Tim Cole, self-proclaimed Internet Pundit and a journalist for over 20 years, gave a very frank impulse talk about his views about the role of young people and the internet today. He clearly stated that he has no idea about the profession of Youth Information as such, but is a father whose daughter has shared her father's internet affinity during her upbringing.
Cole's devil's advocate position is that grown-ups have no idea about the internet while the young people use it naturally. This again raised the question of the necessity of professional Youth Information in a world where young people are used to find informations themselves. While Tim Cole advocates the ideas and tools usually summed up as "web 2.0", he doesn't like the term as such. He prefers to call it "Mitmach-Internet" in German, meaning participation and collaboration. The internet always has been a participatory medium, even before the advent of the world wide web -- but the increase in available bandwidth and availability of tools everybody can use has taken that development to the point where it is now.
Cole's first theory was that more and more young people spend more and more time in the parallel world and lead a happy and productive life. The internet is like a physical place to them and this is not only true for virtual worlds like Second Life or World of Warcraft. This lead to Cole's second theory: "In a world of participation, people (kids especially) make up their own rules, often as the go along." This might often be incomprehensible to adults who just witness the ways of interactions young people have on the web.
Cole compared today's internet skills to very basic activities that have always been around: Blogging as such is essentially writing, like in a classic diary, and especially for young people, the writing itself is the key part, not making money by it. "Kids want to generate their own content, and the internet is giving them new tools for self-expression."
On the subject of popular social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, Cole pointed out how young people like to present themselves online, often giving away much more information publicly than is considered appropriate. Cole: "Kids want to stand out from the crowd. Forget privacy -- this is the age of the extroverts." This might lead to problems in some years' time, when kids grow up, apply for a job and everything they put online, including the embarrassing things such as videos carelessly uploaded to YouTube, is still available to the job recruiter. This is a problem that even Cole did not have an easy solution for as he found out himself how hard it is to have something erased that has been released on the web. He cited NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd: "Never do anything you dont want to see on the top favourites on YouTube." Cole's wisdom on that subject: "On the internet, nothing goes away. We must learn to live with total transparency -- even if it hurts."
In Germany, there is an online community called spickmich.de where pupils can rate their teachers. So far, four lawsuits have been filed by teachers who found their privacy invaded by this. On all four occasions, courts have turned down the issues, claiming that the right of expression for the pupils is greater than the teachers' demands for privacy. Cole: "Kids want to express their opinions. There is no way to stop them."
Even if technology companies such as Yahoo! abides censorship in China, helping the government to put a critical journalist in jail who felt safe to voice his criticism online anonymously, there are always tools to circumvent restrictions. As everyone can use them, filtering internet access does not solve any problems of blocking young people from seeing information that might not be appropriate for them. Cole's conclusion: "The world behind the computer screen contains everything our real world does -- only more so. It offers a unique opportunity to reach out and touch the lives of kids everywhere -- but only, if we learn to play by the new rules."
What do you think? Please discuss in the comments.
I also have written about Tim at my blog. There's a automatic translation in english if you don't understand it. Cheers to all!
Posted by: Rubèn Novoa | Monday, 25 February 2008 at 01:58 AM