I was talking the other day with a lady at work. She is a Baby Boomer and we were talking about our different views of the computer and Internet. I am a Digital Native; I was playing with KidPix as soon as I could draw and I learned to type quickly and accurately by maintaining six Instant Messaging conversations simultaneously before I was 13. She, on the other hand, is a Digital Immigrant. She had to take a class on computers in her thirties and she learned to type on a typewriter (side note: certain friends of mine have recently developed a taste for typewriters as an artsy novelty item, the same way they collect vinyl records).
I mentioned in passing that I suspect growing up on the Internet has redefined my generation’s ideas of appropriate boundaries. Two things in particular come to mind: space and knowledge.
The whole world fits inside a 15″ flip-open box of plastic sitting placidly on my desk. In a matter of seconds, I can converse with anyone anywhere in the world. Through Google Maps I can also see most people’s backyard; sometimes I can even see a live action shot of the street I want to visit next weekend. Distances which used to take days or even months to traverse are bypassed in milliseconds. You may say that it’s not really bypassed because my body is still located in Los Angeles, but if my lack of body doesn’t limit my ability to communicate, see the world, or change it, then what am I really missing? I live in a Global Community. I have very different ideas about who I am as a citizen, what my responsibilities are to my nation, and who is my neighbor than previous generations. I can see and feel the devastation of an earthquake in China as immediately as one in San Francisco. I have, in many respects, done away with the limits of my physicality.
Secondly, the internet has transformed our ideas about the boundaries of knowledge. I have the collective knowledge of at least 4 billion people at my fingertips — the only thing which limits me is my curiousity, imagination, and the ability to manipulate a Google search engine. There is almost nothing I can’t know. I don’t need a cookbook: I can have 309,000 chocolate chip cookie recipes available in 0.9 seconds. I don’t need a dictionary: I have Dictionary.com. I don’t need an encyclopedia: I have Wikipedia. In fact, Wikipedia is doing on a micro scale what the internet does as a whole — it’s compiling ‘popular’ knowledge, the knowledge of the People. Add this to the basic American sentiment of democracy , and I am pretty convinced that I have a right to know everything. The idea of censorship is distasteful and a cause for suspicion. And one step behind that assumption is the belief that nothing is sacred.
So what are the implications? What happens when you have 75 million people who have no notion of physical or intellectual boundaries? Not sure, but I would guess the ideas of boundaries, period, would seem artificial. And if they are being crafted, we want to know why and by whom. The well-publicized failure of authority figures in every walk of life — Bill Clinton was President during our adolescence, Enron the focus of the news as we were entering the work force, less than half of us grew up with both our biological parents living under the same roof, and even our priests were denounced as pedophiles – has given us good reason to question the right of elders to tell us what is appropriate.
In the garden, Satan asked, “Did God really say…?” He questioned the hearer, not the speaker. Today, I can hear him asking, “Does God have a right to say…?”
cSc
