The term "digital native" is bandied about whenever someone is trying to say that a younger, less experienced person is less clueless about the internet than a more senior person. In cases where an intuitive grasp of the online world is what's required, such aboriginal distinctions may make sense, but the phrase does have a sense of generational warfare about it.
These generational rifts have really come to the fore with the controversy about the SOPA legislation (see Bruce Upbin's storify collection to get up to speed on the details). In this morning's NY Times, David Carr quotes Yancey Stickler, one of Kickstarter's founders, “The schism between content creators and platforms like Kickstarter, Tumblr and YouTube is generational. It’s people who grew up on the Web versus people who still don’t use it. In Washington, they simply don’t see the way that the Web has completely reconfigured society across classes, education and race. The Internet isn’t real to them yet.”
Add to that the fact that "Maplight, a site that researches the influence of money in politics, reported that the 32 sponsors of the legislation received four times as much in contributions from the entertainment industry as they did from software and Internet companies." For those of you keeping score, that's congress and the entertainment content companies on the old person side and the internet/software companies (and most consumers who have bothered to think about any of this) on the young hipster side.
Reddit launched a very successful campaign agains Go Daddy, one of the few tech companies that supported SOPA (they have since recanted) and other grass roots web efforts promise to counteract the huge lobbying imbalance of the pro-SOPA stakeholders. It's great fun for Joshua Kopstein of Motherboard to write an open letter titled, “Dear Congress, It’s No Longer O.K. to Not Know How the Internet Works," but there is something a bit blasé about the millennials lack of concern about the impacts of piracy on the U.S. economy.
It is indeed in all of our interest for content to be paid for, otherwise American consumers are just subsidizing the cost of the rest of the world's entertainment. If there were more trust between consumers and content companies it would be easier to make common cause. It is notable that there has been much less alarm on the web about corporate piracy (i.e. the Chinese eating our lunch) than about content piracy (i.e. the world eating our snacks). The moral is, never get between Americans and their snacks!
