Category Archives: Digital Natives

Mimi Ito, Howard Rheingold on "Digital Kids"

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The cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito has a lot to say about kids and learning in a digital era. It’s a great topic, and her work is very important (the MacArthur Foundation agrees; she’s got a multi-year grant from them to study it). She is working with Howard Rheingold, of SmartMobs fame. He blogged it on the Annenberg DIY Media site. There’s a great overview of a recent presentation, plus helpful links, if you are interested in the topic. Via Joichi Ito.

Following up on the RSS/Copyright debate

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In the past few weeks, I’ve gotten several fresh calls, four in fact (some out of the blue, some from people I know well) about RSS, aggregation, and copyright issues. I think the matter continues to have traction and importance. Two follow-ups:

– I never managed, somehow, to see a very fine reply from Nathan Yergler to a post of my own a few months ago. I had proposed a series of 5 licenses specific to syndicated online sources. (I understand that Nathan works for CC in a technical job but was not writing as a CC employee.) His sense is that there is a need for more explicit licensing of citizen-generated content, but that CC licenses (and other things, like full copyright and the public domain) already cover the five variants that I had in mind. It’s a nice argument. I have to think about whether I agree in full — there are reasons why CC Attribution 2.5 may not get the job done in full for all users, say — but if he’s right, then we’d need no new licenses, but just a campaign to get people to know about the options and to use them in ways that reflect their desires related to aggregation and re-use of their content. (Apologies, Nathan, that I’m just getting to reply now, but I managed to miss it the first time; it was a strong argument.)

– Ethan Zuckerman had a terrific post, and engendered more discussion, on just this topic. As Ethan writes, “I want to see Creative Commons succeed. I share Larry Lessig’s concern that artists of all sorts need material to enter the public domain so that we can comment, remix, repurpose and create. I release (with very rare exceptions) everything I do under CC in the vague hope that someone else will find it useful. But widespread abuse of content published under CC licenses will make creators – me included – reluctant to release content under them.”

These posts prompted me to reflect on another matter much on my mind, which is the difference between holding intellectual property rights in the first place and in enforcing them. Admittedly: I am not a fan of a strong view of copyright. Nor, for that matter, do I think may forms of patents make much sense at all, at least in anything like the form that they currently take. That is not to say, though, that I think it’s immoral or otherwise bad to hold IP rights. I think that authors or recording artists or those who make movies should be compensated; I’m not a fan of piracy. The fact that things are right now out of whack in the IP realm (see Lessig’s permission culture argument, among many other good articulations of the problem, and any number of people who have pointed out silly patents getting issued) and the fact that pre-digital IP laws are looking a bit long in the tooth in a world packed with digital natives do not change the fact that I want there to be an incentive to create and for fairness to reign in the world (i.e., for artists and inventors to be able to make a living).

What I’m coming to think is that, absent systemic reform, holding IP rights, some of which, like copyright, attach automatically, is not the primary issue. The issue is much more about what rights we choose to enforce against others and how we do it. The issue is also whether we have a system of accountability where, when we do give away some rights that otherwise would attach, we can hold others to the rights we’ve chosen to retain. This is a sticky problem, especially when choices about enforcement could, recursively I suppose, affect those rights themselves. (An issue for another day, but: this is true also of the tiny start-up that holds a software patent for defensive purposes, to create freedom of action against incumbents, and perhaps who licenses it to other firms for similar purposes. The issue is whether those rights are exercised in an appropriate manner.)

I think a key next step in the RSS and copyright discussion may not be new licenses (if Mr. Yergler is right; or perhaps tweaked ones, if that would help; or perhaps repackaged ones, so ordinary people can figure it out), but rather 1) a clearer common understanding of what people mean when they in fact license their works in this fashion and 2) appropriate systems to enforce those rights when they’re being flagrantly violated. Of course, the copyright system works just fine on this second score (perhaps too well, sometimes!), but I suppose that those of us who are wildly supportive of CC as an essential add-on to the copyright regime may have to be willing to step up and file cease-and-desist letters where necessary (polite ones, perhaps!), even as distateful as that may seem. A great deal, it seems to me, hangs in the balance of getting it right, if the trends in creativity online, syndication, search, and aggregation continue on their current trajectory.

Re-envisioning privacy and security online

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The combination of our conference this week on digital identity, JZ’s paper and forthcoming book on Generativity and his OII inaugural lecture, this morning’s WSJ, and all manner of other things has convinced me that we need a new framework for thinking about privacy and security in the digital world.

On a plane this morning from SFO-PDX, I read found (at least) three articles that made this problem plain to me, again. One was the piece on the Consumer Privacy Legislative Forum’s day on the Hill yesterday (see the CDT et al. statement), in the context of which Meg Whitman of eBay and Nicole Wong of Google and others made the case for laying “a foundation for a long-term approach to privacy protection” (Whitman, as quoted in the WSJ). Wong wrote, correctly in my view, that “this matrix of [privacy/security] laws is complex, incomplete and sometimes contradictory.” She went on to say: “On an Internet beset with spyware, malware, phishing, identity-theft, and other privacy threats, enforcement of privacy protections has become an industry-wide challenge.” The WSJ story on MySpace and its advertiser relationships — in the wake of a $30 million lawsuit against the company related to online safety of a user — made the same point, implicitly. A nice Web2.0 story on Boston-based Tabblo didn’t have to make the point that anyone can post online photos about anyone, mash them up into a collage, and publish — to anyone else, and everyone else.

The creative opportunities of the web have never been more wonderful and should be embraced. But the privacy and security stakes are rising as we bring our digital identities come online, more and more, and as our digital native children start to experience the good and the bad of this brave new world. What’s the role of schools, and universities, and parents, and kids, and companies, and governments? As the wisdom of the crowd is relied upon to make more and more decisions, what’s the due process when your privacy and security is at stake, if things go wrong? JZ has some good ideas, and so do others. We need to get on with the planning and the building of this foundation, and fast.

(If you’re having trouble grasping the digital ID part of this equation, zip over to ZDNet, where David Berlind does his usual amazingly lucid job of putting it all in context in his review of the Higgins Trust Framework — and n.b. the “spectrum” that he describes, which is right on. Berlind writes: “By the end of the panel, I was visualizing a spectrum of attitudes about technological expression of identity that range from the very negative to the very positive. On one end are the warning signs about what could happen if the right checks, balances, and governance aren’t in place. On the other end is hope. Hope that idenitity could be tapped in a fashion that serves the greater social good.”)

Digital Natives, take 2

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In Ithaca, I am the guest of the Cornell LLM Association for its event on “Emerging Legal Challenges for International Law in the Cyber Age,” the 3rd annual LLM Inter-University Conference — quite a cool thing, and I’m grateful to be here. It’s lovely on campus. People seem in a great mood.

But what do they mean exactly, I wonder, by the “Cyber Age”?

It has me thinking about the idea of Digital Natives. The term has been in use for some years, maybe first coined by Marc Prensky in 2001 in an article, “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.” It’s a helpful challenge, to try to understand what changes, in law and society, as a generation comes of age whose members have not had to learn digital things, but rather have always interacted in a digital environment. It seems to me that this orientation is helpful in looking across a set of issues.

The hallmarks of the generation that is now in universities, and about to join the workforce, are a bit different than when Prensky wrote his article, but some of the challenges are the same. I think that we’re already into a second Cyber Age, perhaps, and a first true generation of Digital Natives (I know, it’s so cool to call things on the web “2.0” these days, but it seems relevant here, too, somehow). The first generation and set of issues was framed by Nicholas Negroponte on the front end; it was the world that Lawrence Lessig captured so effectively in Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace in 1999. Many of those issues, especially of control and of the interaction between technologies and law and markets and social norms, persist. The opportunities, though, have only gotten greater — and the stakes for understanding this new crop of digital natives all that much higher.

One important attribute is the shift from consumers of information in the media environment to digital natives who are at once consumers, creators, and evaluators of information in digital form. These creators do their art in written, audio, video, and mashed-up formats, often online, always digitally. They use MySpace and Facebook and LiveJournal; they blog, podcast, make music, make art, borrow stuff, reuse stuff, steal some stuff; they IM and Skype and text more than “call long distance.” They multitask and love massive multiplayer online games, as Beth Noveck (the “Queen of Video Games” in the legal scholarship world) has observed. They have Second Lives.

Another is the aspect that Prensky focused on: they are different kinds of students. The manner in which digital natives learn, and digital immigrants teach — and the widening gulf between them — is still poorly understood. Pedagogically, we teachers are in a weird place.

Then there’s the digital workforce, as these students prepare to enter into the job market: how they look for jobs and how they do them is different from even those 10 years older. And the way that employers — clients of Monster, of Craig’s List, and lurkers in Facebook — find and evaluate and train them.

And digital citizens, one hopes, might be different too — more engaged in civic life than a famously apathetic generation older. Yochai Benkler has a forthcoming book, The Wealth of Networks, that states quite beautifully the possibilities and the challenges laden in this aspiration.

More relevant to what I have to say tomorrow morning: what does the Cyber Age mean for international law? In part, it means understanding Digital Natives and thinking through challenges for the law — the sorts of challenges taken up by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu in their new book, Who Controls the Internet?, and those digging into the internet governance debate. It’s plainly of relevance to those who care about intellectual property law in a Cyber Age, just as Terry Fisher starts out Promises to Keep with a description of one of his twenty-something daughters’ media consumption habits. It’s also critical that those who want to teach international law see the connections between digital natives across cultures and the complex world that they’re maturing into, and will come to lead.