Information Law Possum (discontinued)

Niklas Luhmann explaining his Zettelkasten: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu3t_zzHJJs. (Hat tip to Andreas Böhm via Claudia.)

Today I saw that our Public TV network has been posting videos on its own YouTube channel for 10 months. Check it out: http://www.youtube.com/user/SchweizerFer….

(They’ve been publishing content over their own website for a while now.)

Given the fact that Swiss TV viewers (including me) pay a mandatory fee of 400 dollars a year, I can only welcome this added service.

Last week Urs Gasser and John Palfrey were kind enough to hold a session on their forthcoming book Born Digital for the students of the University of St. Gallen. I happily accept their invitation to further conversation beyond the printing press, so here are two afterthoughts to that session: (I consider myself a digital immigrant, just to have said this.)

My first afterthought is a political one: The fact that one generation thinks and behaves different in a (more and more) prominent aspect of life, namely long-distance communication, adds a new dimension to the pluralism our society and the law have to cope with. So to speak, a cultural minority is emerging, and it will crowd today’s majority of digital immigrants out as the decades go by. In the very long run, policy issues might come up such as enabling older people to participate in societal and cultural life that will then be dominated by digital natives, and might be inaccessible to those who can’t learn to behave like a digital native.

However, for the time being the problem of this new dimension of pluralism is different: As we can already see – and John and Urs argue in extenso –, our one-size-fits-all laws (such as privacy laws, copyright legislation, what about electoral laws? etc.) are sometimes inadequate for both digital immigrants and digital natives. From a legal point of view the challenge is to reform the law in a way that it reflects the values of digital immigrants and digital natives likewise. One might call this a sociopolitical case for cyberspace-specific legislation (and, of course, case-law), which adds to the many other reasons for treating cyber-issues different from offline issues. (In contrast to a tendency among cyber-exceptionalists I don’t have an a priori preference for looser rules as far as cyber-issues are concerned, they just ought to be adequate to the values and behavior of digital natives.)

My second afterthought is about the historical perspective: There were similar developments in the past, in which a generation grew up in a societal environment that was radically different to the collective experience of the elder generations in at least one respect. Maybe the most prominent example is the baby boomers, who had no wartime experience (at least in Europe) and were the first generation to be able to conduct reasonable family planning. (The other examples that come to my mind also have to do with wartime or politics, such as the generation that had fought in WW I, the generation in China that didn’t experience the famines and the cultural revolution under Mao, and – more recently – the Eastern Europeans who are young enough not to have lived under communist rule.)

We all know what happened in the 1960s when a huge proportion of this generation felt that the societal institutions they grew up with didn’t match their values and lifestyle. I wonder to what extent the emergence of the generation of digital natives will parallel this development, and in particular whether this will only affect cyberspace, or whether it will also spill over into “real life”. Let’s wait and see.