#IMA09: John Palfrey opening session notes

The usual caveat applies – these are notes and while I strive to be complete and to connect the dots between thoughts, there may be places where that doesn’t happen. Still, I hope this is useful.

John Palfrey
co-director, Berkman Center
author, Born Digital

It’s time to get in front of this mob and call it a parade

There are 1 billion people with access to the Internet. There’s an access gap but there’s also a participation gap.

It’s not just kids who use these tools in sophisticated ways – there are digital settlers who were born in an earlier era, who understand where the Internet is going.

Digital Natives – children born after 1980, who have an environment where they have access to the network.

• * the extent to which identity is created online as well as offline: the two are converged. There is no difference
• * multi-tasking and switch-tasking, and the impact on attention as a result
• * young people presume that the content they’re interacting with is digital. The idea is to share the content
• * young people are very good at working in teams. But the standard education environment is built around competition. Interestingly enough, once students get into the world of work, they’re expected to collaborate

- there’s an international dimension to this community (Global Voices Online is an example)

Myths That Are True

Young people do, in fact, share too much personal information in networked environments, and they don’t understand the consequences of sharing it with unintended audiences.

Young people do take content without paying for it, and share it with others. They know it’s illegal – they’re sticking it to the man. They’re confused abut their rights when it comes to using and remixing content.

Digital natives dip into news they’re interested in, or content that’s been recommended to them by their friends. They don’t go to libraries to research information – they go to Wikipedia and other sources for information, and a small percentage do additional research to verify what they research.

We’ll see people continue to turn to peers to help them discover important things, as a tool to manage information overload.

Young people can be the creators of information, as well as consumers, and we need to provide them with opportunities to do so.

Takeaways
It’s clear that the audience includes young people, and they don’t consider themselves to be just the audience. We’re all creators and audience, and everything is global, even if it crosses local, regional or national lines.

The power in public, private and other collaborations is enormous. There’s so much going on in the public sector that can connect to public media.

Bigger bets are called for at this time. This is, in fact, how people are interacting wth media. So we need to put more wood behind the arrows. This is much more mainstream than we’ve admitted so far