JohnsBlog

(originally published in Eduspaces, February 09 2008 )

Does Castell’s description of the four main strands of internet culture – techno-meritocratic, hacker, communitarian and entrepreneurial – tell the whole story? In 2000 when Castells was writing it probably did. From the vantage point of 2008 I think I’d want to add a fifth cultural strand: that of digital youth culture.

The children and teens who have come online in the last 10 years constitute the first generation of users for whom the internet is normal and unremarkable because it has always been there, and their sheer weight of numbers and the specificity of their digital needs have had a dramatic impact on the character of the Net. Napster, Limewire and the other peer-to-peer music sharing networks, MSN, MySpace, Bebo, Last.fm, Facebook and YouTube are “social web” phenomena which young users have effectively called into being, in some cases wrenching them from their original form – Facebook famously beginning as a simple Harvard College yearbook and YouTube founders initially thinking of it as a video dating service – to fit in with their need for p2p sharing and socialisation. In the process they have changed the way young people communicate and entertain themselves, and quickly transformed a clutch of young Net entrepreneurs into young Net millionaires.

What you see here is the same wave of young ‘digital natives’ who have helped kickstart two new and massively profitable industries based on digital networks – mobile telephony and internet-based music retail – moulding the internet itself to their own generational culture and digital needs.

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Castells M, 2001, The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society p/back edition, OUP, Oxford