Children of open-source politics

Even as politicians talk knowingly about the importance of the internet, something does not seem quite right. Like those would-be cultural patricians and political patrons who thought of TV as an electronic pulpit or soapbox, they talk about the new medium in terms of what preceded it - as a kind of ether-based TV and newspaper. The fact that the new medium changes how we think and feel is missed.

It may be unfair to single politicians out. Even the most clued-up TV generally discusses the internet as though it were a Mr Hyde version of itself.

Of course, TV and the internet resemble each other in important ways. But with the internet comes a fundamental shift: The user is no longer just a spectator and consumer; she becomes an active producer and contributor.

The development and consequences of this shift have been spelled out by Kathryn C. Montgomery in her recent book, Generation Digital: Politics, Commerce And Childhood In The Age Of The Internet (The MIT Press). Ms Montgomery is a professor of public communication and a founder of the US-based Centre for Media Education, through which she has led a series of successful media policy campaigns.

Two points are salient to her focus on childhood and youth.

First, those children aged five in 1995, when the internet became widely available, are now of voting age. The youth networking around Barack Obama and following John McCain's daughter's election blog represent the first generation to grow up with the internet as practically a second nervous system.

Second, she offers an illuminating analogy for the internet: the child's bedroom - that private den most teens use as a hothouse for their interior life and experiments with identity. Thanks to posters, secreted diaries and other paraphernalia, bedrooms personalise a second skin and explore different personas; homepages - with their links, blogs, pictures, film and music clips - enable online experimentation with ideas and virtual experience.

Ms Montgomery does not romanticise the process. The public realm of the web is often mistaken by children as a mere extension of their private world, free from threats and public exposure, when it is not so.

The book charts how, from 1995, commercial researchers set up "safe-for-children" websites that then bombarded youngsters with detailed marketing questionnaires. One brand sent a personalised Instant Message "from Britney Spears" to a few thousand teenage girls, who then excitedly forwarded the note to many of their friends, with a cascading effect. Products are routinely marketed within the very tissue of children's online life - so if a video game calls for lunch break, up pops an advert for a pizza online ordering service.

Politics and public policy are catching up. The techniques of the commercial world have been used to promote public health and to mobilise the youth vote. Celebrities have sometimes been drawn in - but politicians had to pay a price: backing off from campaigns against the entertainment industry's own exploitation of the young.

The book outlines the shape of a profound cultural transformation. The internet does not merely extend teens' capacity for subversion or adults' ability to pursue them. It changes how people think about wealth, power and themselves.

The key notion is "open-source". Applied to property, there is the "creative commons", pioneered by the legal scholar Lawrence Lessig to offer alternatives to current intellectual property legislation, where individuals can design tailor-made copyright.

The experiments with identity - tried out in chatrooms and online reality shows and "communities" - presuppose the notion of an "open-source self". While online political mobilisation - sometimes bringing strangers to stage an old-fashioned face-to-face group protest within a couple of hours - operates under the assumption of open-source politics: a conviction that civic activism can operate along flat horizontal temporary networks, unlike the old hierarchical, permanent party machines.

A serious political response to these developments would have to go beyond simply using the internet as a form of turbo-outreach.

It would rather need to resemble Mr Lessig's drive to rethink basic notions like property and wealth in the light of the potential - for emancipation as well as exploitation - of the new technoculture. Since organisational power will be increasingly understood in terms of online coalition building, then an egalitarian politics would be committed to teaching the skills of building trust and commitment as widely as possible.

In other words, politicians should regard the internet not only as means to increase their popularity but also as a set of issues on which they show their perspicacity and substance.

ranierfsadni@europe.com