Though I was merely a lurker at SC Forums, I kind of feel sad that they are taken down. An era ends with them. Second Life history of a year and a half suddenly disappeared with the forums closing down. No back ups to be had. Talk about Tony Walsh’s proverbial tree.

Growing up Digital, while in some respects is correct in its arguments, set false expectations for me in dealing with my students at Indiana University. Not every day does a graduate student gets to teach her dissertation topic and I was fortunate enough to be given this chance. In Fall 2007, I thought a 100-level seminar called Narratives in the Age of Media Convergence. Set aside all my difficulties in getting the university give me technical support (mind you, IU is among the top ten most-wired universities according to Newsweek), I was a bit surprised to see that my incoming freshmen lacked the media literacy that Tapscott’s book promised me. It was a shock to me as much as it was to them. I kept a blog from the inception of the class to its completion here. To encourage online collaboration I created a class wiki, prepared forums, started a collaborative story project, assigned a blogging assignment as their daily journal, and we read Patchwork Girl as an example of hypertext. The students were in a state of shock the first day, which to my surprise, recovered really quickly. Although all of them had a laptop, most didn’t use it for anything other then to check e-mails. I had instant questions: How are we going to use the Wiki? What do I write in a blog? I have nothing interesting to say. My favorites: How are we going to get graded for the blogs? What if someone deletes all the changes/additions I made in the collaborative story project?”

Is Indiana University an exception to the rule? I think not. I remember Howard Rheingold coming to IU to talk about smart mobs last year and when he was asked about media access and the digital divide, he responded that media access wasn’t the financial ability to buy these technologies anymore, it is being fluent in the literacy of these media. All my students had laptops, some had MACs, a luxury that I didn’t even permit myself, but most had absolutely no idea what to do with it. Which begs the question: where are these kids who grew up digital?

The bad thing about the Internet is that it is like an elephant: it remembers. The bastard never forgets. As I noted before, it is the harshest reputation building tool. One person writes something bad about you and it stays there forever. Or you post one angry comment, it stares at you like an eyesore. One silly comment on Twitter, it is right there up the rank. What is worse is that these comments are taken out of context. So you were joking around with a friend and jokingly called him a name on Twitter, the context is deleted, and your off-color comment remains.

What’s Boyd’s answer? Blog incessantly so that the not-so-good images of you get buried under recent entries, comment on others’ blogs responsibly, say no to Facebook’s public profiling, and treat video just like text because indexing them is only a matter of time. I think these are smart suggestions. Surely the Internet is changing the meaning of privacy as it is changing the meaning of copyright. Why don’t we sell our souls to the devil so at least we get a say in what appears.

"In Unix and other computer multitasking operating systems, a daemon (IPA pronunciation: /’deɪmən/ or /’dimən/^[1]) is a computer program that runs in the background, rather than under the direct control of a user; they are usually initiated as processes. Typically daemons have names that end with the letter "d" (for example, syslogd, the daemon that handles the system log, or sshd, which handles the incoming SSH connections)."

Of course this definition does not imply all the mischief they cause, but at least the name suggests it.