Born Digital: Is Common Sense Enough?

Born Digital is the product of several years of research from John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, two law professors, web luminaries, and digital immigrants.

This book is written about me and my friends. We’re “digital natives,” the ones who grew up with alongside the Internet. We don’t really watch TV or read newspapers, even though we understand how those things work. We get our news from Talking Points Memo and the Huffington Post and the New York Times online, or Twitter, and we take it for granted that we can find just about any piece of information that has ever existed.

From my room, I can write a blog post about two Harvard law professors, and somebody will read it, and maybe even agree with the points I make. This is a neat development in human history.

I first came into contact with John’s work on digital natives through a class blog at the Harvard Berkman Center. Someone had referenced an article by Thomas Friedman titled “Generation Q,” meaning “Quiet Generation,” in which Friedman laid down some especially patronizing zingers:

America needs a jolt of the idealism, activism and outrage (it must be in there) of Generation Q. That’s what twentysomethings are for—to light a fire under the country. But they can’t e-mail it in, and an online petition or a mouse click for carbon neutrality won’t cut it. They have to get organized in a way that will force politicians to pay attention rather than just patronize them.

Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy didn’t change the world by asking people to join their Facebook crusades or to download their platforms. Activism can only be uploaded, the old-fashioned way—by young voters speaking truth to power, face to face, in big numbers, on campuses or the Washington Mall. Virtual politics is just that—virtual.

The last line really set me off. Today, I’d barely need to whisper “Obama” to show Friedman’s lack of insight, but last April I needed a little more ammunition. So I fired off a long email to John making the case that we’re not, in fact, Generation Q, we’re legitimate, we’re engaged, and so on. Surprisingly, I got an encouraging email back—and that’s how I got in touch with the Berkman Center.

Fast forward a month or so. I ended up at the Berkman@10 conference, which turned out to be an amazing, illuminating gathering of minds to sort out the most pressing questions of today’s online world. Among the many fantastic presentations was John, Urs, and some members of their team, presenting the research that would end up in book form as Born Digital a few months later.

I was struck by how tuned in they were to what’s really happening. The publisher’s advance copy for the book promised “a sociological portrait of this exotic tribe of young people”—a description that makes me want to run away screaming. But, John assured me he didn’t write that and didn’t think it was the right approach, and when I saw him and Urs give their talk, I was impressed above all with their sensitivity towards their subject. They resisted the Friedman impulse to tie up a generation in generalizations. Instead, they came to their subject—me and my friends, and our global peers—with open-mindedness and curiosity, and I was genuinely impressed.

When I got my hands on the book recently, I was happy to find the same feel. The best feature of this book is that it’s rooted in sincere common sense, but like I mentioned earlier, it’s also resting on the foundation of several years of research and many more years of experience in the Internet and the law. The authors touch on all the important areas—privacy, safety, identity, creativity, learning, and more. In the world at large, especially the semi-tech-literate adult world, there’s a lot of reactionary thinking about the digital generation. In every area, this book tempers common paranoias and fears with common sense, empirical evidence, and solid argumentation, and I’m glad to have John and Urs on my side.

At the same time, another part of me was left a little unsatisfied. This book is not the sort of thorough, scholarly look at the landscape, like what you’ll find in Yochai Benkler’s work. That’s not the problem, though; I think there’s a need for an accessible book from credible sources that takes a thoughtful approach to these problems. But the book does make some policy recommendations, or strongly hints at them, and I’m not sure if it’s forceful enough.

I would love to hand a book like Born Digital to my Congresspeople and say, “See? Look—these guys have it right. Follow their lead.” But there are some points that seem like they’re treated with too light of a touch. Take the chapter on digital piracy, for instance—one of the prickliest issues when it comes to legislation and digital natives. After a short history of filesharing, the authors make the point that we need to look past anti-piracy laws if we want a longterm solution; they claim it’ll take a combination of market forces and deep revision of intellectual property laws. Their guiding principle is to figure out how to best foster the creativity of digital natives

All of this is fantastic and I think it’s exactly right. But how do you argue it to a corporate media executive? How do you argue it to a lawmaker that’s constantly heckled by the corporate media’s lobbyists?

At the same Berkman conference, I had the opportunity to wine and dine with some of the top legal executives form large media companies, on one side of the table, and on the other, some of Harvard’s best intellectual property experts. We talked about how to deal with filesharing on university campuses, which turned into a bigger conversation about network management, intellectual property law, and innovation.

What struck me most was the extent to which the large media companies will go to protect their traditional business model. This is a model in which media production is monolithic, large-scale, and strongly proprietary—traditional Hollywood. Same with music. This model doesn’t square well with college students (and others) downloading media on a huge scale via filesharing networks. The corporate approach is to police the network as strongly as possible, and if necessary, shut it down. If you’re one of today’s media executives, as far as I can tell, you’d prefer no Internet to one in which a certain degree of openness allows people to share your property illegally.

It’s tough, because the media companies have a lot of legitimate arguments to make against filesharing (and mashups, etc.). But any kind of legislation that would distort their conventional business model is effectively off the table. We’ll reach a point where protection of intellectual property will start to strangle the openness and generativity we love about the Internet—and that’s a huge problem.

I’ve only scratched the surface of the debates on intellectual property and net neutrality, but I think I have a good sense of the right approach, and I know how important it is to have strong advocates for an open Internet. This book’s take is refreshing: it’s forward-thinking and it treats digital natives as innovators, rather than criminals (we’re sometimes both, but we’re not always criminally-minded—there’s an important difference). All good—but I’m not sure this book does much to convince those that have the opposite opinion, and those are the ones that we most need to convince.

This same thread can be followed in the problems of privacy, safety, etc. The book is accessible and reinforces what I know to be true, but if I had some fundamental disagreements, I don’t think I’d be swayed.

This doesn’t have to be the case, though. These are some of the strongest thinkers when it comes to Internet, society, and the law, and their case is backed up with years of research from around the world. That’s hard to beat. So, Urs and John, I’m looking forward to your next book about the digital generation.