The Young Side: The Indigenous Digital Generation with Clay Shirky (NYU), danah boyd (UCB), Xeni Jardin (BoingBoing), Alan Kay (UCLA) and Ethan Zuckerman (Harvard).

It looks like they spent a lot of time during lunch trying to fix the sound system. It was terrible this morning, breaking up and dropping out left and right to the point that many some of the panelists where trying to just speak and avoid the microphones. Lots of "testing, testing 1, 2, 3" later and things seem to be in working order. Fingers crossed.

Clay is introducing the panel, but barely since the sound system keeps throwing in these crazy beeps. Guess all the problems haven't been worked out. He's talking about a pidgen language and a creole language. A pidgen language is a language that is a combination of several languages pulled together by the people of an area, the Creole language is the language that is made up by the children of people who speak a pigeon language. That's what this is about, people on the web doing things and making things with it that the original creators never could have thought of.

Intro to panelists was just roll-call.

Alen Key: showing a slide called "what do we know at birth?" that shows a frog eating a small piece of rectangular cardboard that was thrown at it while there's a lit of flies sitting on the ground next to it. This means that the frog knows that it's food is supposed to be moving, not really what the food is. So that brings up the question what do we know, and what do we have to learn. At birth, as far as anyone can tell, no child has a desire to create a written language. If that makes sense. That's what schooling and science is about, to create the possibility for people to come up with things that if left along the chance of them figuring out is next to none. Next up is a slide of Marshall McLuhan and a quote that says "I don't know who discovered water, but it wasn't a fish!" and then a slide with Doug Englebart and talk of sub-second responses. He's showing animations and video which I can't see or hear from my back of the room corner but I think the gist is that the most interesting things happen between a group of people rather than just one person. Also, and this is where he disagrees with Clay, if you put a piano in a room full of children with no instruction, they will absolutely learn to play it but it will be a chopstick society, they won't reinvent 600 years of classics. In the same way, if left alone children would return to a spoken society and not focus so much on writing.

danah boyd: Starts off saying that as a young person she doesn't care who built the internet, it's just there and that is that. Finding IM as a way to talk to her friends without her mother listening into half the conversation was a major moment. She's now studying how the youth are using the internet is less interested in what adults can teach kids but what kids can teach adults. They use the internet for information and communication. She says as far as kids are concerned Google is the internet. It all comes from there. She's also talking about the e-mail/IM thing. She says kids think of e-mail as a way to talk to companies and adults, but IM is the way they talk with their peers. Also that they are blogging, but using LiveJournal and Xanga because those are more about communities and way to hang out online with their friends. Which all comes down to ways to find people like yourself. Now she's talking about Fan Fiction, where people take characters that exist in popular culture, Harry Potter for example, and putting them into their own situations and own stories. How this is a great creative outlet and those people are now being sued for violating copyrights. Now she's talking about finding communities online that are like yourself and how when she found some queer groups online it helped her come to terms with herself even if it's something that some other people think is wrong, but she thinks that some communities that are there that are in support of anorexia, bulimia, and self cutting are very scary.

Ethan Zuckerman: Talking about digital networks, right now about 800 Million people on the internet, mostly focused in north america, eastern europe, Japan and Australia. People are wondering where the "next billion" people are going to come from and it's south america, asia, western europe, etc.. but what about the last 400 million, who will be last group to get online. Africa seems to be the main place for this. AMD is making devices to try and put tech in the hands of the desperately poor. There's a sticker on it that say 50x15, that being 50% of the world online by 2015 which might be a bit ambitious. Now talking about Brazil, as it's very close to being one of the next big places. 170 million people with medium to high income. What will they do when online? Photolog. Orkut. Brazilians now represent over 60% of Orkut users. But of course, it's not all good. Of attacks in 2003, a bunch of them are coming from Brazil. But they are different than the attacks people have seen from turkey and the middle east. They weren't so political, but they were organized crime and curiosity based. He's now showing a slide of the world a night and how you can see based on what is lit up, who has power. If you are lighting your city with kerosene it doesn't show up on satellites and probably you don't have the power for computers. 78% of the content on the internet is English. Gana - cyber cafes. They are filled 24/7 by locals, not travelers. They found $.80 an hour is comparable to the price of beer and people are willing to pay it. Francis Quartey and IDN is building an infrastructure, a lot of it being wireless.
In countries where you have 40% illiteracy voice interface and VOIP is going to be a major factor in connecting more people.

Xeni Jardin: Showing BoingBoing and finding out about something you don't know. One of her first memories is of her father bringing home this antique printer that he'd dug out of the garbage that must have weighed a ton. They had a whole room filled with lead printing blocks and how he really liked the slow format that it involved, and here she is a few decades later dealing with a medium that offers blinding speed. That's not good, or bad, it just is. So she's going to talk about a few things that have happened in the last 24 hours. Yesterday morning someone pointed out that they could not access georgewbush.com if they were out of the US. When they posted it, more people reported back about it. The BBC then wrote about it, and referenced the blog, and then BoingBoing continuing and referencing back to the BBC. What's interesting is not the separation between people and the press, but that the divider is now totally permeable. Also, she's talking about the SuicideGirls/Nintendo thing. It was an auto-nastygram that had gone awry. Within 24 hours it was all resolved. Now she's talking about Kevin Sites, a combat journalist who she helped set up with a blog of his own so he can blog from Iraq and how his comments have been filling up with people trying to find their own family members.

Questions: or not. Arm is hurting, will try to fill in the banks and the discussion of language that resulted from this later.

end.