Children entangled in the Net

HOW revolutionary really is the Net? Some years ago it was thought that the new medium would transform business, make people rich and provide a free flow of information and other goods. Today, after the fall of IT stock, the closure of many web start ups and the grim reminder that there is no such thing as a free lunch (the latest instance being the conversion of free e-mail to pay mail), excitement has become muted, some even going so far as to claim that the Net is nothing but a faster means of communication. It could be as Marshal McLuhan said that new technologies become less visible as they become more familiar. Or it could be that the gloom is as unrealistic as the hype, given how slightly the enormous potential of the Net has been tapped yet.

What is significant, however, is the fact that even in its brief and tumultuous existence, the Net has already set in motion a social transformation. So, at least, claims Michael Lewis in his new book, based on a BBC series, The Future Just Happened (Hodder & Stoughton). Lewis who has covered both Wall Street and Silicon Valley in his previous books went about studying the social effects of the Net for his latest project. One area his findings prominently deal with is children and their shifting position in the world.

It is widely accepted that children are most responsive to new technology, even dreaming up uses for it that might never have been intended. Nokia, for instance, claims that their dominance over the mobile phone business is due in a big way to the time they spend studying children: the instant message which is fast becoming a staple of European business communication was apparently invented by Finnish schoolboys who were nervous about asking girls out on dates to their face and by girls who wanted to tell each other immediately what happened on those dates.

One of the things Lewis was looking at was individuals who had used the Net to violate some social norm. He found that such people tended invariably to live in ‘desert towns, strip mall villages, third world ghettos’ — landscapes that inspired a person to seek an outlet. He also found that many of them were only in their mid-teens.

Jonathan Lebed, 15, for example, who triggered chaos in the stock market by buying stock and recommending it through Yahoo message boards; 15-year-old Marcus Arnold who became one of the top ranking ‘experts’ on an information web site by posting answers to hundre- ds of legal queries; 14-year-old Daniel Sheldon, who created a website devoted to a file sharing programme that could have been a successor to the controversial Napster and others.
Drawing on these cases Lewis found some common features. One was that while children had mastered the new medium with incredible speed, their parents and teachers had been turned into the equivalent of immigrants who not only did not know what their kids were up to on the Net but needed their help, in a curious reversal of power, to navigate their own way in the new world. Other adults — law keepers for example would maintain that what the child had done was terrible without being able to actually explain what it was that he had done.

The alleged juvenile offenders meanwhile had no remorse or guilt, which is not surprising given the lax moral standards set by adult society. In fact the more Lewis describes the phenomenon, the more one begins to feel that what is so terrible is really that children had been behaving like adults. Such Net-led precociousness is increasingly going to be a fact of life. And so are its effects on social values and adult behaviour.

The effects could be positive, negative or plain ambiguous. Lewis describes one effect as a completely different perspective, for instance, on time. For a 14-year-old he was interviewing, the release of a certain programme on the Net constituted a great day that he spoke of in ‘grand historical terms’, as if it had taken place as far back as the Middle Ages. He said months when he meant weeks and weeks when he meant days. ‘‘His sense of time,’’ Lewis concludes, ‘‘was not mine.’’

Interestingly one response Lewis found in adult behaviour or, more specifically, the behaviour of some technogeeks past their prime (which in these times could mean anything above 25) was a sudden and overwhelming preoccupation with the future, a complete contrast to the Net’s here and now culture. But then that is hardly surprising. The thing about childhood is that it doesn’t last forever. So perhaps ephemerality will be one of our biggest concerns in the near future.

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