(No.187) Society before and after the Internet and digital media

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Workshop Theme: 
Emerging Issues
Theme Question: 

Questions 1,2,3

Concise Description of Workshop: 

The modern Internet is over 25 years old. We have generations of people who were born well before it and also those for whom the Internet has been the main tool of education, entertainment and business for their whole lives. To further bridge the gap between different age groups in Internet governance, we bring together active Internet users from varying age groups and backgrounds. Discussion will aim to pinpoint key differences and similarities in how digitally native youth and people, whose period of youth took place long before global networking became mainstream, see the Internet.
The focus will be to assess the impact of Internet as a historical and social phenomenon, but topics cover a wide range of questions about education, politics, distribution of information and business such as:

What features and services of the modern Internet do today's youth take as self-evident compared to people who witnessed the system evolve?
Do the differences reflect serious discrepancies in morals?
What can today's digitally native/digitally naïve youth learn about how things were done before the Internet age?
What great examples are there to show how Internet has revolutionized economy and education and made things better?
Are there topics where young and old alike agree things have gone worse since the introduction of easy, public digital communications?
What kind of concepts were imagined before the Internet but really couldn't really be materialized before the current digital era?
Why do some people and institutions think of the Internet as a Wild West that is waiting to be tamed while others hold it as a safe haven?

Organiser(s) Name: 

Joonas  Mäkinen, Board member, Electronic Frontier Finland

Previous Workshop(s): 

I have been organizing the Youth Coalition on Internet Governance Dynamic Coalition and related workshops. IGF11 workshop Challenging Myths about Young People and the Internet: http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/component/chronocontact/?chronoformname=W... A general statement about YCIG-related events at IGF2011 can be found here: http://www.ycig.org/index.php/2011/10/2011-ycig-statement/

Submitted Workshop Panelists: 

Amelia Andersdotter, MEP, SE (confirmed)
Deirdre Williams (confirmed)
Ashnah Kalemera (confirmed)
John Kampfner, Google (confirmed)
Joonas "JoonasD6" Mäkinen, Board member, Electronic Frontier Finland, moderator

Name of Remote Moderator(s): 
Tim Davies