Time and place
There was a small flurry of messages today among cyberprofs about how students see the internet today. The consensus seems to be that it's harder for young people to understand John Perry Barlow's Declaration or the notion that spam is a big problem. But virtual property issues are all the rage. Online access is just like electricity to this generation.
Internet exceptionalism makes sense to me, but not because of the “we can't be regulated” argument. Electronic interaction augments what humans are particularly good at — associating, talking, remembering, getting things done — and makes visible what is often invisible offline. It's a revelatory medium. Ten years from now, we'll see this more clearly. I don't think it's right to be curmudgeonly about the internet now (”harumph, no big deal, just a speeded up telephone network”), and I'll bet that our successors will understand much better than we do what impact it has had on life.
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So while students may not identify with Barlow's Declaration, they identify even more strongly with his prescient The Economy of Ideas? That would be a good thing, as it was this article that made a copyright lawyer of me!