{"id":215,"date":"2007-12-03T11:56:19","date_gmt":"2007-12-03T15:56:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/ugasser\/2007\/12\/03\/discussing-born-digital\/"},"modified":"2007-12-03T11:58:05","modified_gmt":"2007-12-03T15:58:05","slug":"discussing-born-digital","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ugasser\/2007\/12\/03\/discussing-born-digital\/","title":{"rendered":"Discussing &#8216;Born Digital&#8217; with European Students"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/palfrey\/\">John Palfrey<\/a> and I are getting tremendously helpful feedback on the draft v.0.9 of our forthcoming book <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/palfrey\/2007\/10\/28\/born-digital\/\">Born Digital<\/a> (Basic Books, German translation with Hanser) from a number of great students at Harvard and St. Gallen Law School, respectively. Last week, John and I had an inspiring conversation about the current draft with our first readers on this side of the Atlantic: a small, but great and diverse group of law students here at www.unisg.ch. The students, coming from Switzerland, Germany, France, Singapore, and the U.S., were kind enough to share their feedback with us based on reaction papers they\u2019ve drafted in response to assigned book chapters.<\/p>\n<p>Today, the second session took place. John and I are currently revisiting the final chapter of the book. The \u201cfinal\u201d chapter, of course, is by no means \u201cfinal\u201d \u2013 even not if it once becomes a chapter of the printed book. What we\u2019re trying to do is simply to synthesize some of the things we\u2019ve said so far, and to look ahead once again and ask ourselves how the digital world will look like for our kids given the things we know \u2013 and we don\u2019t know \u2013 about their digital lives. In this spirit, the last chapter of the book in particular is an open invitation to join the discussion about the promises and challenges of the Internet for a population that is born digital. Against this backdrop, we prepared three discussion questions for today\u2019s session here in St. Gallen.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>First, what do you think is the greatest opportunity for Digital Natives when it comes to digital technologies? Second, what are you most concerned about when thinking about the future of the Internet? Third, what approach \u2013 generically speaking \u2013 seems best suited to address the challenges you\u2019ve identified?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Here are the students\u2019 thoughts in brief:<\/p>\n<p><strong>Greatest opportunities:<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Democratizing effect of the net: DN can build their own businesses without huge upfront investments (Rene, Switzerland)<\/li>\n<li>ICT enables networking among people across boundaries (Catrine, Switzerland)<\/li>\n<li>Encourages communication among DNs (Pierre-Antoine, France)<\/li>\n<li>Increased availability of all kind of information, allows fast development and sharing ideas among DNs (Jonas, Germany)<\/li>\n<li>Availability of information, DN can go online and find everything they\u2019re looking for; this shapes, e.g., the way DNs do research; as a result, world becomes a smaller place, more common denominators in terms of shared knowledge and culture (Melinda, Switzerland)<\/li>\n<li>Efficiency gains in all areas, including speed of access, spread of ideas, \u2026  (Eugene, Singapore)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Greatest challenges, long-term:<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Problem of losing one\u2019s identity \u2013 losing cultural identity in the sea of diversity (Eugene, Singapore)<\/li>\n<li>Dependency on technology and helplessness when not having the technology available; DNs are becoming dependent on technology and lose ability to differentiate b\/w reality and virtuality; other key challenge: bullying (Melinda, Switzerland)<\/li>\n<li>Who will get access to the digital world \u2013 only the wealthy kids in the West or others, too? Digital divide as a key problem (Jonas, Germany)<\/li>\n<li>Addiction: DNs are always online and depend so much on Internet that it maz lead to addictive behavior (Pierre-Antoine, France)<\/li>\n<li>DNs can\u2019t distinguish between offline and online world, they can\u2019t keep, e.g. online and offline identities separate (Catrine, Switzerland)<\/li>\n<li>Notion of friendship changes; DNs might forget about their friends in the immediate neighborhood and focus solely on the virtual (Rene, Switzerland)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Most promising approaches:<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Teach digital natives how to use social networks and communicate with each other; law, in general, is not a good mode of regulation in cyberspace (Rene, Switzerland)<\/li>\n<li>Technology may often provide a solution in response to a technologically-created problem like, e.g., privacy intrusion (Catrine, Switzerland)<\/li>\n<li>Don\u2019t regulate too much, otherwise people won\u2019t feel responsible anymore; education is key, help people to understand that it\u2019s their own responsibility (Pierre-Antoine, France)<\/li>\n<li>The laws that are currently in place suffice (except in special circumstances); learning is key, but who shall be the teacher (since today\u2019s teachers are not DNs)? (Jonas, Germany)<\/li>\n<li>Generic legal rules are often not the right tool, problems change too fast; instead, kids need general understanding of how to handle technology; goal could be to strengthen their personality in the offline world so that they can transfer their confidence, but also skills to the online world (Melinda, Switzerland)<\/li>\n<li>Technology will most likely help DNs to solve many of the problems we face today; education is the basis, but focus needs to be on the question how to put education from theory into practice (Eugene, Singapore)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As always, we were running short in time, but hopefully we can continue our discussion online. Please join us, and check out our <a href=\"http:\/\/www.digitalnative.org\/Main_Page\">project wiki<\/a> (new design, many thanks to Sarah!), our new <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/\">DN blog<\/a>, or for instance our <a href=\"http:\/\/harvard.facebook.com\/group.php?gid=2493581296\">Facebook group<\/a>. John, our terrific team, and I are much looking forward to continuing the debate!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John Palfrey and I are getting tremendously helpful feedback on the draft v.0.9 of our forthcoming book Born Digital (Basic Books, German translation with Hanser) from a number of great students at Harvard and St. Gallen Law School, respectively. Last week, John and I had an inspiring conversation about the current draft with our first [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2094,406],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-born-digital","category-digital-natives"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ugasser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ugasser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ugasser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ugasser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ugasser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ugasser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ugasser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ugasser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ugasser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}