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♪[Jazz music]♪

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So yeah, being one of the first

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net culture or computers in society writers

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was, strategically, a poor move for me.

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And I'm living proof, though, 
you can still survive it,

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if you can get through it somehow, 
by answering e-mail more slowly

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It's funny,

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I wrote some notes because I thought 
I should be responsible,

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because you guys are real computer studies,

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computer science people,
as opposed to just,

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you know,

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your average,
digitally illiterate audience.

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So I don't really need to make the case
- I probably don't -

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on why learning something about 
digital technology is a smart thing,

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because you guys have already
made that choice.

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But something that occurred to me 
on the way here, actually,

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that you might not realize as young people

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if you don't mind being called that

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...is that it's very hard to get

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an accurate sense of the biases 
of the digital media environment...

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...when you've been raised inside it.

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In other words, what I want 
to suggest to you is that

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those of us who are old enough to have 
experienced and consciously experienced

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the shift from a pre-digital media 
environment to a digital media environment

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actually

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understand something or sense something
or experience something

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about the biases of digital technology

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that is relatively difficult for those 
of you who have been raised

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with digital technology to get.

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Right now this is the opposite argument 
I made through most of my career.

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In 1995, I wrote a book called, 
Playing the Future, where I argued that,

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"Don't worry, you grown ups!


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Digital technology is coming 
and you feel overwhelmed.

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But you guys are digital immigrants 
whereas kids are digital natives.

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So you'll speak the language like 
an immigrant, they'll speak like a native.

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You're always going to feel 
slightly out of place and unsure,

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and every time you have a hypertext link,

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you're gonna be a disoriented 
because we're not used to that,

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whereas kids are going to experience 
that very naturally.

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That what looks disjointed to us, 
will be a natural terrain for them.

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And they will have command, 
don't worry, the kids are alright."

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But as I've grown older, and 
as I've watched where cyberspace has gone,

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and where our culture has gone, or hasn't,

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I realize that some of my elders were 
actually more right about this than I was.

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And in reading all the

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finally catching up 
with who I was supposed to read,

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when I was younger, McCluen and Ong, 
and all the great media theorists.

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I would read about the digital or
the media environments,

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and this notion that McCluen had that,

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if you ask a fish about water he wouldn't 
be able to tell you what it is, right?

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Because the fish is swimming in the water.
The fish not aware of the water.

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If you ask someone who is raised 
in a television environment,

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"Oh, what about the impact of television 
on you?"

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You can't say it because you're living 
in it.

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You're living in that media environment.

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Likewise, those of us who are living in 
a digital media environment,

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it's very difficult for us 
to parse its effect,

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for us to feel what it is

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for us to understand the difference 
between

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what it is to be a human being

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and what it is to be a digital being.

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And

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being able to parse it, though, 
being able to begin to look at that

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What Norbert Weinert used to call,

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"the human use of human beings."

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He was one of the first people to talk 
about cybernetics

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I think he invented the word, actually, 
back when, cybernetics.

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Even though it got stolen.

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He was really looking at as we develop a computer environment, how will we recognize what is the difference between humans and the machines that we're in?

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How will we understand how to create a human, or a humanity-encouraging, digital media environment?

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Now the reason why I think this is important is because most of my peers strongly disagree with this sentiment

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Most of my peers, and call them the sort of, the Negroponte, Kevin Kelley, Wired Magazine, Chris Anderson,

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all the way to Ray Kurzwhile on that spectrum, Clay Shirkey - there's this sense, this sort of letter ripped sense about technology

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that's uncomfortably consonant with corporate capitalism, but that's another story

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That human beings are merely one stage in information's inevitable evolution towards greater states of complexity, right?

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And they tell this very compelling story about the beginning of time all the way through now.

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That matter has been groping toward greater states of complexity, right?

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That we had atoms became molecules, and molecules became, you know, sort of these weird pre-proto-life things which became cells

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And now we have this whole life thing that happened

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And life got very complex through evolution

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And we had people

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And people built machines, and machines are just sort of in that big, blue, overtake humanity moment,

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and when they do, then machines, our computers, our networks will be the real host for the evolution of information

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and we human beings can tend to those machines, or, at best, upload our consciousness

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and then they will continue that journey for us

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You know, and each one has a different metaphor for explaining it

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You know, whether it's Kevin talking about what technology wants, right? What technology wants, like it really wants.

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Not, it's not bias towards something, but it wants something, we've made this thing.

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Just as God made people, people made technology, and this child will go on wanting something.

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Or Ray Kurzwhile who will talk about the singularity, which I'm sure you've all read or heard about, even on, you know,

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you can find out about it in Vice Magazine or anything, at this point

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You know, the idea that technology reaches this point of, not self-consciousness or self-awareness necessarily, but it just surpasses us

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It becomes this thing and can keep going.

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It's a... I don't know... for me it's a discomforting view of humanity

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but it's also, I would argue, an incorrect one, you know?

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It's one that is - it's one that is a result of living unconsciously in a digital media environment

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It's one where you let the digital media environment dictate what you are and how you think about the world

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rather than maintaining some sense of humanity in that.

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Alright? So, what's interesting to me as I look at the history of computing, which now we have

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and as we look at computers in society, which is a real thing.

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I mean, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, when we taught courses like this, it was futurism.

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Computers in Society was a course was a course in, "What's it gonna be like someday when people have e-mail?"

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I mean, there were times, and I'm sure you were in those conversations

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when people like me used to go to a cocktail party or go to a publisher, or explain to a magazine editor.

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Someday people are going to have their own computers

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They are gonna send messages to eachother using little text editors

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using, you know, word processors,

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and they would literally laugh us out of the room.

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They did not - they - it seemed so outrageous, that - Or they'd walk around

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No, you're not gonna have to implant chips in people, they're gonna walk around with phones that are gonna track them everywhere they go

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and they're gonna do this voluntarily

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They're gonna give all their information - it's all just - and no one believed us. But, of course that happened.

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But, the thing that's interesting to me about computer history, if we're gonna follow it from the history of humanity

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rather than the history of technology, right? Let's not worry about paper tape to punch cards to tape to discs to hard drives to RAM.

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Let's not worry about machine evolution. But you look at the difference in people, right?

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If we look at history as the human story rather than the story of stuff

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then the interesting thing becomes - the big switch, I think, is the shift from a pre-literate to a literate society, right?

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When we look at the impact of the printing press.

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Do we talk about it in terms of, "Oh, look! These rooms filled up with books!"

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No, that's not the part that's interesting.

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The part that is interesting is people learned to read

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and then when they learned to read, they had personal interpretations of the Bible, right?

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So we had a Protestant Reformation, with people rebelling against the Church,

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So we had the idea of "one man, one vote," because everyone has their own perspective.

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It coincided with prospective painting.

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It coincided with central banking.

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And all of these other, very, analagous human inventions that were all about people having individual perspectives,

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"One man, one vote," it led to the Enlightenment, and all this other stuff.

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Consumerism, Industrial Era and everything else.

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When we look at digital technology I think we have to look at it that way.

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In other words, what is the difference between a pre-literate digital society and a post-literate digital society?

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You know, I'm over arguing for digital literacy. I think digital literacy is inevitable, you know?

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I feel like I'm making that - when I, and I, it's my main talk that I do.

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It's like, you know, "Programmer be programmed!" And I wrote this book, Programmer Be Programmed.

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We have to learn to program. If you don't learn how to program, you're just swimming blindly in a sea of information.

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Kids don't understand the biases of the technologies they use.

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You know, if you ask a kid what Facebook is for, he'll say Facebook is here to help him make friends.

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But we all know Facebook is really not here - it's really here to monetize the social graft and all that.