Webkids

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\title{We, the Web Kids}
\author{Piotr Czerski\\
(translated by Marta Szreder)}
\date{Feb. 2012}
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There is probably no other word that would be as overused in the media
discourse as ``generation''. I once tried to count the ``generations''
that have been proclaimed in the past ten years, since thewell-known
article about the so-called ``Generation Nothing''; I believe there were
as many as twelve. They all had one thing in common: they only existed
on paper. Reality never provided us with a single tangible,
meaningful, unforgettable impulse, the common experience of which
would forever distinguish us from the previous generations. We had
been looking for it, but instead thegroundbreaking change came
unnoticed, along with cable TV, mobile phones, and, most of all,
Internet access. It is only today that we can fully comprehend how
much has changed during the past fifteen years.

We, the Web kids; we, who have grown up with the Internet and on the
Internet, are a generation who meet the criteria for the term in a
somewhat subversive way. We did not experience an impulsefrom
reality, but rather a metamorphosis of the reality itself. What unites
us is not a common, limited cultural context, but the belief that the
context is self-defined and an effect of free choice.

Writing this, I am aware that I am abusing the pronoun ``we'', as our
``we'' is fluctuating, discontinuous, blurred, according to old
categories: temporary. When I say ``we'', it means ``many ofus'' or ``some
of us''. When I say ``we are'', it means ``we often are''. I say ``we'' only
so as to be able to talk about us at all.



\paragraph{1.}
We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes
us different; this is what makes the crucial, although surprising from
your point of view, difference: we do not ``surf'' and the internet to
us is not a ``place'' or``virtual space''. The Internet to us is not
something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet
constantly present layer intertwined with the physical environment. We
do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet and along it. If we
were to tell our \emph{bildungsroman} to you, the analog, we could say
there was a natural Internet aspect to every single experience that
hasshaped us. We made friends and enemies online, we prepared cribs
for tests online, we planned parties and studying sessions online, we
fell in love and broke up online. The Web to us is not a technology
which we had to learn and which we managed to get a grip of. The Web
is a process, happening continuously and continuously transforming
before our eyes; with us and through us. Technologiesappear and then
dissolve in the peripheries, websites are built, they bloom and then
pass away, but the Web continues, because we are the Web; we,
communicating with one another in a way that comes naturally to us,
more intense and more efficient than ever before in the history of
mankind.

Brought up on the Web we think differently. The ability to find
information is to us something asbasic, as the ability to find a
railway station or a post office in an unknown city is to you. When we
want to know something --- the first symptoms of chickenpox, the reasons
behind the sinking of ``Estonia'', or whether the water bill is not
suspiciously high --- we take measures with the certainty of a driver in
a SatNav-equipped car. We know that we are going to find the
information we needin a lot of places, we know how to get to those
places, we know how to assess their credibility. We have learned to
accept that instead of one answer we find many different ones, and out
of these we can abstract the most likely version, disregarding the
ones which do not seem credible. We select, we filter, we remember,
and we are ready to swap the learned information for a new, better
one,...