DATE: Wed 1st of July, 1998
FROM: [email protected]
TO: panel participants
CC: all interested
SUBJECT: Questions for discussion
STATUS: done so far, looking for comments

1. Sharing experiences with friends (by writing) on the net

The net enables new ways to share experiences with friends. Does that change our lives and how? Is text-baseness essential here - i.e. could these work with sound/video and other time based media as well in some way? Are the written ways of communication actually a benefit here? (could hypermedia perhaps combine the good sides of asynchronous text and audio/visual multimedia?)

Two examples that we have plenty of experience of:

Many people keep semi-private on-line diaries so that their friends and others, even people they don't know, can read them.

Other, perhaps not so well-known way of sharing, is having IRC channels and keeping your chat clients (agents, if you prefer) permanently on-line (first attach, then just de- and retach) so that all discussions go to log files or to the backbuffer. This way the things friends tell publicly to other friends can be "heard" later also by those who happened not to be present that very moment. The dynamic multichanneling and messaging features in IRC help choose a specific audience for every sentence
 

Some misc. thoughts:

Mails - perhaps especially mailing lists - and now that I come to think of it actually most of old media like newspapers, books and TV can be viewed from this experience sharing perspective. Friends' bottom-down networks on IRC are however quite different than the big media. They are probably more related to writing postcards and letters but differ technically at least in time-span, interactivity and in the ways they can be shared.

One interesting thing related to this is how the net makes people move. I mean, before these communication systems really worked many visionaries predicted that telecommunications would reduce the need for travelling dramatically. Quite the opposite has happened so far as most people who make friends on the net want soon to travel to meet them - sometimes cross the world.

Friends simply want to spend time with each other - experience together. This might work better over the net if virtual reality techniques one day fulfill their promises but I don't think that's going to happen in near future. Sitting in airplanes is more likely for us. Party sharing experiments are still interesting! Parties are often the ultimate experiences that we live for and they really ought to be shared if net is supposed to be any good.

2. Facing Reality - what kind of adults does Growing Up Digital make?

Don Tapscott's book, titled Growing Up Digital, describes quite thoroughly many aspects of so called Net-Generation (N-Gen). Are we like that? Have some of you read the book, what do you think of it?

Most importantly: what do you think that the future of you and other net kids will be? Do you know, if you even want to know, what kind of life you are hoping to live in the future? What is your dream work, family etc?

Some thoughts about this question as well:

Tapscott gives a very positive image about us. I recognize some of it but am afraid that we Net People will have more trouble facing reality - the established often stupid excisting sturctures in cultures and organizations that is - than he lets the readers understand. At least I'm always in trouble ;) My friends often as well .. with for example stupid laws, unmotivated restrictions, stupid bureauchracy and non-netty closed systems in general.

Of course it's  important to bend those borders and try to make a change if we believe in something different but I'm always not sure if we can do it the right way. Or should we even care? Many net groups tend to isolate from the rest of society. Does it necessarily have to be that bad if everyone's happy that way? Societies are divided in separate entities anyway and as long as we have interfaces and standard enough protocols to operate with other groups everyone should be happy. Rough consensus and running code! (i.e. no net evangelism, please)