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Mind The Gap! Whose view of the Internet matters?

Mind The Gap! Whose view of the Internet matters?

January 2021

Dr. David Smith of the IET pointed everyone to this piece as being the Technology Read of the Day. 

I wrote a personal blog post in which I demolish the trope of the internet being threatened by elderly politicians who don't understand it, because the reality of policy is a hell of a lot more difficult to come to terms with. https://t.co/LtnnH5svAc

— Heather Burns (@WebDevLaw) January 30, 2021

The money quote from Burns' piece is this:

We – the GenXers – think of the internet as the open web. The land of dialup telnet Unix systems, the days of table layout, the days of dot com, the days of early tech startups, the days of the internet as a connector, the days of the internet as a business opportunity, the days of the internet as a path to social justice and revolutions, the days of the internet as a light in the darkness. That’s all we have ever known.

Today’s policy facilitators – the millenials – think of the internet as MySpace and Facebook. The closed web.

It's worth considering how different age groups -- those "Digital Natives" as the phrase went -- view Internet infrastructure.