From Adam Curry comes the following, excellent essay by Douglas Adams written in 1999. Yes, the Douglas Adams. How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet

"I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are."

And then there's this wonderful observation:

"One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’."

And still this quote:

"Another problem with the net is that it’s still ‘technology’, and ‘technology’, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’ We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‘crash’ when we tried to use them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs (and a couple of decades or so after that, as sheets of paper or grains of sand) and we will cease to be aware of the things. In fact I’m sure we will look back on this last decade and wonder how we could ever have mistaken what we were doing with them for ‘productivity.’ But the biggest problem is that we are still the first generation of users, and for all that we may have invented the net, we still don’t really get it."

Which is really where I wanted to end up to say this. Net Generation. To them, it's not "technology" the way it is to you and me. Unless you're under age 21 and reading this, in which case disregard that last sentence. My whole point is better illustrated by this last quote:

"Most of us are stumbling along in a kind of pidgin version of it, squinting myopically at things the size of fridges on our desks, not quite understanding where email goes, and cursing at the beeps of mobile phones. Our children, however, are doing something completely different. Risto Linturi, research fellow of the Helsinki Telephone Corporation, quoted in Wired magazine, describes the extraordinary behaviour kids in the streets of Helsinki, all carrying cellphones with messaging capabilities. They are not exchanging important business information, they’re just chattering, staying in touch. 'We are herd animals," he says. 'These kids are connected to their herd – they always know where it’s moving.' Pervasive wireless communication, he believes will 'bring us back to behaviour patterns that were natural to us and destroy behaviour patterns that were brought about by the limitations of technology.' "

Shift asks, "Will newspapers survive?

"Fast forward to 2002: My folks still turn to the papers as their primary source for news and analysis (they do go online, but it's primarily for email). Although I'll still buy a paper occasionally or grab one that's laying around the office (for Canadian news or a Canadian perspective on an international event), I don't turn to the papers much these days. For the most part, I rely on the internet to let me know what's happening out there.

I fall in between the old and new vanguard of media in that I was raised on newspapers and am now weaning myself on the web, so I'm loyal to both. But a new generation is growing up on the net and for many of them, the print papers aren't even an option; even if they do read the papers, they tend to end up on the online version (TheStar.com, not the Toronto Star) through a referral.

With the net, now we go and find the news; the news doesn't get selected for us by editors and writers. We go out and discuss various viewpoints on political events in threads and discussion boards rather than having them dictated to us by op-ed pages with their own agenda." [via ia/]

Read that last paragraph to mean we're "news-shifting," getting our news from places we choose, and more of them. If you think you can sit behind a reference desk in your building and wait for the Net Generation to walk in and ask you a question, you are sadly mistaken. They choose when, they choose where, they choose what. They're growing up with information coming to them, not the other way around.

A natural corollary to this is that they expect their news to come to them, not out on the driveway once a day. In general, newspapers don't provide daily, personalized emails with headlines. So what do these kids do? (And that's the "royal" kids that includes adults like me.) They're getting their news chunked to them from places like Salon, Plastic, and MeFi.

The interesting part will come when RSS news aggregators hit the tipping point. Right now, we're still very reliant on human gateways for news. That's the fun of blogging and readings blogs... passing the news and the memes. But what happens when everyone gets their news and memes via RSS headlines on their combo-cell-phones-PDAs? If newspapers are smart, they'll start preparing for that. Some already have. Most haven't, but they need to shift with us. Just like libraries.