>>> the shock of inclusion
I teach in the Interactive Telecommunications Program, an interdisciplinary graduate program at NYU. In the decade I’ve been there, the average age of my students has stayed roughly the same, while my average age has grown at the alarming rate of one year per year; my students are now fifteen or twenty years younger than I am. Because I try to convey an understanding of the changing media landscape, I now have to teach the times of my own youth as ancient history. Seemingly stable parts of the world I grew up in had vanished before many of my students turned fifteen, while innovations I saw take hold with adult eyes occurred when they were in grade school.
Despite half a century of hand-wringing about media contraction, my students have never known a media landscape of anything less than increasing abundance. They have never known a world with only three television channels, a world where the only choice a viewer had in the early evening was which white man was going to read them the news in English. They can understand the shift from scarcity to abundance, since the process is still going on today. A much harder thing to explain to them is this: if you were a citizen of that world, and you had something you needed to say in public, you couldn’t. Period. Media content wasn’t produced by consumers; if you had the wherewithal to say something in public, you weren’t a consumer anymore, by definition. Movie reviews came from movie reviewers. Public opinions came from opinion columnists. Reporting came from reporters. The conversational space available to mere mortals consisted of the kitchen table, the water cooler, and occasionally letter writing (an act so laborious and rare that many a letter began with “Sorry I haven’t written in so long. . . .”).
In those days, anyone could produce a photograph, a piece of writing, or a song, but they had no way to make it widely available. Sending messages to the public wasn’t for the public to do, and, lacking the ability to easily connect with one another, our motivation to create was subdued. So restricted was access to broadcast and print media that amateurs who tried to produce it were regarded with suspicion or pity. Self-published authors were assumed to be either rich or vain. People who published pamphlets or walked around with signs were assumed to be unhinged. William Safire, the late columnist for the New York Times, summed up this division: “For years I used to drive up Massachusetts Avenue past the vice president’s house and would notice a lonely, determined guy across the street holding a sign claiming he’d been sodomized by a priest. Must be a nut, I figured—and thereby ignored a clue to the biggest religious scandal of the century.”
My students believe me when I tell them about the assumed silence of the average citizen. But while they are perfectly able to make intellectual sense of that world, I can tell they don’t feel it. They’ve never lived in an environment where they weren’t able to speak in public, and it’s hard for them to imagine how different that environment was, compared with the participatory behaviors they take for granted today.
Nik Gowing, a BBC reporter and author of “Skyful of Lies” and Black Swans, about media in crises, offers an illustrative story. In the hours after the London subway and bus bombings of July 7, 2005, the government maintained that the horrific damage and casualties had been caused by some sort of power surge. Even a few years earlier, this explanation would have been the only message available to the public, allowing the government time to investigate the incident more fully before adjusting its story to reflect the truth. But as Gowing notes, “Within the first eighty minutes in the public domain, there were already 1,300 blog posts signaling that explosives were the cause.”
The government simply could not stick to the story about a power surge when its falsehood was increasingly apparent to all. Camera phones and sites for sharing photos globally meant that the public could see images of the subway interior and of a double-decker bus whose roof had been blown to pieces—evidence utterly incompatible with the official story. Less than two hours after the bombings, Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, publicly acknowledged that the explosions had been the work of terrorists. He did so even though his grasp of the situation wasn’t yet complete, and against the advice of his aides, simply because people were already trying to understand the events without waiting for him to speak. The choice for the police had previously been “Should we tell the public something or nothing?” By 2005, it had become “Do we want to be part of the conversation the public is already having?” Blair decided to speak to the public at that early stage because the older strategies that assumed that the public wasn’t already talking among itself were no longer intact.
The people surprised at our new behaviors assume that behavior is a stable category, but it isn’t. Human motivations change little over the years, but opportunity can change a little or a lot, depending on the social environment. In a world where opportunity changes little, behavior will change little, but when opportunity changes a lot, behavior will as well, so long as the opportunities appeal to real human motivations.
The harnessing of our cognitive surplus allows people to behave in increasingly generous, public, and social ways, relative to their old status as consumers and couch potatoes. The raw material of this change is the free time available to us, time we can commit to projects that range from the amusing to the culturally transformative. If free time was all that was necessary, however, the current changes would have occurred half a century ago. Now we have the tools at our disposal, and the new opportunities they provide.
Our new tools haven’t caused those behaviors, but they have allowed them. Flexible, cheap, and inclusive media now offer us opportunities to do all sorts of things we once didn’t do. In the world of “the media,” we were like children, sitting quietly at the edge of a circle and consuming whatever the grown-ups in the center of the circle produced. That has given way to a world in which most forms of communication, public and private, are available to everyone in some form. Even accepting that these new behaviors are happening and that new kinds of media are providing the means for them, we still have to explain why. New tools get used only if they help people do things they want to do; what is motivating The People Formerly Known as the Audience to start participating?
credits
Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in Atlantic Monthly (July/August 2008). Copyright © 2008 by Nicholas Carr. Reproduced by permission of the author.
Cathy Davidson, “We Can’t Ignore the Influence of Digital Technologies,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education (March 23, 2007). Copyright © 2007 by Cathy Davidson. Reproduced by permission from the author.
William Deresiewicz, “The End of Solitude,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education (January 30, 2009). Copyright © 2009 by William Deresiewicz. Reproduced by permission of the author.
James Paul Gee, “Learning Theory, Video Games, and Popular Culture,” in International Handbook of Children, Media, and Culture, edited by Kirsten Drotner and Sonia Livingstone (2008), pp. 196–212. Copyright © James Paul Gee 2007. Reproduced by permission of SAGE Publications, London, Los Angeles, New Delhi, and Singapore.
James Paul Gee, “Learning Theory, Video Games, and Popular Culture,” in International Handbook of Children, Media, and Culture, edited by Kirsten Drotner and Sonia Livingstone (2008), pp. 196–212. Copyright © James Paul Gee 2007. Reproduced by permission of SAGE Publications, London, Los Angeles, New Delhi, and Singapore.
Todd Gitlin, “Nomadicity,” in Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives (2002), pp. 53–60. Copyright © 2002 by Todd Gitlin. Reproduced by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
Maggie Jackson, “Judgment: Of Molly’s Gaze and Taylor’s Watch,” in Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, pp. 71–95. Copyright © 2008 by Maggie Jackson. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Prometheus Books.
Henry Jenkins, “Love Online,” in Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (2006), pp. 173–77. Copyright © 2006 by New York University. All rights
reserved. Abridged and reproduced by permission of New York University Press.
Steven Johnson, “The Internet,” in Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (2005), pp. 116–24. Copyright © 2005 by Steven Johnson. Used by permission of Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Andrew Keen, “Web 2.0,” in The Weekly Standard (February 14, 2006). Copyright © 2006 by Andrew Keen. Reproduced by permission of the author.
Katherine Mangu-Ward, “Wikipedia and Beyond,” in Reason magazine (June 2007). Copyright © 2007 by Reason Foundation. Reproduced by permission of Reason Foundation.
Jakob Nielsen, “Usability of Websites for Teenagers” (January 31, 2005) and “User Skills Improving, But Only Slightly” (February 4, 2008), published in Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox (http://www.useit.com). Copyright © by Jakob Nielsen. Reproduced by permission of the author.
Tim O’Reilly, “What Is Web 2.0,” and, with John Battelle, “Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On,” at http://oreilly.com (September 2005 and October 2009, respectively). Copyright © 2011 by O’Reilly Media, Inc. Abridged and reproduced by permission of O’Reilly Media, Inc.
John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, “Activists,” in Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (2008), pp. 255–67. Copyright © 2008 by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser. Abridged and reprinted by permission of Basic Books, a member of Perseus Books Group.
Marc Prensky, “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,” in On the Horizon (October 2001), pp. 1–6, and “Do They Really Think Differently?” in On the Horizon (December 2001), pp. 1–6. Copyright © 2001 by MCB UP Ltd. Reproduced by permission of the author.
Christine Rosen, “Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism,” in The New Atlantis (Summer 2007), pp. 15–31. Copyright © 2007 by Christine Rosen. Abridged and reproduced by permission of the Center for the Study of Technology and Society, Washington, D.C.
Douglass Rushkoff, “They Call Me Cyberboy,” in Time Digital; “The People’s Net,” in Yahoo Internet Life (July 2001); “Social Currency,” in TheFeature.com (September 2003). Copyright © 2001 and 2003 by Douglass Rushkoff. All writings reproduced by permission of the author.
Clay Shirky, “Means,” in Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (2010), pp. 42–64. Copyright © 2010 by Clay Shirky. Abridged and used by permission of The Penguin Press, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Lee Siegel, “A Dream Come True,” in Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob (2008), pp. 125–37. Copyright © 2008 by Lee Siegel. Used by permission of Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan, “Your Brain Is Evolving Right Now,” in iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind (2008). Copyright © 2008 by Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan. Abridged and reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Don Tapscott, “The Eight Net Gen Norms,” in Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World (2009), pp. 74-96. Copyright © 2009 by Don Tapscott. Abridged and reproduced by permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Sherry Turkle, “Identity Crisis,” in Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995), pp. 255–62. Copyright © 1995 by Sherry Turkle. Reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
Maryanne Wolf, “Learning to Think in a Digital World,” in Boston Globe (September 5, 2005). Copyright © 2007 by Globe Newspaper Company. Reproduced by permission of the author.
index
Abrams, Jonathan
Abundance
The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook—A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal
Acquisti, Alessandro
Action-and-goal-directed preparations for embodied experience
Activism
free-speech
in post-9/11 world
AdSense
Advertising
Affordances
AIDS hospices
AJAX
Akamai
Allport, Alan
All Your Base Are Belong to Us!
AlterNet
Amazon
Ambrose, Stanley
American Library Association
America Online
Amusing Ourselves to Death (Postman)
Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Nozick)
Anderson, Chris
Anderson, Dan
Ando, Kunitake
angryasianman.com
AOL
Apache
Apple
Apprentice (television series)
Aristotle
Artificial intelligence
The Asian Wall Street Journal
Assignment Zero
Atlantic Monthly
Attention
brain and
continuous partial
deficiency in
in education of Digital Natives
executive
goal-oriented behaviors and
learning and
perceptual coherence and
switch costs and
television and
working memory and
Attentional inertia
Attention spans
Attentive-user interfaces
Audiocafe.com
Augustus
Australian Football League
Authenticity
Axe
B2B websites
“Bad Romance” (song)
Banner ads
Barabási, Albert-László
Barnesandnoble.com
Baseball cards
Battelle, John
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (Chua)
Baudelaire, Charles
Bazooka
BBS. See Bulletin Board Systems
The Beauty Myth (Wolf, N.)
Bebo
Bell, Daniel
Belting, Hans
Berkman Center for Internet and Society
Best Buy
Bezos, Jeff
Biofeedback
The Biscuit Report
Bishop, Jonathan
Bit.ly
BitTorrent
BlackBerry
Black Eyed Peas
Blade phone
Blair, Ian
Blockbuster
Blogger
Blogging
Blogosphere
Bloom, Allan
Bodkin, Tom
Bomis
Bonaventure (Saint)
Bono
Bookheimer, Susan
boredatbaker.com
Boredom
Boyd, Danah
Brain
attention and
Broca’s area in
computational modeling of
development of
of Digital Immigrants
of Digital Natives
digital technology influencing
evolution and
experience and structures of
expert reading and
genetics and
Google use and
hypertext minds and
interactivity and
Internet impact on
malleability of
neuroplasticity in
reading and
retraining
sensory stimulation and
structure of
techno, burnout and
Brain gap
Brand, Stewart
Branson, Richard
Briggs, Pam
Brilliant, Larry
Brin, Sergey
Britannica Online
Broca’s area
Brooks, David
Brown, Scott
Budweiser
Bulletin Board Systems (BBS)
Bush, George W.
BusyBody
Butler, Judith
Byrne, David
CAD. See Computer-aided design
Camera phones
Campaign Wiki
Carl’s Jr.
Carr, David
Carr, Nicholas
CDDB
Cell phones
cameras in
in Kenya
task switching and
Centralization
Centre for Addiction and Mental Health
Chevy.com
Chevy Tahoe
Chua, Amy
Cicierega, Neil
Citizendium
Citizen journalism
Citizen media
Civic causes, Net Geners and
Civic disengagement
Civic engagement
Classmates.com
Click Health
Clinton, Hillary
Clocks
Cloudmark
Club Penguin
CNN
CNN Pipeline
Coates, Tom
Cognition
Digital Native differences in
Internet use and
multitasking and
Cognitive psychology
Cognitive science
Cognitive surplus
Cohan, Peter
Cohen, Leonard
Col, Cynthia
Collaboration
Collective intelligence
collegeabc.com
Comcast
Company of Friends
Complex adaptive networks
Comprehension
Compressed workweeks
Computer-aided design (CAD)
Computer games. See Video games
Computer vision
Computing Power and Human Reason: From Judgement to Calculation (Weizenbaum)
The Digital Divide Page 33