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Opening keynotes at #ima09

Joaquin Alvarado is here to talk about the “next Internet.” What would happen if we were all gone tomorrow? Disappeared? Don’t knock humanity; we’re a pretty clever species. “The dinosaurs didn’t know they were losing. … They were rocking! They were huge. They were everywhere. They had managed to survive the separation of the continents. … All they were missing was a telescope, because they could not foresee a ginormous deadly comet hurdling toward Earth.” Oblivious species. (I see where he’s going with this.) We need to stop imagining public media to be “on the dinosaur” and actually imagine ourselves as nimble enough to survive! We’ve done this before. “The sky is falling; it’s not a warning, it’s actually happening.”

The Internet is a “happy accident.” American taxpayers fund the Internet. Unfortunately, the United States is “woefully behind.” “I don’t believe technology creates communities. I believe communities create technology.” More women leading households. Inflation rising. Internet’s power increasing, but our ability to stay effective in it is shrinking.

“How many people live in a state in this country?” (Everyone raises their hands.) “Your state is broke.” From California, which created the most progressive, free public education system in the country. But the state is broke — can’t balance its own books. What tech do we need to create to deal with it? Public school system is “a disaster.”

What if the creators of the Internet knew the consequences of the infrastructure they built? People would not imagine a system that could change communication, elections, journalism. No one had a telescope, just like the dinosaurs. How can we do that again? “That’s National Public Lightpath.” People all around the world have truly high-speed Internet access — 10 to 50 mbps — for less money than we do. “We’re Americans and we’re special, and we don’t have to have that.” (Sarcasm.)

Practically every university-licensed station is connected to a next-generation fiber-optic network. Awhile back, universities realized they could built an optical network cheaper and better than they could buy or lease it. The people who created Mosaic have been active in this space. (Remember Mosaic?!) Creating real-time interactive networks. Do you realize YouTube is the No. 2 search engine online? And it’s not necessarily taking search away from Google. It’s how people are getting information. (Unverified.) Don’t think people can anticipate how people will use video. Why can’t video be used as a document, such as that in a word processor? When son goes to do research for a homework assignment, he’ll START at YouTube. He’ll look at people talking about the subject, etc., then go on from there. The Internet was not designed to support that kind of data flow.

We have to stop using the word digital! It’s so stupid! We don’t start our day by thinking, “How I will work with electricity today?” It’s normalized. “Does anyone have an analog microwave?” Will young people come to use my microwave? “Digital is 50 years old. Let’s drop digital! Here’s the new term: Networked.” Digital was really important; it means something — you can convert information to 1′s and 0′s. Now we have to ask ourselves, Are we really ready for the network? REALLY ready? Your job is not to plan how people will use it, it’s just to ensure THEY WILL. To normalize your content so that people will be able to use it. If we’re smart and we’re fast, and I think we are, it’s a great opportunity.

Anyone use HD videoconferencing? Anyone heard of Cisco Telepresence? They require 50-megabit Internet connection. Have developed a $500,000 instant solution. (Missed the name of this org/product?) University campuses, totally wired out of their minds. They are not storytellers. They are plumbers. They are trying to bring capacity to the people that they serve. I didn’t realize there’s so many of our stations that are on university campuses. It’s like, wow, let’s not only be aware of that, let’s drive that thing!

NTIA is going to have billions of dollars, thanks to stimulus package. Does anyone do anything with 10 gigabits? (1 megabits?) You don’t want to let the network get in the way of workflow. Why can’t you transfer an entire video project from ‘GBH to some other station? FedEX? WTF? “The ‘network effect’ will change the producing environment.”

We are failing the K-12 and we don’t even let teachers turn on video in the classroom. Why not? Because the Internet sucks. It’s not secure. It’s slow. We can’t control where the kids go. It’s just content! It’s simple content. If we were to do National Public Lightpath, we could connect all the K-12 campuses in the classroom — all of them — to fiber, and we would then connect them to all the public media outlets and independent producers in the country. Then the teacher searches for “dolphin” and gets contextually relevant, high-definition media created by professionals.

My son has two ways to learn: school and Wikipedia. Wikipedia is winning. WE CAN DO BETTER. There is not a single school in this country serving K-12 complaining they have too much bandwidth. If you do a broadband map of the United States, the poorest areas are most underserved by bandwidth. (map) “The network divide is so big it’s almost hopeless.” There are clear paths to go after this kind of infrastructure: You write a grant to NTIA requesting access to fiber networks, bring in K-12. Imagine that becomes the next-generation service to schools in this country. Imagine we actually said we want every teacher in America to go to that network and pull the content off the network at any time. If we don’t do this, we’ll be left behind.

The incumbent telephone companies are spending $100 billion to get into the video space — even in this down economy. It’s the next big thing. If you were at CES, there were pushing a few big things: Humongous televisions (100 inches), Internet-connected televisions (go into any American living room, we’re already doing it — anyone have a Wii or a PS3?). There’s not enough time to do all of this, I would say the money will be spent fairly quickly. NPR/CPB’s letter to the president is just a TOE in the water. “We have to go get the new America.”

John Palfrey is here. How many people can say they wrote a BOOK with the word “digital” in the title? Oops. Ha ha! Agrees we need to rethink the use of the word. Two phrases to describe journalism: “The future is bright.” “Hope.” Not all doom and gloom, people. Wants to discuss the attributes about some of these young people “born digital.” Admits being a “glass-half-full” kind of guy. The digital generation? A digital population. 1 billion out of 6.6 billion who have access to this tech. In simplest form, there are lots of people with access — but lots without. “Digital natives” born after 1980. But it’s not the case that only young people use digital in smart ways. Doc Searls, seated here, is a “digital settler.” “Digital immigrants” are aunts and uncles who still send you large forwarded e-mails with urban myths inside. (HA!) It’s not just the kids who are doing sophisticated and dumb things on the Internet. (A lot of adults are doing dumb things on Internet dating sites.) Attributes of digital natives? Here are 5:

1. Digital identifiers: The extent to which identity is not just created in the offline space. You might ask, “What is your online identity?” They have no idea. But: “How often do you update your Facebook or Black Planet profile photo?” They’ll know precisely what you mean. You might create identity through Twitter or a personal blog. And often young people create multiple identities for multiple audiences. There’s a quality of role play. You’ll often hear a young person say they prefer their WoW or Second Life identity better than their first life. Sometimes it’s about creating a more “beautiful” identity, which is easier online than in real life. Quote from teen: “She’s dressed totally different from me and my personality. That’s why I like these games because I would never go on the street like this, but I can put he in something like this because I have the power to do it.” [showing totally lame diary-style videos from young people who have TENS OF THOUSANDS of subscribers] Young people are not only buried in their laptops while someone is speaking, but they’re “switch-tasking” — having conversations about the conversations in backchannel. (Note from Andrew: I’m doing it right now on Twitter. Having real-time debates with people about the points raised in the keynotes.) Caught self sending e-mail to wife the other day, from living room to kitchen. Kids texting their friends underneath the dinner table. Clearly, attention is divided! To Doc’s point about “are you paying attention and listening” while looking at the screen: Walked into a classroom the other day of entering a classroom and seeing all the laptops from the back of the room, not front. Saw pretty much Microsoft Word, people taking notes — for 20 minutes. Then, up comes e-mail, instant message. Very much sort of a “flickering” experience. Yes they were taking notes but also checking e-mail. They were looking at the CNN site as Michelle Obama’s ball gown, one or another after another.
2. (Third point, missed the second?) Digital media. Young people presume the media they’re interacting with is digital. Little girl looked at the back of a CVS disposable camera and said, Daddy, where’s the picture? Very telling. No surprise Tower Records is long gone and that iTunes is the No. 1 music retailer in the world. The effort by Google to digitize books is an incredibly difficult and fascinating problem. We presume we can not only digitize, but share. If we take pictures of people in this room, we can immediately share it on Flickr — no assumption that we WON’T share it.
3. Young people presume themselves to be CREATORS as well as consumers. We needed a logo for our organization. Rather than getting $10,000 in grant funding for a designer, held a logo contest. Got hundreds of entries from young people with a simple message on its Web site. Winner was a 15-year-old from England (with a wonderful submission; then again, he submitted 32!); not long ago, this wouldn’t have worked. Young people WANT to CREATE and be recognized; they don’t need to get paid. Imagine the trajectory of Facebook from a Harvard dorm to a massive global network; based all on feedback from young users.
4. Young people work really well in teams. (lightweight collaboration)
5. An international dimension to this community. A global culture of sharing stories from around the world. Credible reports from places the mainstream media doesn’t cover or can’t reach. The Lingua Project– if a story is written in one language (say, a story about monks protesting in Burma last year); suddenly Global Voices is flooded with calls from journalists looking for sources, also other people in the world start to translate those stories into other languages; Lingua Project begins doing real-time translation (by human beings) with argumentation on the page from users: “No, that’s not what that means… it means something else.” Anyone done “CouchSurfing?” (No.) It’s a social network whereby people create profiles and are traveling. They want info on where to stay — literally, people’s couches to sleep on around the world, wherever they may be going.” An interactive world map covered in pins– places people slept on a couch and came back alive! Successful Couch Surfs. Obviously, this absolutely TERRIFIES parents; to kids, it’s no big thing.

Issues: Privacy. (changing expectations) Young people share too much about their environments about this space. “Unintended audiences.” They think they are sharing only with the 3 or 4 people they can IMAGINE. Fail to recognize the replicability and public-ness of the Internet. May be a tattoo they will want to get rid of in two decades; but in two decades, it’s still searchable and still archived in a public space. We haven’t yet figured out what the implications of this will be. Imagine babies born today. The baby might be described in a sonogram in a digital file. That is going to be available forever — both on the proud parents’ fridge and in some kind of digital network. (From @acarvin on Twitter: @jpalfrey: on privacy, talks about sonograms as your first digital portrait. Guilty: I uploaded Sean & Kayleigh’s to Flickr. #ima09)

Issues: Intellectual property. Young people do take music and moves without paying for them. No huge surprise here. The falling away of DRM in iTunes describes the fact that people “get this” and they’re trying to do with it. Kids realize it’s illegal and perceive themselves to be “sticking it to The Man.” Found this in communities around the world. Do young people know they can remix this content? That’s the part where they are totally confused. “Copyright law is a huge black box.” (People of all ages are confused about this. Creative Commons, anyone?)

Issues: Credibility. Some people see a headline that compels them and they click on it. Then they want to “make with it.” (misinformation. cheating. hidden influencers.) Asked kids how they would look up “Spanish-American War” or “Lou Gerhig’s Disease.” 100 OUT OF 100 KIDS went to a browser and did a Google search. (EVERY SINGLE KID!) The variation is here: Some kids copy-pasted the text from Wikipedia into a paper. One kid, when asked if he goes to a library, said, “Why would I go there? That’s ridiculous. Oh wait, I did one time — on a field trip.” Kids go to a library only when assigned.

Here’s the positive outlook promised: Opportunities for new content. Young people can be the creators of this information. We need to give them the platforms and ways to do that.

Joaquin Alvarado is director of the Institute for Next Generation Internet, and John Palfrey is a law professor and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School.

About Andrew Phelps

Andrew Phelps is a WBUR reporter and the host of Hubbub, a new blog about Boston.

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