SarahJoichi 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.
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?
Apple and Pepsi saw this happening and their smart marketing people decided that they should adapt to this trend by letting people download mp3's for free after pursasing a pepsi. They launched this big with an commercial during the superbowl (the most watched television moment in the US) in which they let the arested kids speak about how noone could stop them downloading now, because it was legal.
Context
The older generations tend to see and value new technologisch as the see and value radio, books and television. But context has changed with the upcoming of the internet. Distributers can be the same people as the users now, music can be created by one person behind has computer.
Copresence
Copresence basically means "I share my present with you" and comes down to letting other people know about the mundain things in your life through technology. In Japan, for example, teenagers textmessage each other the whole day with texts like "I'm just out of bed" or " I'm meeting Kay in 5 minutes, where are you?". Mostly they share these details about thim with 5 to 10 friends.
I think that if you look at the popularity of Twitter, Plazes, Pownce and Jaiku that sharing your presence is becoming more and more of vital importance to a growing group of people. They share their life, through internet, with their friends. And, although they might not always realise that, with the world.
Remix and share
For people who haven't had acess to the internet for most of their lives, internet usually stands for diminshed values and the loss of culture. But they couldn't be more wrong. Sharing MP3's makes it easier to give other people access to a certain piece of music you like. Ito uses the comparison with the dinner table. Sure, you can tell that you heard a piece of music, and that you love it, bt will the person on the other end of the table actually listen to it? MP3 and other technoligisch make sharing culture with your friends, relatives and everyone you know much easier.
But people do not only share these cultural expressions they also tend to use it in their creativity and remix music or video into new material. Mostly these people are not proffesionals in what they are doing but amateurs, and that brings us to the next point of the talk.
Amateurs
The word amateur has as Tito sais a negative sound to it, because we associate it with work that is less good (less valuable) then work what is done by proffesionals. This used to be the case when education and manufactering cost money. But think about this. People who are working on Linux aren't working on Linux because they couldn't get a job at Microsoft. They work on Linux because they love it, and because they love open source. The same goes for distrubition. There was a time when music was only recorded in studios and that it cost a load of money. Now, it's a bit different. Listen to the artist Beirut you might hear a whole folk orchestra playing, but it's just one guy and his computer. The bar for making and distibuting work is gone down, and yes, there might be a lot of crap that is made that way, there can also be a lot of very original ideas and work because amateurs are often not stuck in a pattern that many proffesionals can be.
Happiness
Everyone is working hard to make money, often money is what drives people to work in the first place. But amateurs are not driven by money, they do it simply because they love it. And that is a very powerfull thing. It might be hard to understand for some, but there are people who go and edit Wikipedia in their free time like any other person would go gardening to relax. They like it because it makes them part of a community, and they work on something on what they value as important.
Political speach
When we talked about remixing culture before, we haven't talked about using remix to speak yet. As you can see in the video below, people can use remixing as a tool to express a certain political point of view or to let people now what they think or feel. And this is an important thing to keep in mind when we talk about legislation. To protect copywrightor or privacy in to strict and tight ways can make you lose freedom of speach. And that, we need to watch out for.
