Ars Electronica. Jasperschelling.com

The first international symposium kicks off with some intensive talks on digital rights, society and the internet. Fasten your seatbelts for some sharp statements on the first festival day in Lentos Museum.

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger

People are able to remember, and they are able to forget. The case was, that recalling a memory was taking more effort than forgetting one. Nowadays, technology has changed that the other way around. Data storage has become really cheap, and new technologies are allowing us to build indexing software better than ever. We are storing all the pictures our digital camera makes, even the bad ones. Google stores all our search-queries we ever made, and millions of security-cameras are recording our movements in public space. Our society is making it harder every day to forget things. Everything is being recorded and stored for later use, but how does that affect our being? Our lives? Our privacy?

Forgetting was the norm, remembering was the exception. In the end we are storing too much memories, too much information. Actually, this threatens our privacy in a semantic manner. For example; in 1920, The Netherlands were keeping track of exceptional information concerning citizens. Information such as country of birth, religion, birthplace, et cetera. In a way, this helped the society to serve citizens. But at the same time, this is a real treasure of information, when you place it in another context. When the second world war started, and The Netherlands were taken over by the nazi-regime, the first thing they got hold of was this database, because they could easily filter out the jews and deport them. Because of this, the nazi's were able to deport the most jews than in any other country.

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger: "Biological forgetting has been turned in eternal forgetting"

This example illustrates an extreme case of the negative side of dataretention. But, this problem may be closer than you think. When you realise that Google is recording every query you do, Amazon is recording every product you considered buying, when your favorite airline is recording every journey you make, even the ones you didn't book(!), what is left of your privacy? Is that data still yours? What if you don't want your information in the hands of that company?

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Joichi Ito is described as an activist, entrepeneur, venture capatalist, chairman of the board of Creative Commons, as well ICANN and WITNESS board member, and is involved in many of the latest web 2.0 developments. Personally I would like to add, a charming speaker who speaks with passion about a generation that he himself does not belong to, but seems to understand very well.

Joichi Ito

This was also one of the first remarks he began his talk with. The older generation who has the money vs the younger generation. Who has, much more then the older generation, the creativity and technical skills and also a different point of view on how to cope and imbed new technologies in their lives. Ito thinks it's from vital importance that the older generation understand this generation better, so that the don't miss opportunities.

"Limits of existing legislation and legal precedents with respect to the demands of life online."

But what defines this generation?

According to Ito this generation is the creative class as described by Richard Florida. Important for the older generation to understand is that the Internet is a working anarchy. No one is in controll alone, there is no big UN like organisation behind it and yet almost half of the business done today is through the internet. With the internet being uncontrolled as it is, that must bring new values and ideas to the generation that grew up with spending time online.

A perfect example for this is downloading music. In 2004 teenagers were arrested in the US for downloading and spreading MP3's. According to the copywright rules they were breaking the law, and the older generations and their perspective on this case said that the teenagers were wrong. But how wrong are they really?

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