may not enjoy ten years down the road. I want the freedom to try new and different things. If I like what I’m doing, if it challenges me and engages me and is fun, then I would definitely commit to it, I guess. I think about the time I reach age thirty, I would settle on something. I view my twenties as a period of self-discovery and self-realization.”

  Alex is typical of his generation. The Internet has given them the freedom to choose what to buy, where to work, when to do things like buy a book or talk to friends, and even who they want to be. Politicians like Barack Obama have tapped into it. Obama’s iconic line, “Yes we can,” has spawned a music video by will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, plus the spoofs—proof positive that it went viral. These three words speak volumes about the Net Gen’s belief that they can do anything, that no one can tell them not to. “Yes we can” was perfectly tuned to this generation, just as the peace sign was for mine. They’re on a quest for freedom, and it’s setting up expectations that may surprise and infuriate their elders.

  Our research suggests that they expect to choose where and when they work
; they use technology to escape traditional office space and hours; and they integrate their home and social lives with work life. More than half of the Net Geners we surveyed online in North America say they want to be able to work in places other than an office. This is particularly true of white- and some graycollar workers. An almost equal number say they want their job to have flexible hours, again with some differences among the various employee types.2

  Alex doesn’t buy the line that young people expect their first employers to accommodate them with flexible hours and telecommuting. “It makes young people look childish. We’re not going to start making demands about hours.” Alex says he and his friends want to work hard, be productive, and succeed. “I’m not sure it’s a young–old thing.”

  Yet, in my research and in my work as a consultant to major corporations and governmental institutions, I see signs of a generational trend. They prefer flexible hours and compensation that is based on their performance and market value—not based on face time in the office. And they’re not afraid to leave a great job if they find another one that offers more money, more challenging work, the chance to travel, or just a change. As one twenty-six-year-old woman who answered our online survey put it: “We’re given the technology that allows us to be mobile, so I don’t understand why we need to be restricted to a desk; it feels like you’re being micromanaged.”

  Intel gets it. Many of its employees telework, while other staffers take advantage of flextime, compressed workweeks, part-time hours, and job shares. All the company’s major work sites offer employees great amenities, such as fitness centers, locker rooms, basketball and volleyball courts, dry cleaning, sundries, and food court–style cafes with menus that change daily.3 Studies repeatedly show that perks such as those offered by Intel boost employee satisfaction and performance.4