John Palfrey and Erin Mishkin are leading a Tuesday lunchtime talk at the Berkman Center about the “digital natives” project, which “explores what it means to be born digital.” The hypothesis is that there’s a gap between those born digital and those who came to it at some point in their lives…and the gap is larger than we think.

JP acknowledges right at the beginning that many others know much more than the people on the project do about what’s goin’ on with the kids. He hopes that a formal project will emerge from the past few years of informal research and discussion. From the project he hopes will come public policy suggestions that reflect the differences. E.g., privacy laws reflect digital immigrants’ assumptions

Those who were born digital have a sense that they’re always on. (The project will involve research beyond the US, by the way.) JP now goes through some of the slides from the talk he gave at the Internet & Society 2007 on June 1. Stray points from what he says today:

– Online identities frequently are made to be different from the rw identity “because I can.”

– The most important global trend that ties natives to one another is that they’re creators. (He shows a bunch of great clips by kids and amateurs.)

– What might privacy law and policy look like if it reflected the digital native ethos? E.g., FaceBook and MySpace give a good set of controls, although they’re hard to use. But what happens if a friend posts an embarrassing photo of you? At FaceBook, you can remove it, but not at all networking sites. Or suppose a friend posts at Flickr an embarrassing photo of you and tags it with your name. You can’t get rid of it. Finally, imagine a friend posts the same photo of you, but doesn’t tag it with your name…but a face recognition system does. All these are google-able and part of your online identity. How should public policy reflect and react?

– JP’s got a book deal, with Urs Gasser, from Basic Books. It’s out in 2008, and it’s aimed at lawyers.

Now Erin talks about the project. They’ll be doing a bunch of interviews.

They had a logo contest for people under 18 and got 200 entries. A 15 year old Brit won.

There is then lively discussion about the questions the project should be asking. Too rollicking to blog well. So, I’ll blog it badly. The following points and questions were raised by various people:

If the technology is transforming the way natives “socialize, engage in the political process, and engage themselves” (which JP and Erin pose as a question, but which I’m taking as an assertion), then how can policy created by immigrants and stay-at-home reflect that? How can policy keep up with “quicksilver”?

What’s the driving force? Technology? Social norms? Policy?

The interviews may affect the natives’ attitude towards exposing too much info on social sites.

How can the project use Facebook to get natives talking about this topic?

Empirical issue: What is due to developmental issues and what is due to the tech? To sort this out, strong collaboration among this team and other teams in other areas (e.g., Project Zero) would be helpful.

Today’s digital natives are still in the childhood of the technology. It’s the next generation that will be true natives. OTOH, by the time the current natives are adults, the environment will have changed.

[“If you __________, you might be a digital native.” Could be a way to generate some interest. E.g.: If you think email should be saved for wedding invitations and pink slips, you might be a digital native. If you get bored before you can finish writing a Tweeter post, you might be a digital native. Ok, maybe not such a great idea.]

[Tags: berkman digital_natives]

Categories: Uncategorized dw