I wish my mother, and all like her in Finland, could read your book. Many
boomers there don't know foreign languages like we (N-Gen) do and that
makes the lap even greater .. and a gap, I'm afraid.
The situation is even worse in these strong, traditional conservative
Central European countries like Germany, France and Spain. They have their
own widely spoken languages so they don't follow angloamerican literature
like we Scandinavians (and the Dutch) do.
As you know the net is lagging behind there otherwise too. A French
speaking Belgian friend of mine, who has started using the net now that
we've been living here in Amsterdam, told me about a message-party he had
been to recently back in Belgium. He had changed contact information there
with someone. As the other gave the Minitel number and he gave his e-mail
address there were comments like "oh, mr. follow the trend!" in almost a
nasty sense if I understood correctly.. Of course there's a whole lot of
net.positive hype like everywhere but I was quite suprised to hear about
the incident.
You write a lot about parents. Mine seem to fit your picture as something
we young think is cool. My mother has always been wonderful, bought me
this domain (explained in http://an.org/inet98/discussion/0027.html) even
though she couldn't really understand what it was about. Now she uses
e-mail and my father (they're divorced) has been contributing for the
presentation too and often writes really interesting mails.
I know that it doesn't go that well with all the parents. Some get
hysterical about their childrens addiction and I'm afraid that this
attitude might get stronger and even affect public policies even in
Finland if we don't go through the discussion I hope your book will
support.
I come from quite a poor family myself so the unrestricted free public net
access that we now have had in Finland in (kindergartens,) schools and
public libraries is critical. If older people - who run those politics -
get too concerned about "net addicts" in a wrong way it might have
dangerous consequences. As a member of the European Union stupid
decisions made in Brussels affect Finland too so we have even more reasons
to be concerned about what's happening here in the old world.
Pekka Pihlanto, a professor and a specialist in situationism working in
Finland who has been contributing quite a lot for my presentation, wrote
an interesting message about a note that had been published in Helsingin
Sanomat (the leading Finnish newspaper) 21.2.1998 about net addiction. The
A-klinikkas��ti� ("Alcohol Clinic Foundation") asked the persons who feel
addicted to net, to contact them and describe personal experiences about
the problem. I wonder what they're thinking? The whole message is at
http://an.org/inet98/discussion/0045.html
Thank you for your time - in case you had any ;)
and for the book I've really enjoyed reading!
+ an + ~ Toni ~ : (t . !