Switch your name on Facebook, and the New York Times will declare a national movement.

Maybe that’s not exactly how it happens, but a recent Times article suggests that changing your Facebook moniker may actually be far more significant than, say, uploading a new batch of photos. The June 29th piece, which made the front page of the Times website, traces what appears to be a trend among young Obama supporters, some of whom have informally adopted the middle name Hussein to show loyalty to their candidate. Their object is twofold: first, to reject opponents’ attempts at making Obama’s middle name a campaign issue and second, to demonstrate that, in the words of blogger and Obama supporter Jeff Strabone, “We are all Hussein.” This statement is meant to be a declaration of solidarity in the vein of “I am Spartacus,” a 1960 film in which Roman slaves attempt to protect one of their number from solitary execution by declaring that they, too, are Spartacus. To this end, some Obama acolytes have not only adopted the name on Facebook, but have also begun to sign their checks with it or to have their friends append “Hussein” when addressing them. The trend only goes so far, however. As the Times reports, “Legally changing names is too much hassle, participants say, so they use ‘Hussein’ on Facebook and in blog posts and comments on sites like nytimes.com, dailykos.com and mybarackobama.com, the campaign’s networking site.”

What’s to be made of all this unofficial renaming? Is it a revolution, as the tone of the Times article seems to imply? Or is it, as the title of one critical blog suggests, only so much hot air? It’s hard not to be skeptical. The article consists mainly of testimonials from those who have already adopted the name Hussein, omitting any alternative viewpoints that might lend some perspective on the trend. To be fair, reporter Jodi Kantor does throw in one mitigating phrase about halfway through — “The movement is hardly a mass one, and it has taken place mostly online, the digital equivalent of wearing a button with a clever, attention-getting message” — but because she presents no sources or statistics to buttress it, the statement seems like an afterthought. And really, what does changing a username prove, other than the fact that you have internet access?

My initial fear in reading the article was that Kantor’s coverage only substantiates what Mark Bauerlein and others have already alleged – that today’s youth are the “Dumbest Generation,” a demographic that equates activism with fashion items and the Facebook causes everybody puts on their profile but never actually contributes to. Indeed, responses to a handful of blog posts critical of the article include such choice lines as “What a bunch of dillweeds” (at HotAir Headlines) and “Just stoopid kids” (on Sweetness and Light). The piece itself does little to counter this impression: the five newly-minted Husseins in the accompanying photo are posed more like a rock band than a group of political volunteers, and the arrangement of the subjects suggests the photographer was particularly concerned with showcasing the most photogenic members of the group. The article also dodges a more significant point – that adoption of the name among young people reflects both growing acceptance of Muslims and a rejection of the anti-Islamic sentiment often promoted by critics focused on Obama’s middle name (and yes, to say it again, Obama is Christian, not Muslim).

It appears to me that the Mark Bauerleins and Jodi Kantors of the world, despite their divergent impressions of young people, are all guilty of the same thing: oversimplification. Their portrayals of Digital Natives gloss over the legitimate and difficult work youth are doing to address a variety of international and domestic issues — whether launching NGOs like TakingITGlobal, which promotes youth activism in various social and political arenas, or running national grassroots organizations like ObamaWorks, which organizes community-oriented service projects.

Teenage frippery, which usually involves toying with identity, has always gone hand in hand with youthful idealism and achievement; nowhere is this combination more pronounced than online. As danah boyd notes, young people today are no different from the youth of generations past, and much of what they do online (hanging out, listening to music) is normal, real–life behavior that has simply been transferred to a digital space (albeit with additional opportunities and risks presented by the new medium). Just as these activities take place both online and off, so too do youth activism and political engagement. It seems that both Kantor and the advocates of the “Dumbest Generation” argument have been misled by the blurring of young people’s private and public faces, confused, perhaps, by the fact that teenagers’ shallow and serious tendencies are expressed simultaneously in the enduring public space of the web.

Kantor and reporters like her would do well to acknowledge this balance and to cover stories in a way that reflects what young people are really doing in the world today: defining themselves, determining their loyalties, and doing much more to bring about change than just tweaking their usernames.

— Nikki Leon

I am proud to be invited to write a guest post here for the Digital Natives blog of Harvard’s Berkman Center. It all started with sending an email to Urs Gasser, who is one of the heads of the team. As a Digital Native myself, I know best how they behave, how they think, and how they “work.” I know, my words reveal no new discovery, but I am not a researcher — I am just a digital native writing down his perspective…

German teenagers don’t really behave differently from their companions in the US. What is different are their primary social networks, where they upload photos, publish guestbook posts, and discuss in groups. There is StudiVZ for students or SchülerVZ for younger children. They are a complete copy cat of Facebook, which does not play a role in German children’s lives.

SchülerVZ and StudiVZ both have an enormous reach. More than 90 percent of students in my class and probably the same percentage in my age-group are registered. Those who don’t use it don’t exist. It’s often used for sharing photos; “traditional” photo sharing sites likes Flickr are not used. The two social networks don’t offer the same degree of functions and features that Facebook does (for example there is no open API), but what is interesting for me to see is the fact that they both allow you to share short messages with your friends, like Twitter does. And this feature is used a lot – believe me. But if you ask me, I would suggest they offer a txt-based Microblogging tool as well. That’s firstly a way to monetize it and secondly a new way for the users to send messages.

To speak more generally (and not simply about German youth), teenagers at large don’t have an understanding of copyright and ownership of digital goods. They want to share, want to mix, and want to edit. They can’t understand why it is not okay to go to Wikipedia, print a page, and use it for a speech. Anyway, that’s how they still do it. Most of their created presentations are totally or partly rip-offs and plagiarism. But teachers – especially the older ones – simply fail to discover them, and so it’s not punished, and there are no consequences for the students. Although they know it’s illegal, they do it, just because they can and because they know nothing else. Besides the school-related illegal sharing, there are of course downloading and sharing of songs, movies and other stuff. I don’t know whether that is because students do not have the needed money for buying every interesting movie or just because those things are too expensive.

Mobile phones are children’s toys of choice and primary tools of communication. Nearly every single person in school has one – which can be an advantage but also a torture. Cyberbullying can start with taking photos of people you don’t like and sending them to your friends or editing them with mobile photo editors. Since mobile phones became practical MP3 players, they have become a plague. Wherever you go, music played aloud bothers you if it’s not your taste of music. But, to be honest, I am one of these troublemakers myself. Teachers have to deal with that and with students playing during the lessons instead of listening.

To point out one of the major differences between students and adults: young people don’t use email to communicate with their friends. It’s just not important, because it’s just not fast enough. They use IM or social networks to communicate with their friends. That’s also a much better way to meet new people, because you don’t know what the person looks like in an email. With social networks, you even know how you are connected to them (maybe you share the same friends or attend the same school). Of course, they all have an email account (you need it to register to SchülerVZ and StudiVZ of course) but if they use it, they do so only for sending big files and attachments.

I didn’t want this to become something like egotainment, so I decided to mention the things I do last. I am 16 years old and attending Realschule in Germany but will change to a new school soon. In my later life, I want to become a journalist. I was also one of the organizors of BarCampHannover.

It was my idea in July 2007 to write a post about why we should do a BarCamp here in Hanover (known for the largest exhibition ground in the world, the EXPO2000 and the annual CeBIT). Some people answered and we formed an organization team – of which I was the youngest, followed by some university students. I was responsible for sponsoring affairs and asked some of my entrepreneur friends to help us. In February 2008, we successfully finished our work with BarCampHannover. During this time, we met several times for organizational meetings, and, because everybody knew how old I was, they all respected me, even though I “fighted” several discussions. You must know, I am not one of these guys who hides his opinion. But it was a lot of fun and a great experience for life. In addition to that, I am the organizer of Lunch 2.0 in Germany, which had its first anniversary in May.

When I first met Sören Stamer, CEO of CoreMedia AG, in August 2007, he told me about his idea of doing a workshop for teenagers to discuss things like “How has the Internet influenced your life?” or “How would you like to work in the future?”. In December, we realized this idea and created the “Delle im Universum” (Dent in the universe), where CoreMedia employees, Sören the CEO, some of their partners, I, and a friend of mine met. We talked some hours about our future plans and played foosball after the workshop in a relaxed atmosphere.

Last month, Sören attended the so-called “Deutscher IT-Gipfel” (German IT summit), organized by the German Government, where IT people and high-ranking German politicians gather to discuss ideas. In his workgroup, Sören introduced the idea of the “Delle,“ and together they fine-tuned the plan and got new ideas. One of these was a competition where teenagers can upload their thoughts in a video. The best ones, selected by a jury, will be invited to meet with the workgroup (Deutsche Telekom is one of its members) and get the chance to meet the German chancellor Angela Merkel.

I liked organizing the BarCamp. Because I am a teenager and want to spread the thoughts we have, I am tinkering with the idea of organizing another conference, maybe even an unconference, about Teens in the Internet. There are already plans to do something similar in Germany, but with a different focus: while I want to gather people within this context and have experts talk about this topic (even older ones), the other unconference currently in development would have younger bloggers go to a BarCamp. The issue is really unresolved, and I am still searching for people to help me. If you are interested, use the email address below.

In case you have any questions, would like to give feedback, or just want to get in touch, here’s how: mail at timoheuer com (I choose email to demonstrate that not all the teenagers don’t use it..)

— Timo Heuer

If you were intrigued by our last post, which touched on a TPM Café discussion between Clay Shirky and danah boyd concerning the nature, essentially, of geekdom, you might enjoy Chapter 1 of Christopher M. Kelty’s Two Bits. As Kelty described at this week’s Berkman Luncheon, the book’s opener is an anthropological essay on geeks. Now, Kelty’s definition focuses on geeks as the technologically innovative tour de force responsible for the Internet (and not on Digital Native geeks), but he does acknowledge the origins of geek subculture:

Until the mid-1990s, hacker, geek, and computer nerd designated a very specific type: programmers and lurkers on relatively underground networks, usually college students, computer scientists, and “amateurs” or “hobbyists.” A classic mock self-diagnostic called the Geek Code, by Robert Hayden, accurately and humorously detailed the various ways in which one could be a geek in 1996—UNIX/ Linux skills, love/hate of Star Trek, particular eating and clothing habits—but as Hayden himself points out, the geeks of the early 1990s exist no longer. The elite subcultural, relatively homogenous group it once was has been overrun: “The Internet of 1996 was still a wild untamed virgin paradise of geeks and eggheads unpopulated by script kiddies, and the denizens of AOL. When things changed, I seriously lost my way. I mean, all the ‘geek’ that was the Internet was gone and replaced by Xfiles buzzwords and politicians passing laws about a technology they refused to comprehend.”

Check out the rest of the book, which is under a CC Non-Commercial, Attribution, ShareAlike license so you can mix and mash it.

– Nikki Leon

Clay Shirky, in discussing his new book at TPM Café, concludes with the following question(s):

I can imagine that however unjust it may be to be relegate to the status of a despised cubicle rat, it’s gotta be worse to be a d.c.r. who doesn’t kick ass at WoW. The question it leaves me with is this: if we have a way of increasing people’s satisfaction with their activities in flexible social spaces, is that a net gain, because it increases satisfaction, or is it a net loss, because blissing out on our local social contexts lowers our sense of injustice, in a way that makes us less likely to fight against it?

Also at TPM Café, danah responds:

It is possible to gain satisfaction from achieving high status in World of Warcraft, even if popularity there is quite niche. In our ethnographic study of new media and youth culture, the Digital Youth group at Berkeley and USC also found that many youth involved in interest-driven digital practices rejected traditional status markers in preference for those that could be achieved in subcultures… [But] just because status markers can be rearranged does not mean that they universally are.

…

For most teens, the status that matters is that which is conferred in everyday life. Everyday friendship and dating matter more to them than the connections that they make online. This isn’t that surprising because, for as much time as teens spend online, they spend very little engaging with strangers and far more connected to people that they know. Finding interesting music videos or gross-out content online may heighten status amongst peers if this content is valued, but becoming popular with strangers online does not transfer to popularity offline.

I agree with danah here, but think there’s also more reason for hope regarding the value of online popularity. For introverted – nerdy, geeky, etc. – kids, online activity can be a source of validation absent elsewhere in their lives, and sometimes that affirmation can transfer back to their off-line lives either as greater self-confidence or, in some cases, more local social capital. In the upcoming Born Digital, John Palfrey and Urs Gasser focus on the case of one introverted teen who was not classically popular – until word made it back to his school that he was a successful and popular video mash-up artist online.

Certainly there’s a n=1 danger here – most nerdy, socially awkward kids will remain, as ever, at the lower rungs of the social totem poll in high school (saying this as a proud alumnus of the class of nerdy, socially awkward kids), and danah also relates the thoughts of,

Dominic, a 16-year old from Seattle: “I don’t really think popularity would transfer from online to offline because you’ve got a bunch of random people you don’t know it’s not going to make a difference in real life, you know? It’s not like they’re going to come visit you or hang out with you. You’re not like a celebrity or something.”

Bringing this back around to Shirky’s original question – will this dull our sense of injustice? I would ring in here with a full-throated “NO.” What Shirky is really talking about when he says “blissing out in our local social contexts” is a very old idea, and a powerful one – you say esprit de corps, I say solidarity. Building social capital is a good thing, no matter how local it might be, because the alternative (could be) a society atomized down to the most basic component level of the individual. That doesn’t work, Thatcherite critiques notwithstanding: we’re social creatures, happiest and best when we’re most social. ICTs at their best can be a tools in creating greater solidarity among citizens: more people with a sense that working together and towards a common purpose might, as a general principle, be a good thing. And in my book, there are few goals more worthy than that. A generation raised with practice building solidarity – even if it is with “random people” (indeed, perhaps especially if it’s with random people) – is a hopeful sign for society.

–Jacob Kramer-Duffield

Are Digital Natives forgetting how to remember? This was Anne Balsamo’s parting suggestion at the Berkman luncheon last Tuesday, and it chilled the gathering instantly. Up to that point, Balsamo’s talk had been largely upbeat, a primer on the power of what she calls the “technological imagination” — the “quality of mind the enables people to think with technology, to transform what is known into what is possible, and to evaluate the consequences of such creation from multiple perspectives” (as she explains in her essay “Taking Culture Seriously”). Balsamo highlighted many positive aspects of the Digital Age, including the development of new kinds of literacy and the transformative influence of technology on education and art. Nevertheless, her final thought reminded us that with the great gains of digital technology come inalterable change and inevitable loss.

What Balsamo intimated was this: Digital Natives are unconcerned with remembering events and data because they can usually find the information they need online. My own experience indicates this is true. Take, for example, the act of remembering the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. In a pre-internet age, a young person might have felt compelled to memorize its approximate date, the circumstances that led to its collapse, and, just maybe, the fact that someone named Edward Gibbon wrote a giant book about it. A Digital Native, on the other hand, can say, “I’ll look it up later on Wikipedia,” and leave it at that. This nonchalance towards remembering facts applies to experiences as well. For Digital Natives, a party, rock concert, or political rally is no longer a prized moment shared with a select few, no longer an ephemeral event that will live on only if attendees choose to remember it. Before a concert has even begun, before tickets are even available, a Digital Native can network with other fans, buy merchandise at the band’s website, or download tracks that will be played live on stage. If a Digital Native can’t make it to a political rally, he or she need only follow the event’s twitter feed. And if the Digital Native can’t remember what, exactly, he or she did last night, no matter – it’s all been recorded in a friend’s Facebook photo album for the entire school to see. In Balsamo’s view, the Internet has become a prosthetic memory; as Digital Natives rely on it, their own capacity for recall only grows weaker.

These days, it seems the cry of memory has never been louder. We are told to “never forget” 9/11, urged, in the face of Darfur, to remember the Holocaust. Amidst all this remembering, the Internet breeds crisis. On the one hand, anything we do online — be it traveling from page to page or uploading content — is logged. Our information persists whether we want it to or not, preserved by the collective digital memory of the web. On the other hand, as Balsamo puts it, “Every day, the web forgets more than it remembers.” The face of the Internet can change in an instant: a headline altered to reflect breaking news, a picture photo-shopped to exclude political dissidents. While proof of all these changes should be lurking in a cache somewhere, the sheer volume of information online can prevent the average person from finding it. Web users, too, exercise willful forgetfulness. As blogosphere culture demonstrates, new is in. Old news is no news.

All the same, this “memory crisis” may not be so new. Older generations have also experienced great and terrible things to remember – The Revolution, the Great War, Vietnam. Always, it seems someone is urging us to remember something. This is not, moreover, the first time technology has changed the nature of memory itself. With the advent of writing came the fear that people would lose the ability to recite oral histories; the art form would disappear, and history would be forgotten. Although many did lose that bardic skill, it was a small price to pay for the birth of a new art form, a new way to log history, and a new way to spread knowledge.

So, how do we deal with the changing state of memory today? As when writing became widespread, we will have to recalibrate our notions of what it means to remember. We need to exercise the “technological imagination” Balsamo describes, to “think” with our technology and examine how we can harness it in service of, and not counter to, memory. Memory in a Digital Age is collaborative. Whereas one person could easily forget the details of an event, a community of users can now swap pictures and stories to let the moment endure. As a result, facts and experiences take on their own life, presences greater than any one person could render. At the same time, the web’s shifting nature demonstrates that experiences – and our memories of them – are as tenuous as ever, that they are something to be cherished. Perhaps the Internet can actually teach us reverence for memory. If that is the lesson to be learned, it is no wonder internet-savvy thinkers like Balsamo are so concerned with remembering to remember.

– Nikki Leon

(Special thanks to Jacob Kramer-Duffield for his thoughts on the impact of writing.)

(cross-posted from John Palfrey’s blog)

The first book that I read in the series of MacArthur/MIT Press’s Digital Media and Learning series was “The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning”, edited by game designer and educator Katie Salen (open access version here). As with the other books in the series, it’s a very important contribution to the scholarly literature of a nascent field. (I’ve come back to Salen’s work just as Urs Gasser and I are turning in the final, final version of our forthcoming book, Born Digital.) “The Ecology of Games” is an excellent primer on where innovation is happening at the intersection between games and learning and where future avenues for research offer promise.

The first essay, Salen’s “Toward an Ecology of Gaming,” sets the frame for the collection. She recounts, helpfully, those things that “we” know already: “… that play is iterative as is good learning, and that gaming is a practice rooted in reflection in action, which is also a quality of good learning. We know games are more than contexts for the production of fun and deliver just-in-time learning, the development of specialist language, and experimentation with identity and point of view. We know games are procedurally based systems embedded within robust communities of practice. We know that video games and gaming have done much to shape our understanding and misunderstanding of the post-Nintendo generation, and hold a key place in the minds of those looking to empower educators and learners. Beyond their value as entertainment media, games and game modification are currently key entry points for many young people into productive literacies, social communities, and digitally rich identities.” (pp. 14 – 15) She ends her chapter with five unanswered questions, each worth reflecting and working on. (p. 15)

James Paul Gee’s “Learning and Games” gives an overview of what “good game design” can “teach us about good learning” and vice-versa (p. 21). He offers these insights through what he calls the “situated learning matrix.” (pp. 24 – 31) The most illuminating part of his essay for me was the discussion of the ways in which young people form cross-functional teams within gaming environments — and his view of the excellent training opportunities these contexts could hold in terms of training them for workplace experiences. (p. 33)

In “In-Game, In-Room, In-World: Reconnecting Video Game Play to the Rest of Kids’ Lives,” three authors (Reed Stevens, Tom Satwicz, and Laurie McCarthy) take up a great topic: “whether playing these games affects kids’ lives when the machine is off.” (p. 41) The key insight for me was the notion of identity: “… young people are indeed forming identities in relation to video games. The idea that they can do things in the game that they cannot do in the real world is only part of the story; the other half is that they hold actions that they control in-game in regular comparative contact with the consequences, and morality, of those actions in the real world. Actions in games, then, are a resource for building identities in the real world, occurring through a reflective conversation that takes place in-room.” (p. 62)

“E is or Everyone: The Case for Inclusive Game Design,” by Amit Pitaru, followed a different structure than most other essays in the series. It’s told as a story about the researcher’s time with students at the Henry Viscardi School in Albertson, NY, a “remarkable school” that “educates approximately 200 pre-K to twenty-one-year-old students with a variety of physical disabilities and medical needs.” (p. 68)

Through this narrative, Pitaru offers insights on many levels. The essence of the argument is that a lack of play among children poses dangers, many of which can be avoided through digital games when set in the proper context. Pitaru claims further that digital games “provide a viable complementary activity to existing mediated forms of play” for children with disabilities.” (p. 85) I wondered, at the end, how many educators would agree with Pitaru, and where other experimentation is happening.

Mimi Ito, as usual, offers an extraordinarily helpful essay. If you read any single essay from the DML series, read this one: “Education vs. Entertainment: A Cultural History of Children’s Software.” The topic is genres of participation. She tells a story about “commercial children’s software, designed to be both fun and enriching, lies at the boundary zone between the resilient structures of education and entertainment that structure contemporary childhoods in the United States.” (p. 89) Ito gives an instructive history of the development of games for kids along with a genuinely useful analytical frame and a clear conclusion. She writes, “If I were to place my bet on a genre of gaming that has the potential to transform the systemic conditions of childhood learning, I would pick the construction genre.” (p. 115) Here’s to tinkering (and to Mimi’s great work).

In “The Rhetoric of Video Games,” Ian Bogost makes an intriguing argument in favor of “procedural rhetoric” via games. In his view, this approach could enable the questioning of the values behind certain professional practices instead of their blind assumption. (p. 130) I’m not sure I completely got his argument, but it was useful and provocative to puzzle it through.

Anna Everett, the editor of another volume in the series, and S. Craig Watkins offer a counterpoint to much of the rest of the book, exploring ways in which games and other immersive environments are not always socially productive. (p. 143) It’s a helpful reminder and a useful link to the DML series book on race.

The most interesting data that is presented in the book comes from the private sector: Cory Ondrejka, then of Linden Labs/Second Life and the Annenberg School (now headed to an exciting new job…), points out some usage statistics about SL in “Education Unleashed: Participatory Culture, Education, and Innovation in Second Life.” The most striking — and hopeful — figure was his note that 67% (sixty-seven percent) of respondents to a survey of Teen Second Life users “had written at least one program using the scripting language.” (p. 239) Of course it is a tiny sample (384) of self-selected young people, but the tinkering spirit that Mimi Ito highlights in her essay is alive and well in the people that Ondrejka heard from.

Salen, Ito and Ondrejka’s essays, among others in the book, led me to a conclusion out of the book: in some contexts, great forms of learning may come for some students using well-designed games, primarily of the construction genre. There’s not yet sufficient evidence here, in my view, to turn over our entire educational system to games and virtual worlds, but there’s plenty to learn from what some young people are doing in these environments during school time and otherwise.

It’s not controversial to note that the meaning of words changes over time. Within the same language, different groups and cultures use the same words to different ends, or different words to the same end. It is widely noted (as so often happens when there is a linguistic shift) that Digital Natives not only alter the meaning of pre-established words but also change more basic elements of language like sentence structure, spelling, and capitalization. While many self-appointed defenders of language bemoan IM and SMS shorthand, 1337 culture, and LOLcat macros, I think that they demonstrate not the intellectual laziness but the creative depth of online culture. Creating new, highly phoneticized spellings for words is not an abuse of language but a respect for the medium and playfulness with it.

So what to make of the usage of “pirate” and “piracy”? Once conveying bloodthirsty terror, “pirate” to most Americans today evokes images of lovable rogues. Holders of copyrighted materials have used pirate to describe infringing users for at least a few hundred years, with mixed results. Pirate radio of the 1970s was largely stamped out as buccaneers of the Main were — with the force of governments — but piracy in software and media is proving more difficult to address. There are a variety of reasons for this, and the term “pirate” itself is changing in ways that were difficult to predict. Physical piracy in software and media (that is, where DVDs or CDs are produced to imitate [usually poorly] the real thing) in developing countries is difficult to the point of near-impossibility, given that (i) a “legal” license for Microsoft Vista can run to several months’ wages for most workers, and (ii) the copyright holders are often half a world away. Some governments at the behest of media and software companies have begun to crack down on the mass piracy of those materials, but realistically stand little chance of doing anything more than diverting current distribution channels to more distributed ones. Rich countries, with more enforcement resources, do not have the same problems with counterfeit physical goods.

Rather, the North has a booming trade in online piracy. Media organizations such as the MPAA have, as readers will be aware, propagated a maximalist definition of piracy:

Movie pirates are thieves, plain and simple. Piracy is the unauthorized taking, copying or use of copyrighted materials without permission. It is no different from stealing another person’s shoes or stereo, except sometimes it can be a lot more damaging.

Many – Digital Natives especially – are unconvinced, and might respond “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” At the top of that list would have to be Rickard Falvinge, founder of the Pirate Party in Sweden. He talked about this explicitly in a 2006 interview with Wikinews:

The name “Pirate Party” seems to identify the party with what is currently defined as a crime: piracy of software, movies, music, and so on. Will a name like “Pirate Party” not antagonize voters, given that the label is so negatively used? How about potential allies abroad who argue for a more balanced copyright regime, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation or Creative Commons?

Oh, it is a crime. That’s the heart of the problem! The very problem is that something that 20% of the voters are doing is illegal by punishment of jail time. That’s what we want to change. Where the established parties are saying that the voters are broken, we are saying it’s the law that is broken.

Besides, it’s a way of reclaiming a word. The media conglomerates have been pointing at us and calling us pirates, trying to make us somehow feel shame. It doesn’t work. We wear clothes saying “PIRATE” in bright colors out on the streets. Yes, we are pirates, and we’re proud of it, too.

Well-crafted public relations campaigns can have enormous influence on public attitudes and behavior, but campaigns of linguistic meaning are a trickier business. Meaning is constructed in practice, and the ultimate success of either the MPAA or the Pirate Party will be based not just on what they convince the public piracy “means” but on the value judgments that the public places on that meaning and their own behaviors.

So – are you a pirate?

–Jacob Kramer-Duffield

With Berkman’s summer term in full swing, the Digital Natives blog is back! Check regularly for more thoughts from our principle investigators, fellows, research assistants, and (a new cast of) interns. Also in store for the summer: a slew of audio and video podcasts, as well as the publication of John Palfrey and Urs Gasser’s Born Digital. For the time being, enjoy this post.

Now that much of the initial press reaction to Barack Obama’s Democratic nomination has surfaced, it seems time to offer a perspective from the Digital Natives Project, one informed both by youth culture and by contemporary academic theories of citizenship and education. Obama’s appeal is frequently discussed in terms of the former – his message of change, his success as a brand, his youth – but rarely is it explored simultaneously from the standpoint of a young person and of an academic (though I’m admittedly still pretty green).

Digital Natives are different from their parents not only because of what they do online but because of the way they learn, and this affects their political involvement directly. Henry Jenkins of MIT’s New Media Literacies Project writes that Digital Natives engage best in “participatory cultures” fostered by the web, environments

with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another.

Clear examples of participatory culture include SNSs, like Facebook and MySpace, and content-sharing websites such as Flickr and YouTube. My.BarackObama, a campaign-supported SNS that lets supporters form groups, blog, plan events, and raise money, is built on this model. I do not bring up My.BarackObama to rehash discussions of how it capitalizes on the social networking trend; that has already been addressed both by youth and by the press (as a quick Google search of “Obama youth appeal” reveals). Rather, I urge you to pay attention to a specific characteristic of participatory culture that Jenkins names — the aspect of “mentorship” – and consider its implications here. Participatory culture is, among many things, educational. Perhaps Obama’s campaign is appealing not only for its style, but also because it encourages a learning-by-doing approach to civics, aided by interaction with peers and more experienced political activists, that engages DNs with the topic in a way their school programs may not.

This is not to say that all Digital Natives are consciously seeking lessons in politics. Instead, DNs are most likely drawn to the sense of empowerment that comes in gaining such knowledge. This stands in sharp contrast to the civics education offered in most public schools. As Lance Bennett of the Center for Communication and Civic Education at the University of Washington points out, mainstream civics courses are often taught in a rote, top-down fashion, rather than in the peer-oriented, interactive style Digital Natives prefer. The testing-driven environment of public schools also inhibits civics education. Consequently, 27% of students failed a national civics test administered in 2007 (the test is given every five years). Princeton professor Theodore K. Rabb told the Times this was “not anything to break out the Champagne over[.]” It appears mainstream civics education is outdated – with an emphasis on mainstream news over citizen journalism, voting over activism – and as such, does little to introduce students to the process of political involvement in a digital age, let alone instill them all with permanent knowledge (Bennett writes about this in the aforelinked essay). Movements like Obama’s, on the other hand, transform students into learners and activists immediately by allowing them to engage online. Obama’s SNS has become a new kind of civics instructor, and as November approaches, McCain would be wise to heed the shift as well.

– Nikki Leon

Cross-posted from the blog of a soon-to-be Digital Natives summer intern—Nikki Leon, from Princeton.
Welcome to the team, Nikki! Original version, with links, here.

Seth Priebatsch is pretty damn smart — and I’m not just saying that because he’s a Princeton Engineer. This afternoon, with the help of computer programmers (and fellow Princeton frosh) Josh Budofsky and Val Karpov, Priebatsch launched the first-ever SCVNGR hunt. SCVNGR hunt is a new kind of treasure hunt that combines the immediacy (and product promo potential) of mobile technology with the running, clue-solving, and team play of a traditional scavenger hunt. There were over a hundred players — Princeton students participating both alone and in teams — who registered by texting to the designated SCVNGR short code. They then received various clues urging them to go to specific locations on the Princeton campus and/or to send back a txt or picture (snapped on their phones, no less) containing the solution to a given clue. Prizes included a Nintendo Wii, gift certificates, and, of course, a free hat.

SCVNGR (Priebatsch’s startup, which hosted the SCVNGR hunt) is remarkable because it is representative of two New Media trends. The first of these is a shift towards using mobile technology to link digital interaction to a specific location in order to foster more personal, face-to-face contact. This trend has already been evinced by a few digital signage firms. Among these is LocaModa, a Cambridge, MA company that provides the technology for people to interact on large screens in public places with their mobile phones (in February, they launched a giant digital word game called Jumbli on a screen in Times Square). The second trend SCVNGR indicates is simply that of the rise of the “Digital Native” (i.e. those of us raised in an already-digital world). Most notably, Priebatsch, Budofsky, and Karpov are not just digesting pre-existing digital content, but they are expanding platforms for new content as well.

SCVNGR gives me hope for the Digital Native. The group’s efforts seem to counteract the one thing that has always bothered me about “DNs” (and I am definitely one myself): DNs’ very ease with and dependance on digital media makes them especially vulnerable to the tricks of advertisers and other profit-interested businesspeople of a slightly older generation. This is because the web is a platform like no other for tracking personal data and launching complex adver-experiences. Examples of this are product sponsored online advergames like the Coke Zero Game; info-snooping, advertiser-oriented apps like Facebook’s Beacon; and the strange quasi-webseries / quasi-social-network quarterlife, which features plenty of product placement. SCVNGR, however, is a sign that Digital Natives are gaining the ability to cater to each other and not just be catered to (and manipulated). Granted, SCVNGR is for-profit, and Priebatsch is a shrewd businessman whose prior experience in the digital postcard business shows: after my 90 minutes of SCVNGR participation, I was rewarded with a coupon to a local ice cream shop. All the same, the fact that a fellow DN is behind both the promo and the game makes me somewhat more comfortable — it’s a sign that the process of creating digital content has been democratized.

I have no doubt that SCVNGR will be successful, though to what degree I can’t predict. SCVNGR, or at least its concept, has already seen approval: in February, Priebatsch won the TigerLaunch Business Plan Competition with his plans for the startup. Using their new funding, Priebatsch, Budofsky, and Karpov are relocating SCVNGR to Philadelphia this summer and will have some new additions to the company.

There’s no website yet, but check out the SCVNGR hunt event on facebook, and an article in the Daily Princetonian.

[UPDATE]: See SCVNGRhunt.com.

Today, we at the Digital Natives project held our first Digital Natives Forum. With so many great people in attendance, the discussion was really thought provoking. Check out the video, soon to be posted on the Berkman site.

Andrea Flores and John Francis from Harvard Graduate School of Education’s GoodPlay project started off by presenting some initial findings from their research of young people and ethics online. They described the opportunities online tools give young people to explore their identities in new ways, and how these identities are tied to new norms and conceptions of privacy arising among the digital generation. Also, that young people tend to be concerned about privacy only if they perceive dire consequences to such a compromise.

Judith Donath responded by pointing out the persistence of the ephemeral. Disclosures that young people make online now may not seem important – or to have dire consequences – but what happens twenty years from now?

With this, discussion got started.

We have the ability to track people’s past to an unprecedented degree, as young people traverse online territories, compiling their digital dossiers

So what do we do?

Spell (or draw) it out: Tools need to be better built, for sure, to help clue users in to just how visible one’s personal information is, how much information is being collected by various parties, how this information moves through space. Donath touched on an idea of exploring what it means to be photographed in public spaces: a hidden camera, vs. a subtle-yet-noticeable camera, vs. a very explicit camera. How might we behave differently in front of each one? How may we build social tools online and in digital space that may visibly reflect the privacy individuals compromise when they engage?

Educate, educate, educate! How do we instill ethics? How do we teach the importance of privacy, both protecting your own, and respecting others?

And finally, John Palfrey pushed things a bit further. Education is surely very important in this arena, to empower youth with the critical skills needed to navigate safely and ethically in the arena. And so are better tools, in order to display appropriate information for us to make good decisions, and to encourage thoughtful engagement with what it is we do when we share personal information online. But, is this enough?

No. Laws need to change. As it stands now, we as individuals have very little rights over our personal information. Once we tick the box of the Terms of Service, we very often give complete and total power to the platform to do what they will with everything we share through these services. John suggests that this needs to change: Individuals must have legal ownership and control over their data. Only then will we be able to both live digitally, and retain some control over our sense of privacy.

– Miriam Simun

« Previous Page — Next Page »