Carolyn Brown:
Good afternoon.  I'm Carolyn Brown.  I direct the Office of Scholarly Programs in the John W. Kluge Center, here at the Library of Congress.  And it gives me great pleasure to welcome you here to the second of a series on "Digital Natives," which is being organized by our current Papamarkou Chair in Education, Derrick de Kerckhove.  Before we begin, let me ask you to please turn off cell phones -- I'll try to remember turn my own off when I sit down -- and any other electrical devices that will bong, and beep, and may interrupt the proceedings.  And this event is being recorded for broadcast.

I will just say a little bit about the series and the thinking behind the series, and then I will introduce Derrick, who will introduce our panel members.  All of us, I think, have known for a long time that the digital revolution is transforming the way everyone uses information.  Even those of us who are not wildly literate in digital technologies are still using Google and other kinds of things.  What's becoming increasingly clear, however, is that the digital technology -- the Internet and all associated activities -- are having a major transformative affect on the culture we live in.  

Those of us here in Washington, D.C. -- and certainly out across the country, but we're very focused on politics here -- are very aware of some of the impact on political campaigns.  But there are all sorts of other ways.  Those of you who have children at home know that they're doing things that you can barely understand.  So part of what we're trying to do in this series, is to come to terms with some of the cultural implications of the digital technologies.  We know that young people growing up now have never known a world that wasn't digital, and that has changed the way they think about things.  One of our panelists here this afternoon, Mark Prensky, invented the terminology "digital natives" to distinguish those who've grown up in the digital age from those of us of my vintage who are "digital immigrants."

The Library of Congress sees this as particularly interesting for us and a part of a large educational initiative, of which there are multiple parts here.  We've long had an education office in connection with American Memory.  We're looking forward to a conference next year on the future of the book in the digital age.  The Librarian has even recently appointed a Senior Advisor on Education.  So, we see this series on digital natives in some ways as laying the groundwork for some of these other initiatives.  For all of us in cultural institutions, as we think about what our future is going to be, we hope to have some of the same values and certainly the same mission.  We also understand that that mission is going to have to be executed in entirely different ways from what we may have been accustomed to, and part of the challenge is to figure out how you change those things that are transient and keep the essence.  

So that's what this series is primarily designed to do.  Many of you may have tuned in on April 7 when our guest speaker was Edith Ackerman, who's back today as a respondent.  And we have two more events coming up on June 23 and June 30, both at 4:00, here.

Now, let me say something about our grand designer for this project.  When he's not here, he is sometimes at the University of Naples, and he's also Director of the McLuhan Program at the University of Toronto.  He has a number of books, and other kinds of publications.  I'm just going to mention a few of them.  I'll start with one of the older ones: The Architecture of Intelligence, McLuhan for Managers, The Zurich Manifesto, and most recently, especially for those of you who read Italian, because it's coming out in Italian, The Objective Imaginary.  But I'm sure it'll be in English at some point.  But please welcome Dr. Derrick de Kerckhove.

[applause]

Derrick de Kerckhove:
Thank you, Carolyn, and thank you also to the Library of Congress for bringing me over here.  And to the Papamarkou Chair, because it's been a wonderful opportunity to explore some fascinating themes, of which, of course, digital natives is one -- very, very, I think, pertinent to our time, and very, and I say, urgent to a certain extent.  Two of the people who are responsible for bringing this idea to me are actually with us tonight.  Edith Ackerman was the first person who brought to me the idea of the digital natives and the digital immigrants.  And, actually, the man who invented the term is Mark Prensky, so, you can see that our deck is loaded.  The third person here, to speak to us, is also one of the "50 people who matter most on the Internet," according to Newsweek, so, you know, we are very [laughs] --

[laughter]

-- a very nice thing to have.  Steven Johnson is an expert in many, many fields, but he's particularly an expert in writing best-sellers.

[laughter]

He's got five books to his name, and the last three are sort of a hat trick; all three have become best-sellers.  I knew two of the books; I had read two of the books before I met Steven, and the first one was Interface Culture, about 12 years ago, which was fascinating to me because I was writing, in fact, I was writing a book called Connected Intelligence at that time, and I was very inspired by it.  And then, I was even more inspired by the book that followed, on Emergence -- the issue of emergence, how things come together, either in our minds, or in social settings.  

And particularly, one of the greatest emergence phenomena is the Internet itself, and so Emergence was a very critical book for me.  Then came the first best-seller, Mind Wide Open, about cognitive responses to our technologies.  There's always this connection.  I would say that, maybe, Steven is an avatar of McLuhan.  The medium is a message for him, as much as it is for me.  The book that we are going to hear about this evening is Everything Bad Is Good for You.  You may not be convinced about this right now, but wait until you hear him talk about it.  You'll be going back to your TV set as soon as you can.

[laughter]

The last one is completely off the line, but it isn't apparently, and he will explain that.  The last one is called The Ghost Map, and it's about the worst cholera epidemics in London in the 19th century, which leads Steven to explore cultural consequences of the challenge given to a whole city, the urban challenge of an epidemic.

I won't talk to you much, because I think you will be more interested in hearing him, but here is the list of keywords that [laughs] --

[laughter]

Just to give you an idea.  A list of keywords that are given to accompany his books: behavior, cognitive psychology, communication, culture, digital media, games and gaming -- not a small matter for Mark Prensky, who is an expert, and I'll talk about Mark later -- intelligence, intuition -- is a good one -- I.T., clearly, -- learning, the long tail -- anybody knows about the long tail?  Well, he'll tell you -- media, networks, neuroscience -- that's one that's close to my interest -- popular culture, psychology in general, research -- of course, science, social networks -- very big deal now -- technology and society, trends, and I think you may say a few things about Web 2.0, won't you?  All right, well here's Steven Johnson.

[laughter]

[applause]

Steven Berlin Johnson:
Thank you, Derrick.  No one has ever introduced me with the keywords before.  I am going to discuss every single one of those topics --

[laughter]

-- for you today, in alphabetical order, starting -- I first, yeah, thank you for having me here.  Thank you to the Library; thank you, Derrick.  I first met Derrick a few years ago when he called me up and said, "Would you like to come to the Isle of Capri for a seminar to discuss your work for three or four days with some talented Italian graduate students?"  That was an easy yes, to say yes to that.

[laughter]

It was hard to break the news to my wife that that was what I was going to go do, and then we eventually brought her along, so that was fun.  But this is almost as fun as going to Capri with you, Derrick.  I like, also, how you were into the cool books before the best-sellers, you know, that was very nice.  I like to know that the early ones were special to you.  And I should probably take that "50 people who matter most on the Internet" off of my bio because it was from 1995 --

[laughter]

-- when, in fact, technically, there only were 50 people on the Internet.

[laughter]

So it sounds impressive, but -- Anyhow, so yeah, this is a lot of fun.  So I want to talk to you about this book, Everything Bad Is Good For You, and the argument that I was making.  If you've had a chance to read it, I'm going to give a couple of examples of things that actually came out since the book was published, so it should be kind of fresh, and then hopefully we can just open it up and have a great conversation, because these guys have a lot of great things to say and I know you do as well.  

So I thought the first thing I would do was to just back up and tell you how I came to write this book in the first place, how I came to decide to embark on this project of making this contrarian argument.  The subtitle of the book is How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter, so it was a right in-your-face kind of title.  And the whole story of the book really dates back to this experience that I had.  In around 2001. I was on vacation with my wife's family, and she, at the time, had a 7-year-old nephew -- she still has a nephew, but he's no longer seven -- named Wyatt [spelled phonetically].  And we were at the beach, and it was a rainy day, and the kids were getting a little stir crazy, and so I had been playing a game that I know most of you have either seen or played called SimCity at the time.  This is SimCity 2000, I believe.  How many people have played SimCity here?  But most of you've heard of it, I assume, right?  

So what happens in SimCity, is that you basically play this mix of a big city mayor and a Robert Moses style master planner.  And so you have this whole great metropolis that you control, and you can zone for various different kinds of development; you can zone for high density industrial development and low density residential development, and you can build highways and surface roads, and you build police stations, and you can set different taxation levels, and all of these different things.  But the beautiful thing about the game is that you aren't fully in control of the experience.  You can set up these parameters, and if you've set them up in a kind of a productive way, you will see little virtual people move into your city, and build their houses, and build their buildings.  But if you've set up the variables in some way that doesn't quite work, you'll see problems develop.  So, if you've built too many factories you'll start having pollution problems, and people will move out, and you won't be able to get anybody to move into your city, and then your economy will collapse, because you don't have enough workers, and you don't have enough people going to the stores.  

So it's a very complex, interdependent system made up of all of these moving parts.  And what you do when you play the game, is you try and push this whole complex system towards the goals that you've set for yourself, and for the city you're trying to build.  But you never really feel -- it's much more like growing a garden than it is following a linear story.  You're trying to kind of, you know, basically, kind of, lay down the seeds for the kind of city you want to build, and hopefully it works out, but it's always about tinkering and exploring, and messing with the system in different ways, and seeing what changes.  This is a screen from it here.  

So, we were on this vacation, and I thought well, listen, you know, I'll distract Wyatt for 30 minutes by showing him this video game and, you know, it'll be a little less crazy inside of the house.  So, I sit him down in front of the game, and I proceed to give him what I, with hindsight, now realize is probably a pretty condescending tour of the game.  It was really pretty much a tour of the graphics.  And so, you know, I'm sitting there at the screen and I'm saying, you know, "Wyatt, there's the Mayor's house.  That's where I live."

[laughter]

And, "Look, there's a playground there.  Do you see the two little kids playing around there?"  And, "Look, there's a big, tall building there.  You see that big, tall building?  That's a really tall building, Wyatt."  And so, I'm going through the game, and Wyatt is kind of paying attention, and then, at a certain point, I point out this kind of industrial zone that I built and I say, "You know, Wyatt, I've had a lot of trouble with these factories.  I can't seem to get this area off the ground.  And you can see, this factory is abandoned, and this one's got graffiti all over it; it's about to go dark.  And I'm just, I don't know, I'm kind of stuck with this area.  I can't seem to get it off the ground."  And Wyatt kind of looks at the screen, and he looks back at me, and he looks at the screen again, and he says, "You know, I think you may need to lower your industrial tax rates."

[laughter]

And it was just one of those moments, where you look around, and you're, like, "What did you just say?"

[laughter]

And your world just kind of tilts a little bit on its axis.  And what I realized was that Wyatt was in the middle of this game, and he was, in a real sense, he was learning without realizing that he was learning.  He was thinking at a very high level and was absorbing information about a very complex system, but he was having so much fun that he didn't notice.  And, you know, as we all know that's an incredibly comparable form of education, of learning.  

And I knew that in the game culture, that SimCity was the rule, not the exception.  I mean, one of the important things to say about SimCity is that it is not an educational title.  I mean it's one of the, you know, bestselling game franchises of all time.  There've been millions of copies sold.  The sequel to SimCity, The Sims, is the bestselling P.C. game of all-time.  And, as you know, in The Sims you manage a little household, and you have to -- literally, you do household chores all day in The Sims.  That's what you do for fun.

[laughter]

Like, 16-year-olds won't take out the real trash in their house, but they will go upstairs and take out the trash in their virtual world, in The Sims.  That's the kind of crazy landscape we've ventured into.  So, if you looked across the kind of range of games the kids were playing, there was this tremendous movement towards more complexity in the games, more challenge, more engagement, all of these things.  We've gone from Pac-Man and Space Invaders, to SimCity.  

And at the same time, I was looking around, and my wife and I were watching all of these long-format, serial narrative television shows, like The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, and we were watching them on DVD a lot and, you know, we'd been saying to each other, "Gosh, you know, television has really never been better.  There's a lot of great stuff on television."  And of course, I'd been in the middle of the Internet revolution, and watched all of the things that were happening with participatory media.  And so, it seemed to me that, you know, we were living in this time where there was a lot of great, challenging, interesting, rich things that were happening in pop culture, and yet, every time I looked around to see what the broader public discussion of pop culture was, you know, you came across quotes like this.  

This is a quote from George Will, but I could spend the rest of our time together reading a comparable quote.  I mean: "Ours is an age facaded with graphic entertainments and an increasingly infantilized society whose moral philosophy is reducible to a celebration of choice.  Adults are decreasingly distinguishable from children in their absorption of entertainments and the kinds of entertainments they are absorbed in: video games, computer games, handheld games, movies on their computers, and so on.  This is progress: more sophisticated delivery of stupidity."

All right, that was what I kept seeing, and everybody was talking about the violence question, and the moral values question, and the obscenity question, and I was looking around and seeing something quite different.  And so, what I decided to do was to try and track, over the last 30 years -- to tell the story in a sense of a trend over the last 30 years -- and look at the question of the impact of popular culture, not from the values perspective; not from the perspective of, " Is there more violence or less violence, or is the violence having an effect," or any of those other perspectives, but rather to focus on the question of: how much cognitive engagement is there in the average work of popular culture?  How complex are the problems that you have to solve when you're engaged with a successful video game?  How complex are the storylines and the plotting -- the number of characters you have to track the relationships with when you watch a television show -- compared to, say, what I was doing when I was a kid in 1977?  

And what you find, is when you look at the history of the culture from that angle, what you find is that there's this very steep increase in the kind of cognitive exercise that is required of you to engage with popular culture today.  And I decided to call this kind of trend "the sleeper curve," because every time I told people about it they said, "Oh, that reminds me of that Woody Allen movie from the '70s, when he wakes up in the future -- "Sleeper" -- when he wakes up in the future, and all of the things that were supposed to be terrible for you are actually great for you, and there were all of the scientists who were saying, 'Quick, smoke this cigarette, you really need to get better.'"

[laughter]

And also this idea that this curve, this trend towards more complexity, was happening and people just hadn't noticed it.  It had been kind of sleeping in the background as we were all kind of feeling its effects.  So Everything Bad is basically making the argument for the existence of this trend towards more cognitive complexity engagement.  

And so, today I want to just walk through three different kinds of complexity that I think are really kind of the central kind of pillars of this trend.  And the first is something we've already seen, in a sense, in the example of SimCity, and the kind of substance, the content, of what you're engaging with.  There's another game that came out after SimCity, which is another franchise, and that's a game called Civilization 4.  How many people have seen or heard of Civilization 4?  That's a smaller number.  The great thing about Civilization 4 is, what you do in that game is, you recreate the entire course of human, economic, technological, and political history.  That's what the kids are doing for fun, right?

[laughter]

And this is a game that -- the winter after Everything Bad Is Good For You came out, this was the number two bestselling P.C. game in the U.S.  So again, this is not a fringe educational title.  This is a game, now, that Wyatt plays, now that he's 12 or 13.  And you can't probably read this, but this is the civics screen from Civilization 4.  So, just the idea that there is a civics screen in a video game is probably surprising to some people.  But you can go through and kind of pick out the form of government that you'd like, the legal forms that you'd like to use, the labor model, the economic model, the religious model, and kind of pick and choose.  You'd be like, "I'd like a bureaucracy with a pagan system --

[laughter]

-- with maybe a strong free market, and a theocracy.  I think that would be good, if we'd mix those together and see what would happen."  And the game kind of works like this; you can do this forever, with all of these different layers of complication.  And it's, in fact, too complicated now for me to play this game.  This has exceeded my ability to keep up with these things.  

But to give you a sense, because we don't want to sit there and play it, I just wanted to give you a sense of, like, what the kinds of conversations are like about these games when people get into them.  So I went through and pulled out from the discussion boards of one of the fan sites, just the discussion topics that were kind of hotly debated on the fan sites for Civilization 4.  So, this gives you some sense of what the conversation is like about these games.  "Basic labor management issues: how do you guys control your workers at start?"  It's not a very violent game, but every now and then there's somebody who just wants to know how to start a world war.

[laughter]

I like this one.  "Religion: a few questions."

[laughter]

"Barbarians: How to deal with."  You get the Luddites every now and then: "Is there a way of hindering the space race?"  And the age-old question: "Is it ever worth it to not build a shrine with your first great profit?"  

[laughter]

That's an important one.  "Louis XIV versus Japan: A question on foreign policy."

[laughter]

And finally, "Beware of the sudden collapse experience."  I have no idea what that means, but it sounds profound.  

So, what you have in these games is basically they're exercising, in a sense, a muscle for system thinking, for thinking about a complex system of interacting parts, thousands of interacting parts in a case of a game like Civilization or SimCity, all of which influence each other in complicated ways.  And they're trying to model that universe and make sense of it, and model it by exploring it, by predicting what effects changes will have, and by setting goals, and trying again to push the system towards those goals.  

Now this is a very high-level form of thinking.  This is the kind of thinking we need to understand how ecosystems work, to understand how political systems work, to understand how cultural systems work, and it's precisely the kind of thinking that is very difficult to teach in a traditional linear form.  It's hard to teach it in a book form, or in a lecture form.  The best way to teach it is by, in a sense, getting your hands dirty, and getting in there, and messing around with the system and exploring, and learning from it as you explore.  So that's part of the kind of gaming culture that's, I think, clearly a sign.  You know, if you compare the system thinking that was at work in playing Pac-Man and Space Invaders when I was a kid, there's been this extraordinary advance.

Now, when you shift over into television, there's been a comparable increase in complexity, although I think the interactive forms are always going to be richer, and more engaging and, in a sense, better for you than a purely passive form like television.  But nonetheless, television has been pushing the boundaries as well.  And the best example of that, actually, is something that happened after Everything Bad Is Good For You came out, which is the huge international hit breakthrough for ABC hit show Lost. How many people watch Lost here?  Not that many.  Yeah, that's interesting.  

So Lost is, by some pretty standard measures, the most complicated show ever in the history of television.  If you look at it in terms of the number of characters, the number of plotlines, if you think about the number of, kind of, open mysteries and threads that are connecting the various plotlines over the four years that it's been on the air, there are literally somewhere north of 500 open questions that are kind of being resolved or hinted at.  So, it's an incredibly complex network of storylines, and characters, and mysteries that they've built.  And the great thing about Lost is that there's an easy kind of control study for this, because it's the story of survivors on a desert island trying to get off the island and, you know, [laughs] television did that once before with --

[laughter]

-- Gilligan.  So, we can see very clearly how much more complex things have gotten.  But if you look at Lost, actually, it's not just that there are a number of mysteries, it's that they are layered at various different scales of experience.  So, there are basic ontological questions that the show is raising.  Do these characters even exist?  Are they dead?  Did the plane crash and they all died, and this is some kind of weird collective hallucination?  This is something that the fans are constantly debating about, and the creators of the show have kind of planted various hints about this.  

There are formal genre questions about the show that are kind of built into the plot.  One big one is, are supernatural events allowed in this world?  This is something the fans are constantly -- and the creators have actually commented on this as well.  It's a big question, because there are a lot of things that seem like they couldn't possibly have actually happened, so is there magic in this world, or is there not?

Then there are mathematical riddles.  They have these numbers that are kind of central to the plot in this kind of mysterious way that they literally, in some scenes, have embedded, you know, on the surface of a medicine jar.  So the only way you can see these special magic numbers, is if you are watching at home on your TiVo or your DVR, and you freeze-frame it, and then you output that to your computer, and you blow it up, you'll see these special numbers there, which fans do all the time, and they put them on the fan sites, right?

[laughter]

Then there's the historical question of, you know, the long history of this island and this corporation that supposedly set up the island.  In the early episodes, there was this SOS tape that had been running for, like, 16 years, a whole mystery of how this island came about.  There's a huge geographical question of where the island physically is in space, which has been the subject of, kind of a recurring investigation.  And then there's this whole biographical question about the characters, and what happened to them in the past, and what's happening to them in the future?  And there's just, you know, dozens and dozens and dozens of threads around the individual characters.  

Now, what's interesting is, if you go back in the history of television almost every show lives only -- when there are mysteries and multiple plot lines, they live almost entirely on that last level, down there at the biographical level.  And Lost has kind of erected all of these layers on top, and so it's a show that moves from this broad scale of, you know, 20 years of history, and the history of a corporation, and the location of an island, all the way down to these interpersonal relationships between a character and his dad and their baby.  

In my day, when I was a kid, the mysteries were, "Who shot J.R.," right?  It was one mystery.  There were four suspects.  And that was enough to, you know, capture the attention of a nation, right?

[laughter]

Now we have something like Lost, which if you had put on the air 20 or 30 years ago would've been literally unwatchable.  People would not have been able to tolerate the level of complexity there.  

So, something has changed in the popular imagination over this period of time.  We're more willing to tolerate being open, and kind of confused, and thrown into this very complex world.  And part of it is that we are supported by the kind of participatory structure of the Web in dealing with these new, more complex forms.  So the hardcore fans who are sitting around capturing these things, and finding the numbers in the scenes, post them onto the fan sites so the slightly less hardcore fans can come and find out what they missed, and get help in navigating this complicated narrative universe.  

And my favorite example of this is this map that I found shortly after Episode 1 of Season 2 of Lost, on one of the fan sites.  And [laughs] I won't give anything away if you're going to go back and watch this on DVD, which I encourage you to do, but at the end of season one, there's a kind of a mysterious hatch that they have found and they kind of blow it open.  And in the beginning of the first episode of Season 2, they go down into the hatch and there's kind of an underground lair.  And about 20 minutes of that show, that particular first episode, is devoted to kind of life inside the underground lair.  And, within a day of that episode airing, this map of the underground lair showed up on one of the fan sites.  

And all of those little -- but keep in mind, there's no, you know, overhead establishing shot of what the underground lair looks like.  The fan sat there with, you know, the remote, freezing images, and figuring out all of the spatial relationships between all of the shots, so he could figure out what the underground lair looked like.  And, in fact, each little purple dot there corresponds to a specific shot in the sequence, and then they accompany the map with this long annotated list, where they show the freeze-frame from the show, commentary about how they figured it out, and it just goes on and on [laughs] and on.  It goes on for, like, 10 more pages, you know, all of those shots annotated explaining, you know, what's going on.  So, first lesson, people have way too much time on their hands.

[laughter]

And I love this, because somebody uploaded this and, you know, the next comment from somebody was, "Hey, that's great, really helpful.  I notice one thing that was a little bit wrong.  You might want to fix this," you know.  And it becomes this kind of collective document, you know, helping people navigate their way through this show.  

And Mark knows about this even more than I do.  What this is, is this is the structure of, what we call in the video game world, a game walk-thru, where a fan gets together and gives tips for a game, and explains all of the different things you can do to make it through the game if you get stuck.  What this is somebody doing, is basically treating Lost as though it were structured like a game, as though there were a universe so complex and rich and layered that you needed help kind of navigating through it.  Nobody built these maps for Three's Company --

[laughter]

-- because there wasn't -- I mean, you literally couldn't do it, you know.  It would just be, like, then Jack was there, and then, you know, Suzanne Somers was here.  But Lost as a show is rich enough and is, I think, consciously fashioned itself after the structure of games, recognizing that games are kind of the central cultural experience for a lot of, you know, 16 to 24-year-olds, now.  And so the show has widened open its, kind of, space to allow this level of complexity, knowing that fans will dig in and uncover all of this stuff and share it.  

And that gets us to that crucial kind of second part of complexity, which is participation.  And I'll tell you, just, my favorite story from the reception of Everything Bad is Good For You.  When I flew over to London after the book came out in America -- it came out shortly afterwards in the U.K -- and I was in the middle of kind of a crazy media tour in the U.S., and I fly over to the U.K., and I land, you know, I'm all jetlagged, and my publicist says, "Okay, here's the plan.  You're going to go on the leading BBC radio for a cultural affairs show, and you're going to do a 20-minute presentation of your ideas.  And then there's going to be a responder, who is one of the U.K.'s leading cultural critics, and he is going to engage with your ideas.  And we're going to go there right now.  I'm sorry, you can't go to your hotel first, but we've got to get over there to tape this thing."  So I said, "Well, that sounds like a terrible idea.  I'm jetlagged in another country and going to go on B.B.C. to defend my whacky American pop culture idea."  

I get there.  I don't even get to meet the esteemed cultural critic.  We sit down, you know, tape starts running.  The moderator says, "So, Mr. Johnson, give your little speech."  And so, I do my little talk, and then the moderator turns to the esteemed cultural critic and he says, "So, Nigel, what do you" -- and I don't even know if his name was Nigel, but I feel like it was.

[laughter]

"So Nigel, what do you make of Mr. Johnson's argument?"  And then Nigel proceeds to say the least likely sequence of words that I could possibly imagine, which is, he says, "Well, I have to say that I was rather shocked that Mr. Johnson managed to write 200 pages defending popular culture, and never once mentioned Buffy, The Vampire Slayer."

[laughter]

And then he proceeded to give this long, you know, 10-minute discourse on the philosophical, moral complexity of Buffy, and it was entirely convincing.  And so, when we think about participation, you know, we could just start by learning from Buffy a little bit that, you know, there are things that have been built out there by fans.  This is the "Buffyology" site, which has every single show, every word of every show, every character, searchable, you know, in an Online -- so when you're thinking to yourself, "what was that, that character said in episode four of season two?  Oh, I can go to "Buffyology" and look it up."  Of course, there is an immense Buffy, The Vampire Slayer Wikipedia page that goes on and on.  And I think there isn't a Buffy page in the Britannica.  I'm not sure about that, but --

[laughter]

-- I'm pretty sure there's not.  

And then, an important thing about all of this is, you know, it's not just about these kind of virtual connections.  One of the big changes, which we can talk about if you're interested in this more, is this new idea of using the kind of connective power of the Web to encourage face-to-face encounters.  It's a big trend that's happening, in a lot of different ways, on the Web.  And one of the great sites, which I'm actually on the advisory board of, is MeetUp.com. That lets people get together, of shared interests -- and use the Web to find people who share their interests, but actually go and meet in somebody's living room, or meet in a coffee shop, or in a restaurant, and talk.  There's a great mix of the, kind of, virtual and the real.  And these are the Buffy meet-ups from around the country.  And there's still thousands of them, even though the show has been off the air for quite a while.  This takes me to my favorite map, maybe in the history of maps.  This is the vampire meet-up groups --

[laughter]

-- all around the country, related.  But important to say, these are not people who are fans of vampire shows.  These are people who self-identify as vampires, right?

[laughter]

And it's important, because -- it sounds like a joke, but before the Internet came along, if you were a vampire, it was very hard to meet other vampires, right?

[laughter]

You're in your crypt all day, and you can't, you know, get out until the night.

[laughter]

So, and for the rest of us, we now know where the vampires are, which is good to decide where we want to move.  Yeah, there are definitely a lot of these kids, and in San Francisco, weird.

[laughter]

So, but this is the kind of stuff.  So, with every cultural work, now, there's this, you know, amazing kind of participatory ring of creation.  You know, there's fan fiction and people extending these narratives, and annotating them.  And the sense that what's happening on the screen -- and Mark has written about this wonderfully, and Doug Rushkoff who's coming later has talked about this, too, with his concept of the screen-agers -- this is the generation that accepts the idea, as a given, that what's on the screen is something that they should be able to shape.  And even if they're going to sit there and watch and hour of Lost, and just sit back, the second it's over they're going to go and add to it in some way or, you know, have some kind of extension of that world.  And that's a powerful way of approaching media.  It's really kind of liberating us from that passive structure that I had kind of grown up in.

And then finally, very important here in the context of the Library, I think, the importance of interface in all of this, in the metaphors and models that we use to make sense of all of this information.  On the one hand, there's been this amazing ability, particularly in the game interfaces, of people to process hugely complex user interfaces on the screen.  So, this is an interface from World of Warcraft, which is totally meaningless to me.  I have no idea what -- but some 14-year-old looks at this and says, "Oh, right, yeah.  Okay.  I see the situation."

[laughter]

So, you know, this is the kind of case where the interface is actually, you know, it's gotten in the way of the game, right?  You know, there's all of this meta information about all of the people playing it, and all of the different kind of resources they have, and all of the different kind of things they're up to, and the conversations between them.  And behind this layer there's, you know, a mythical beast that they're trying to slay, but you can't actually see the beast, because there's so much interface in the way.  So, this ability to kind of process these incredibly complex things is important.  

But I think the other thing that I would like to stress is, of all of the great kind of Web 2.0 breakthroughs that we've seen in the past few years, they all began with great interface design.  They're all shaped by people who are, kind of, controlling the kind of visual metaphors that we saw on the screen.  So if you look at, you know, Blogger was originally just a great, simple tool for publishing your own ideas, and keeping them archived in a kind of reverse, chronological order.  You know, MySpace and Facebook were, you know, really path-breaking interfaces for mapping a kind of a social network of your friends.  YouTube -- this is me on YouTube, which I will not make you watch -- is, you know, a great interface for sharing and uploading video, and commenting and doing all of those things.  

And so, all of the forces that have been unleashed by things like blogging: the impact that it's had on politics, as you said; the impact that it's had on traditional media, and on the way that people share their personal lives; all of that began with somebody creating a breakthrough, new interface for that information.  So, the people who get to kind of control those interfaces are, you know, increasingly important to our culture.  And in a sense, they have as much kind of creative impact as traditional novelists, or artists, or architects.  

And if you think about it, the important thing here is how much has changed in such a short amount of time.  So, go back to the Web circa 1995 -- and there's a Yahoo homepage from 1995 -- and think about what has changed, and what the medium is capable of doing, like the basic rules of the medium, to get back to McLuhan here.  What are the basic characteristics?  The change, I would argue, from Yahoo to YouTube, in terms of all of the things that have been added, in terms of the basic functionality, is extraordinary.  I mean we started in 1995 and we've got, you know, a page with links and some static images, and that was pretty much it.  It was very hard to publish to it; there was really no audio; there was certainly no real video.  It was very limited.  Fast-forward 10 years to YouTube, and you've got video, and you've got audio, and you've got the ability to take that and embed it in some other page.  You've got the ability to comment on, and rate, and recommend, and do all of these things that have developed just in 10 years.  

Now, compare that to the evolution from radio to television, and the basic rules of those different forms of media.  With radio you had audio.  You had programs.  You had a dial you could change between different programs that would come on at various different times.  Television comes along. You've got audio.  You've got video.  You've got programs.  You've got a dial.  You can switch the dial back and forth, and see different programs.  In terms of just listing the functionality, the features, the basic interface of the medium has changed far more dramatically from Yahoo to YouTube than the transformation from radio to television.  

And what's important about it is it happened with almost no training, right?  It happened in a much shorter amount of time, and there was no sense of, "Wow, this medium has been totally, radically, you know, reinvented.  We're going to have to slowly absorb this as a society, and learn what these new tools are good for."  The natives, and some of us on the periphery, maybe, of the natives, just saw the new tools and said, "That's great!  Hey, I can take that and I'll build something else on top of it."  "Well, that's very useful.  Could I take my YouTube video and embed it on my Facebook page?  Yes!  Great, I'll do that!"  Right?  And so, this ability to kind of grab these things and repurpose them, and do mash-ups of various different forms, that's one of the great cognitive skills that this generation brings to the table.  

And what they're doing, ultimately -- and this is, I think, the thing that's so exciting for the possibilities, and the future of libraries. What they're most versed in, what they're most comfortable doing, is ultimately, kind of, exploring information space.  That's what they do.  They sit in front of the screen, and there's this whole universe of information, and they're mapping it and navigating it, and reinventing it, and figuring out new connections to make, and building new tools that they can share with other people, and uploading their information about their lives, in a space of information.  And that's the oxygen that they have kind of evolved to breathe.  And what I love about that is, in a sense, you know, the closest thing we have to, you know, a pure information space -- it's that mix of, kind of, real-world space and data space, virtual space -- up to now, has been the library.  So the opportunity to take the skills that the people who have spent a lot of time thinking about libraries and what they mean, to this new generation who has been living a kind of a different version of the library in this new connected world of information space.  That's a great opportunity.

So finally, the sleeper curve mind -- the key things that, I think, you know, I'd leave you with: there's the property of system thinking; an ability to adapt to new interfaces; the ability to collaborate on projects in a kind of distributed way; building a Wikipedia page for Buffy, the Vampire Slayer; that merging of the kind of real and virtual space; not just having to be about the screen, but having the screen being a kind of an overlay for reality.  And then, finally, I think the big point here, that you can see in that original story about Wyatt, is this idea that to be entertained is to be engaged and challenged, that's it's not a race to the bottom, that it's not a lowest common denominator culture.  

If people really wanted to have the cheapest pleasure, and, kind of, the easiest way out, then the history of game design would be the history of people competing to make the world's easiest video game, where you would just, kind of, rule over the world and everything you wanted to have happen would happen instantly.  And, in fact, the exact opposite has happened.  The games have gotten harder and harder, and more challenging, and more layered, and more complex, because this generation of kids demands that; they expect that.  And when they don't get that level of engagement, that's what turns them off.  

So, those are my thoughts.  Lots more to say, but I want to turn it over to the respondents, and then to you.  So, thank you very much.

[applause]

Derrick de Kerckhove:
Well, thank you very much, Steven.  That was absolutely fantastic, and very useful, and I'm very happy that Mark Prensky is here.  Some of you may have been here the first time, and have already heard Mark.  I was delighted when Mark actually wrote once to me on -- we didn't know each other -- and he wrote, actually, to Robert Saladini, because he'd heard about this series, and he thought, well, that's fascinating.  I'm the one who invented the term "digital natives."  I'd like to see what they're talking about.

[laughter]

So, Mark actually, then, kindly came to become a respondent, and has now offered to become a respondent for the whole series, which is really quite a lovely thing.  Mark is an expert in the areas that you've just been hearing about, particularly in gaming and education.  And his last book, I love it, because the title is Mom, Don't Bother Me -- I'm Working -- or, I'm Studying.

Mark Prensky:
Don't Bother Me, Mom -- I'm Learning.

Derrick de Kerckhove:
I'm Learning, which is very sober, in English.  It refers to the fact that the kids are actually playing, but they are explaining to the mother, they really are learning, which is what we've just heard.  The title in Italian is just delightful: Mamma Non Rompere. Sto Imparando!, which means "Don't Break My 'dot dot dot' -- I'm Studying," --

[laughter]

-- which is a rather lovely way of getting the attention of a public, an Italian public.

[laughter]

I hope I got your attention, Mark.  Would you like to come and see -- well, you actually don't have to come; you can stay there, if you'd like to turn the machine on.

Mark Prensky:
Do I need to turn this on?  It sounds like it's on.  Fantastic.

Well, thank you, Derrick, and thank you, Steven, for those great remarks.  Steven and I have never physically met, but we first met when I wrote to him, to ask him for a blurb about that book, and he was incredibly generous, and wrote a very nice blurb, and said, "This is something that I totally believe in."  And so, now we have the opportunity to be together.  And I want to thank everybody who showed up today, in this horrible weather, [laughs] for really having the courage to come out.  It's a great topic.  It's one that is global now.  Everybody's thinking about it.  There are lots of opinions going back and forth about what digital natives are, whether they exist, what that term means about immigrants.  I'm in the process of writing a "Prensky strikes back" piece --

[laughter]

-- about all of the criticisms that have come up recently.  So, it's really a fascinating thing to be in the middle of.  I have -- and I recommend, if you don't do this -- if you are interested in any topic, you can put in something called "Google alerts" and they will send you, on an almost daily basis, everything that hits the Internet, both in the blogosphere and outside the blogosphere, about that topic.  So I kind of have a sense of what's being written about digital natives and digital immigrants, and these kind of things.

One of the things that I generalize about what Steven said is that there are a lot of topics these days about which the common point of view, the generally accepted point of view, is dead wrong.  And games -- the value of games -- is one, and certainly what Steven talked about: the dumbing down versus actually getting smarter.  If you go to YouTube, or maybe it's TEDTalks, you'll see Steven Pinker making the argument, very cogently, that we live in the least violent times in human history.  And he does that very nicely by saying, "What was the probability of your dying a violent death when you were a caveman, or a hunter/gatherer, or this?  And despite the wars and everything that probability has come way, way down," maybe not far enough.  

So, there's a lot of places where we just don't know, and we need to keep a much more open attitude.  Who thought that, when we gave people a tool to communicate in video with the world, that millions of people would do it?  That's what YouTube is.  It's just a way -- there was this huge flowering that, I think, was totally unexpected to most people.  It certainly was to me.  And so, these are the kinds of things that we really need to think about.

You mentioned mash-ups.  I saw something -- ooh, that was a weird voice.

[laughter]

Excuse me.  Anybody got helium?  

[laughter]

I was at the "Games For Health" conference, in Baltimore.  This is something that exists now.  There are now a lot of games that are promoting health of all kinds: doctor training, nurse training, patient training, physical education.  And they had some guy from Second Life, and what he had done -- he was demonstrating Second Life -- and what he had done was he said, "We went out to these public databases."  And, for example, here I am in Second Life, in this place, and I'd like to see all of the planes flying around Los Angeles.  So, I'll just go out to the database, which exists publicly, of all of the planes in the air, where exactly they are, what their speed is, and I'll just suck that right in here.  And suddenly, all of those planes appeared.  And then, he said, "Well, I'm going to go out and create a machine that builds molecules."  And, lo and behold, you could go out to the database of chemistry, and you could just build molecules, right in the middle.  

And this, to me, is huge, because it means that anybody -- and the same thing is happening in Google Earth, and in other applications -- can take data -- and more, and more of this data is public, and it's being collected by the satellites; it's being collected by the military; it's being collected by lots of government organizations, and some of it may have been previously in books in the National Archives, or in the Library of Congress, but now it's online.  And so, it's easy, the tools are there, to bring it together in really exciting, new ways, and put things together, and create things that we never thought about.

Now, of course, this raises very interesting issues of intellectual property, and that whole field is changing right before our eyes, and that's a very interesting thing to watch.  And I'll just end here by trying to tie this up with you, because there's a very -- given what you said -- there's a quote that is attributed to Marshall McLuhan -- that I have never been able to actually track down, so it may be apocryphal -- but I did write to his son, and his son said, "I think he would say that kind of thing."

[laughter]

And the reason we can't track it down, is because none of this stuff is digital.  You can't just go into the books and say, "Where is this stuff?" with a little search.  But that's coming.  And the quote is, "Anybody who makes a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either one."  

Derrick de Kerckhove:
He might have said that, but it could also have been Oscar Wilde.

[laughter]

Mark Prensky:
From jail, right.

[laughter]

Derrick de Kerckhove:
Well, thank you.  That's a lovely presentation.  I'm now going to say a few words about Edith Ackerman, but you also have met her.  She was the first speaker in the series.  She's a part of the MIT Research Group, a consultant also, for business, about interfaces, in fact, and relationship with objects; and a great consumer of the notion of digital natives.  And so now it's your turn to respond to Mark, and to Steven.

[laughter]

Edith Ackerman:
Yeah.  What I would like to do, Mark, is [break in audio] Steven, is to try to tie back what you have said to some of what I have said, a month ago, exactly.  And because I said the opposite of what you said at one point, I would like to go for it.  What I said in my talk is that it's not that the world itself has been complex, is more complex, and that people's ability to handle complexity has augmented so much.  What I would like to submit to you, actually, is the idea that the ways in which we mediate our experience, the ways in which we externalize our thoughts and feelings, and the moment at which we start sharing with others what we want to elaborate, and the complexity that we want to handle, has changed.  And what I want to do is to tell you a very short little tale from my point of view as a developmental psychologist, to get at this question.

When I was younger I learned through my Master, Jean Piaget, that when the children were two-years-old, they entered in what is called a symbolic function.  And when he was talking about the symbolic function, there was the acknowledgement that it's a way of mediating one's experience through different ways, one being the acquisition of language; speech, notation and speech, which actually appear at the same time, and it's not one after the other.  Children being able to scribble as they begin to speak.  But they also spoke about the importance of suspension of disbelief, pretend play, imaginary companions.  

Now, what happens is that, when I was young, when people were studying the genesis or the development of the capacity of mediating one's experience, the focus was only and always on language and, if possible, written.  There was no focus on the capacity that humanity has to evolve what starts as pretend play in children.  It exists, because there are forms of expression like theater, improvisation, that actually follow that path.  But it has somehow been completely neglected by those scientific -- I call them the man-dead scientists, you know.  At the time, those were considered, like -- especially, for example, to animate things that children do in pretend play.  Those are considered not so important.  

Now, what I think happened, with the technological capabilities that we have now, is that, instead of only using notation, our ability to write down something on a sheet of paper that is, in a way, only recording what we write down, but it doesn't help us with the computations, is very different from writing the same operation, let's say, three plus two.  Let's make it simple.  And this thing actually helps you solve the problem.  So, I think that from the moment on, when you have a surface that is an interface to a machine that computes, it allows you to go beyond the world of notation and language, and to engage in the world of simulation and dynamic modeling.  

And I believe this is absolutely key, and I hear it through your talk, because when you talk about SimCity, SimLife, The Sims, I think also of a computation in Micro Works, like the ones that were invented by Seymour Pappert and other people.  The beauty of this, is that those allow you to actually try out something; they give something back to you, you try out, they give something back to you.  So, you start to learn to externalize before you are ready, and that's the beauty of them.

So, that's just one part of the story, because that's still being alone in my micro world.  What is so beautiful, I think, with some of what you are talking about is that, now that we have tools in which people can, let's say, contribute their own little piece of creation and test it with machines, or the computational devices, and among themselves, what happens is that they get public even before they think.  That was my point in the first talk.  I said, "They share before they think," and that's the beauty of it.  

So, all of these little tales, I would like to check it on you.  Whether you would accept the idea that, maybe, it's not so much that people handle more complexity.  Playing Go or playing chess is very complex, and if you are a master in Go, you need to have done your 4,300 games in order to become a black belt, right, in Go.  And so, they are very complex games.  But what I think is that in some of these games you can handle together more complexity in different ways, because you are in the process of simulating an enactment, and not just of writing down, of notation.  So, that's one point.  And the second point is that it's less on the narrative.  You don't have a solo author that talks to an audience that listens, but you have this participatory building, together, these simulacrum.

The second question, and this one I make sure is -- there are people who have studied; Paul Harris is one.  He wrote a beautiful book that is called The Works of the Imagination.  And what he looked at is, in children, the children know damn well when they are in the world of pretend, or not in the world of pretend, but there are funny glitches, when all of a sudden it's no longer so clear.  Because the theoreticians always tell you, you know, "If I am in the world of pretend, or if I am on the stage, I know we are in the world of pretend, and I can take risks that I cannot do in the world."  This is the similar root, simulacrum and simulation.  I can take risks that I cannot take otherwise if I am not on stage.  What Paul Harris has shown is that children know it damn well, but if you have two monsters, one of which is really more scary than the other, all of a sudden this distinction between the reality and the play, the pretense or the enactment, falls.  And something similar, I think, happened in popular culture with reality shows.  And I would love to hear you talk more about that.  

[laughter]

Because in reality shows it's not just that everybody builds the plot, but there is a very funny blending between the ways in which people take personal risks in their lives that they would not have done in theater, no matter what genre.  Even in psychodram [spelled phonetically], it's not the same.  And I would love to hear you talk about this quality of the popular culture, like this bleeding -- also when you go in Second Life and you actually can make real money [unintelligible].  But that interests me a bit less than the melodramatic, tacky, you know, reality shows where at the end when the girl is not chosen by the [Italian] -- how do you say, in English?

Male Speaker:
The Bachelor.

Edith Ackerman:
The Bachelor --

[laughter]

-- it really destroys her life, at least for a week.

[laughter]

So those are interesting bleedings over that I just would like to have your take on these things.

Steven Berlin Johnson:
Well, I'll say a couple of things and then we'll try and open it up?  Is that the way to do it?  Okay, so bringing together.  I'll get to the reality shows in a second, but to get to the first point, and to connect it to things that Mark has said, and that he's written about in that book that I blurbed -- honestly, it was a great book.  One of the things that I wrote about in my book, Mind Wide Open, there's a chapter about laughter in that book.  And laughing is just kind of a bizarre thing; we do it compulsively in all of these situations, and it's clearly, you know, it's not a purely cultural form.  It's something that we do innately.  

But it's unclear what its function is.  All right?  Why do we spend so much time seeking out laughter?  Why is it so crucial to us?  It doesn't seem to have an immediate -- you know, it's not as important as, you know, copulating or, you know, having parent/child bonding, and things like that.  And it turns out that laughter and play are kind of central to what it means to be a mammal, basically.  When you see animals, particularly young animals, playing with each other, or playing with their parents, and laughing and, you know, engaging in that kind of frolicking, you're seeing mammals.  You don't see lizards doing it, right?  You don't see snakes kind of like, "Hey, how's it going?"  Right?  

[laughter]

And so, it's a big part of our kind of evolutionary heritage.  And we now know, we've studied a lot more, and we know that those kinds of play environments are, kind of, crucial learning environments.  And what's so interesting, I think, about the opportunity that we have with games now, is that you take that clear kind of play environment where people are having fun, and they're doing it with their friends -- and we forget that a lot of times kids sit around and play these games together in the room, and they're laughing and they're making jokes, but they're kind of exploring the world together.  

And at the same time, you have a very important element, which is exactly right, that you've gotten to, which is, in a sense, the mental experience of working through a game is, really, very close to the scientific method.  In the sense that what you do when you play a game, is you've got this kind of data in front of you, and you say, "I've got a hypothesis.  My hypothesis is that if I go over there and push that rock that, I think, maybe the magic key will come out of here, and I'll be able to use it to unlock this, and that will take me to this next level, and I'll be able to get over here."  Or, "If I lower taxes on this neighborhood, I'll have better factories," or whatever it is.  

And so, you build that working hypothesis about how the world works, and then you go out and you test it, and you get feedback from the world.  And based on that feedback you either have your hypothesis confirmed and you move onto a higher level one or, more often the case, it doesn't quite work, and so you have to adjust it, and figure out the next way to do it.  And the important thing here is, to combine that way of thinking about the world with play is enormously powerful, and it doesn't -- you know, it's nice when what you're learning about is how cities work, or the history of civilization.  That's fantastic.  But it's also fine if you're playing Super Mario Galaxy, and you have magic keys and magic coins, and it's about rescuing a princess, because it's the structure of the thought that is most important, not necessarily the content of what you're experiencing.  

So, we accept this already with chess.  We accept this with Go.  We accept the idea that chess is a valuable thing for kids to do.  When your kids are into chess and they're good at chess you don't say, "Oh my god, my child just sat at the chessboard all day wasting his time," you know.  You send your kids --

Edith Ackerman:
Couch potato.

Steven Berlin Johnson:
Yeah, right, couch potato or chess potato.  You know, you send your kids to chess camp, because it's supposed to be so great, but there's no important life lessons you're getting from chess directly.  You're not getting any skills that you're going to be able to take to the workplace.  You're not actually learning about history or science.  But we've accepted the idea that there's something in the structure of chess that is good for the brain, and that's what we're seeing in these games, and I think that's the opportunity there, to do even more with that.  

Reality TV.  The one regret I have with this book is that I talk about reality TV in the book, but I can't tell you how many, you know, kind of radio call-in shows I did where they would introduce me and say, "Our next guest believes that watching Fear Factor will make you smarter," you know.  

[laughter]  

And I was like, "No, that's not my point.  That is not my point." 

[laughter]

What I think about reality TV is that, again, the argument I was trying to make in this book is that these shows have gotten, you know, kind of, richer and more cognitively engaging over the last 30 years, and that it's a story of a trend.  And so, to understand what's going on in reality TV, you have to figure out exactly their genre is.  Reality TV is not a documentary film, so we're not comparing it, you know, to kind of classics of documentary film.  What reality TV is, it's a game show.  It's contestants vying for prizes, in a more or less unscripted environment, with very artificial rules that have been set up by the creator of the show.  

And so, if you're trying to understand in my formula, you know, how does it fit with the "Sleeper Curve," you know, if we were all sitting around, you know, reading Middlemarch in 1977, and then we switched to watching Big Brother and The Apprentice, I would say certainly the trend is downward.  But if you're thinking about it in terms of the history of game shows, I think that, you know, The Bachelor and The Apprentice and Survivor are certainly more complex than guessing the price of a refrigerator, which is what people used to do in game shows, right?  

[laughter]

Now, the question is what are they doing?  And where I think it can be interesting, is that reality TV shows are basically, you know, kind of, sports or game shows for, kind of, psychological gamesmanship.  And so, you're trying to kind of out-think the people, and use your kind of social network intelligence, your emotional intelligence to figure out how to kind of connect with this person and, you know, you've got a rival here, and you've got to do this, and that's what's fascinating about it.  That's why people tune into it.  And is it a great cultural achievement?  No, I don't think it is.  But on the other hand, it does have this level of, kind of, humanity that I think is probably much richer than Three's Company was.  That's sort of my then kind of scripted, lame sitcoms.  It could be better, and I think there's definitely a range of variation there, between the best of reality TV and the worst of it, but it still is a trend towards kind of more nuance and more complexity compared to what we had 30 years ago.

Mark Prensky:
If I could say something to that, and then I want to hear from the audience as well.  It's interesting to compare what you said about scientific method with the attitude that -- and let me generalize wildly here -- that many of our teachers have about that kind of learning, because they see it as trial and error.  And without realizing that the scientific method is essentially enlightened trial and error.  You don't just try anything; you try something in the function of your hypothesis.  But that literally puts up a huge wall between, either generations, or teachers and students, because the kids can't explain -- they don't have the vocabulary; they really don't have the way to say, "No, this is valuable.  I'm doing something good.  I'm learning from this," to people who see it as something that is totally worthless.  And you just made me think of something, because I'm thinking, "What shows are really dumb?"  And you know, you think about the one with the cases with different amounts of money in them, right?  And you can say, "Oh god, that's dumb."  

But on the other hand, about five times during that game somebody calculates the expected value of the remaining choices.  That's what the banker offers you.  That's a very complex mathematical calculation that's very useful in lots of ways.  That's why the banker offers you less, et cetera, et cetera.  If somebody would explain that to people, and understand how he came up with that calculation, there's a lot of learning in that.  So somehow we have to bridge the gap between what you're getting and what other people think you're getting, and don't value in the same way.

Derrick de Kerckhove:
Well, I'd certainly like to open it up to the audience, but I do have a couple of questions of my own.  

[laughter]

Steven Berlin Johnson:
Sorry, audience!

Derrick de Kerckhove:
One is, actually, trying to edit against, or at least a critical view of, what Steven has said.  This morning in this very enlightening exchange we had -- the earliest one -- we talked about the mash-up culture, and you made a point that I think is very important to pick up here, which is that so many young kids today are capable of handling rather complex applications that come from the mixing and mashing and matching, in fact, the various tools that are available to them on the Internet.  That is a bit -- contradicting what you said that there is no more complexity and no more capability today than there was before.  And I wonder if there was --

Edith Ackerman:
Quick, quick sentence.  Here I really go back to Loris Malaguzzi from the Reggio Emilia School System for very young children who wrote a magnificent book that was called The Hundred Languages of Children.  And he speaks -- I don't want to flatten it, and to make the discussion too simple; I just want to remind ourselves that very young children are extraordinarily talented to use what he calls the hundred languages that allow them to express better whatever idea they care about.  And they mix and match the media in ways that, as Mark Prensky was saying, grown-ups or educators don't always see as something positive, because they see it as hybridizing the ways of expression.

Now, what I am suggesting is that if we look very carefully, in the ways in which the children juggle between these languages, we would be surprised at the complexity that they are reaching.  And they are very young.  And there are not many people who wrote about the importance to teach more than one language to a very young child at the same time, in order to give them, from the beginning, the capacity to handle that complexity.  So my point is almost, like if you are multi-culti [spelled phonetically], in a way you have more cognitive integration to do, you groom [spelled phonetically] broader, but at the end of the day you handle a complexity of different ways of expressing relations and transformations in the world that you don't have if you have only one language at your disposal.  And he's completely revolutionary, this Loris Malaguzzi.  He's one of my heroes.  Because what he claims is, like, when people were starting with programming language, somebody who knows already five programming languages, learns the sixth one pretty easily.  And you would be surprised at how similar it is with very young children.  

So, it doesn't give the answer to your question, but it just gives a take to dig into it deeper, and to then understand the differences, because there are cultural differences in how, let's say, individuals in different tribes give themselves the trust and the confidence to actually deal with this complexity, because they know they have their buddies with them, and they know they can iterate.  This is important.  They know they can try again, and so on.  So I don't answer the question, but I just give a --

Steven Berlin Johnson:
I think that's very wise, and I know Derrick wants us to fight, but we're just not going to fight.

[laughter]

No, because the way I would say it is -- I mean maybe to try and kind of go at it from a slightly different angle.  So, one of the things that I liked is the kind of way of thinking about the world in Christian Anderson's book, The Long Tail, which we had alluded to earlier.  He has one line where he says, "The thing about the appearance of this long tail," of kind of, all these niches and micro things, is that "this is the real shape of demand."  He has a great line where he says that, where he's like, "We've always had much more individuated, kind of, tastes for things."  And it's just that mass culture came along and gave us this really fake shape, of like, "Everybody wants to watch the same six sitcoms."  And then the Internet came along, and suddenly it became possible to write a book that only six people read, or a blog that nine people read, and suddenly it turns out there's a huge tail of people who are interested in very micro things that are very distinct.  And so it exposed this kind of demand for things that the marketplace had been kind of obscuring before that.  

And I think, maybe, that's partly the way I would approach this issue, in a sense that, you know, a two-year-old is incredibly smart, and capable of thinking on all of these amazing levels, and doing all of these things.  And in a sense, what media has been doing for a long time is squashing that complexity out of them.  And it's not so much that necessarily we've gotten more complex; it's just that the media itself has suddenly allowed that kind of intelligence to, kind of, show itself in their media experiences in a way that was harder to have happen before, I think.  And I think that would be the way I would approach it.

Derrick de Kerckhove:
That's cool.  So, you don't have to fight, but here's my --

[laughter]

-- second to last question, but --

[laughter]

It's urgent.  You'll have [unintelligible].  The question is urgent for me and, who knows, maybe for everybody.  My last book is about the objective imaginary, and this is the tendency that we have, with our screens, and with our computers, and with our network, and so on, to externalize the skills that we have learned from literacy and from life, generally.  Second Life is a kind of a novel, or a kind of imagination that comes from reading a novel, but instead of having it by yourself inside your head, you have it outside in front of you on the screen.  From Minds Wide Open, all the way to -- [break in audio] -- what was your thinking about Second Life, and its cognitive impact?

Steven Berlin Johnson:
Well, Second Life was just kind of starting when I was writing Everything Bad.  I'm trying to remember the sequence here.  And, you know, what's interesting about it is that people have been talking about building kind of virtual worlds with avatars in them that would represent you, and they've been building them for a long time, and they never really worked.  So, you had, you know, kind of games, the Ultima Online games, and then World of Warcraft, and EverQuest, and all of this kind of stuff, and those were big hits.  But once you went into a place where it was just, you're going to have an avatar, you can dress them up, and you can kind of have them interact in the world, they just never seemed to work.  And the thing that they hit upon, I think, that has caused it to be the success that it is -- and it's still, I think, an open question, how big a success it's going to be -- I'd be curious to hear what you think about this, Mark -- is they introduce scarcity into the world.  And they said, "Okay, there's a finite amount of land here.  You can buy this land.  There's a finite number of things.  There's money; there's a currency, and you have incentives to kind of save up money, or to make things, to sell it, and so economy is developed.  And without some level of scarcity, when you can do anything you want, it turns out to be not that interesting.  

And the second, you introduce some kind of restrictions, whereas like, "Gosh, I really want that house, but I just don't have enough money yet to buy that house," suddenly people get pulled in.  It wasn't specifically designed as a game.  It was supposed to be kind of not a game, although there were kind of little elements, but it took that idea that there were kind of a finite number of resources.  And also, the other brilliant thing that they did is that anything you created in the world, you owned.  And so, you had incentive.  It basically introduced private property into this kind of interesting space.

And so, the fact that it seems to have been the first one of these specifically non-game spaces to, kind of, get some critical mass, I think, is really interesting in the way that it strategically borrowed just a couple of things from gaming culture.  But what do you make of it, Mark?

Mark Prensky:
Well, I'm not a hundred percent sure that my ideas are complete at this point, but one of the things -- somebody had written a piece recently that said, "Maybe I'm leapfrogging the digital natives, because I asked 25 kids whether they had heard of Second Life and they all said no."  And what that said to me confirmed something that I'd been thinking: that Second Life is not really a kids' phenomenon.  It's not of the digital native generation.  It's really the older generation playing out their fantasies of --

Edith Ackerman:
[Unintelligible].

Mark Prensky:
-- what the next generation should be.  

[laughter]

Edith Ackerman:
[Laughs] That's good!

Mark Prensky:
And so, it's a very curious thing.  And I think what's going to eventually emerge from the digital native culture is going to look very different in many ways.

Edith Ackerman:
That's very interesting, yes.

Derrick de Kerckhove:
That's a good point, a very good point.  All right, it's your turn.  Question in the back, yes?  I think somebody's going to run with a microphone.  Yeah, yeah.

Keith Krueger:
Keith Krueger, with the Consortium for School Networking.  I have a question about formal education.  You've made the case around participatory culture.  To what extent do you think that formal education will embrace or not embrace?  How optimistic or pessimistic are you that these participatory tools of Web 2.0 will be embraced within formal education?  Or will they really be a factor outside of school?

Steven Berlin Johnson:
Well, I was sort of talking about this a little bit this morning.  So, you know, Will Wright has this game coming out called Spore, that's the sequel to Sims and SimCity.  It's a totally new thing that he's been working on forever.  And for those of you who haven't heard about it, you basically start as a single-celled organism and eventually evolve into a creature who then has a tribe, then you have a town, and then you have a city, and then you conquer a whole planet, and then you develop space technology and you can fly to other planets and colonize them.  And so it's, you know, it makes Civilization look like Pac-Man, basically.  Like, you know, you're kind of going through the whole history of life from the single-cell to interspace travel, intergalactic travel.  

And so I wrote this piece about it for The Times magazine about a year ago, and part of what I kept thinking was like, "God, you know, why don't they just hand over fifth grade to Spore?"  You know, just let the kids just live in this, you know, and learn about all of these disciplines along the way.  And, you know, they'll learn about sociology when they get to the kind of tribe and city stage and they'll learn about economics when they get to the city stage, and they'll learn about microbiology in that first stage.  And so, one of the people I was interviewing for this is Brian Eno, who is doing the soundtrack for it.  And so, I was talking to him and I told him, "Why don't they hand it over to the schools?"  And Brian said something, which I thought was very wise and funny, which was that he said, "Well, that's the way I feel.  But then I talked to my wife about it, and she makes a very good point, which is she says, 'The other really important thing you learn from school that's crucial to your experience being a grown-up is the ability to tolerate long periods of tedium.'"  

[laughter]

And so --

Edith Ackerman:
Only Brian Eno.  

Steven Berlin Johnson:
I know.  [Laughs]  So --

Edith Ackerman:
Only Brian Eno [laughs].

Steven Berlin Johnson:
So Brian was like, "So I think my perfect mix in a formal educational environment would be three days of 'Spore' and two days of mandatory Latin."

[laughter]

That would be kind of the right mix.  [Laughs]  But you've been more involved with this than I have.  I don't know.  What's your temperature?

Mark Prensky:
That would remind me of the general -- "Why did you talk about Spore, because they didn't?" I need to --

Female Speaker:
Education.

Steven Berlin Johnson:
Oh, education.  Yeah.

Mark Prensky:
Oh, his contest was about -- how's this going to come into formal education?  We've got a real problem.

[laughter]

And the problem, I think, one of the biggest aspects of this, is that education has bifurcated for these kids.  And there is the school part, which gives them credentials, but which teaches them almost nothing they need or want to know.  It's almost entirely about the past, what our curriculum is.  We could take whole chunks of it and throw it away, and nobody would be the worse off for it.  But where the real education is coming, and the education for the future, is -- I call it after-school, but it's the combination of everything that people do online, the games that they play, the robotics clubs, the programming.  Everything that they do, which is taking them -- and, as Steven pointed out, even television, even Lost, and these kind of things are part of this -- that is their real education.  And school, which is dying, and in some way knows it's dying, is very resistant to taking any of this other stuff and putting it in to replace stuff in fifth grade.  

So, that is an enormous problem, and until we change that -- and then, let's compound that, because in a normal world, in an economic world, if something has replaced school, and it's better and it works okay, and the colleges start to accept kids who have life skills as opposed to the credentials, school should go away.  But there's also what I call the dark side of school, which is school basically exists to keep kids safe so parents can work.  And that's really what it is.  And you can know that, because if a teacher doesn't teach, and the kids don't learn, nothing happens.  But if a teacher were to say to the kids, "Go ahead and play in the streets," they'd be fired.  

So that function of school, which is the legal function of school, effectively, doesn't go away.  And if we can't get some of what the kids really want and like, and the future, and the kinds of things that Steven was talking about into the schools, then they're going to be prisons.  And it's just going to be herding the kids into there, against their will.

Edith Ackerman:
They always have been.

Mark Prensky:
What?

Edith Ackerman:
They always have been prisons.

Mark Prensky:
Well, they always had been prisons, but there was never an alternative.

Steven Berlin Johnson:
Yeah.

Mark Prensky:
And so, if you had any sense you would say, "Well, okay, I'm here I might as well, you know, I can do this."  But now, everybody's life is -- as some kid said to me, "When I go to school, I have to power down."  So, school is the opposite of everything that they want to do that's their future.  And the fact that that is, is not so bad, because we could change it.  The fact that there's such a huge resistance to change, and so it's unlikely to change without some major forces hitting it, that's the real problem.

Steven Berlin Johnson:
I went back to my high school, which is here in D.C., St. Albans, in the fall.  They had me come back and give a talk, and then I toured around to a bunch of the classes.  And St. Albans, for those of you who don't know it, is a very, you know, well-endowed school here, a private school.  And they took me around to a bunch of classes, and I went to a math class, and was talking to some clearly, really gifted kids, and I was like, "So, what are the computer classes you guys have?  Like what programming languages can you learn?"  And they're like, "Oh, we don't have any programming classes."  

And I was like, you know, that's bizarre, because you get just as much kind of intellectual rigor and, kind of, mental exercise learning a programming language as you do learning calculus or learning algebra, right?  Except, if you learn that programming language, you can actually go out at 18 and get paid, you know, $120,000 a year, and live in your house in your pajamas, you know.  I mean you can --

[laughter]

If you guys realize that it's both mentally rigorous and incredibly lucrative, and useful in the world, why are you not teaching it?  Like, what is stopping you?  And people just were kind of like, "Well, I don't know."  

Mark Prensky:
Well, they do know, because I had the same experience in, literally, I think what may be the top private school, preparatory school, in New York City, recently.  And I'm sitting there, and they deliberately -- the whole faculty is against computer use.  Or, almost the entire faculty is against computers, because they say, "Well, it's the thinking skills.  The kids use that stuff at home.  That stuff is toys.  It's the thinking skills that are going to get them into Harvard."  And so then you get to Harvard and what are they saying?  Well, they kind of have a little of the same attitude.  

So we have to figure out whether we want to keep training -- and I kind of talk about, kind of, back-up education -- whether we want to keep training our kids for the past, thinking that the situations that are going to matter to them are situations from the past: learning, sitting, taking notes, as a way to learn.  That's what they're teaching these kids.  Take notes.  Or, do we want to move our kids forward into the future?  And it's not just a question of technology.  It's really a question of philosophy.  

Female Speaker:
You put your finger on it, though, because you said that schools are about certification.  And if schools sort of said, "Okay, we're about baby-sitting and certification, and we need to do these two things."  And what we'd say is that when people get out of school, they can think like this, they can handle this kind of problem, they can do this kind of thing, it seems to me we would get somewhere else, instead, in one sense, of thinking of ourselves as educational institutions.  The other thing is that there was --

Mark Prensky:
Institution, that's the key word.  Right.

Female Speaker:
Yeah, institution.  The other thing is, there was a place -- and this is one of them.  When we were growing up, there were libraries.  I would have loved to have spent my school days in libraries instead of sitting there doing rote exercises.  I mean that could have been done, and wasn't, and would continue.  So that -- and, well, I just copied a quote into a book that I'm writing, and it has to do with the printing press, and it says, "The universities founded by Henry VIII were all to create new ministers for government, because the new learning was occurring outside of the universities."  And so it is sort of ever thus, when you have a new information world, the new learning does not take place in the institutions of learning.

Mark Prensky:
That's Kuhn's paradigm shift.

Female Speaker:
Yeah, yeah, definitely. 

Edith Ackerman:
I just wanted to talk on this idea, by saying that there is a whole sort of trend in literature; it's called situated learning.  And I think the mistake they make is that they tend to equate the notion of formal learning with schools, and informal learning with out of schools.  And in a way, what we are teaching and learning in school is not formal; it's just using a very, I would like to say, limited -- a very particular way of getting at complex problems, and calling oneself the formal approach to learning.  And this, to me, was the strengths of somebody like Pappert when he introduced a more computational way to go at deep mathematical ideas, like using also engineering approach and not just analytical approaches to think about geometry and mathematics, shows very well that the kind of fraction that we do in school, with the pies that we divide in four and in six, is not very formal.  It's like using certain techniques that sort of have gained a lot of popularity.  

And the problem comes from calling it formal, and from believing that this institution is actually delivering the kind of formal knowledge.  I always felt that there was a, you know, that you cannot equate the kind of things that we learn in school with, even, formal approaches to the domain.  Then we can always question where the formal approaches to the domain are the most useful ones.  But they are so different. 

Steven Berlin Johnson:
Behind you first, perhaps?  That one looks like...

Female Speaker:
Hi.  Thank you so much, Steven, for being here.  I think it's really exciting for a lot of us.  I just have two really quick comments.  And one is that while I appreciate your comment that libraries are places to explore information space, and I do think libraries have been early adopters of, say, Web 2.0, I also think libraries are places of hierarchy, and they are places that have sort of had control over, you know, who is an expert and who is not.  So sometimes I find that the library, you know, runs head into the architecture of participation in Web 2.0.  

So, I mean, there's a bit of irony there.  And as a librarian, I've sort of experienced, you know, some of that tension between wanting to promote, say Web 2.0 and the architecture participation and, you know, the wisdom of the crowds, but that really not being accepted by, say, the orthodoxy of the library.  And maybe I might point to, like, Derrida or Foucault, or something like that, Archive Fever and The Order of Things.

And another comment is that I think, certainly, the Academy has adopted Web 2.0 and, you know, if you ask Michael Wesch I think he could tell you how classes are using Web 2.0.  They're using wikis, and blogs, and Del.ici.ous, and Connotea, and they are exploring these environments for collaborative learning.  So, I don't know about K through 12, but certainly, the Academy might have a different sort of relationship with Web 2.0.  Thank you.

Steven Berlin Johnson:
Well, thank you for the kind words at the beginning.  And I wanted to say nice things about libraries because I was here, and I didn't want to seem --

[laughter]

But you know it's interesting, we were talking about this earlier today.  So, one of the ideas that came up was -- and some of you may know about this -- but one of the things that has made the mash-up culture and Web 2.0 possible is the proliferation of various different Web sites, and various different databases, that have APIs, that have Application Programming Interfaces, i.e., they expose some kind of predictable part of their database, so that somebody can come along and build a tool that will take things out of that database, and do new, interesting things with them.  So Flickr has a fantastic API, and so, there are a million little applications, or a thousand little applications that people have built on top of Flickr, grabbing photos from Flicker and putting them on a map, or grabbing all photos of dogs, and rearranging them, and doing all of these cool things with them.  

And the site I've been running for the last year-and-a-half, outside.in, which is all about kind of neighborhoods and communities, and mapping information about where people live, is totally dependent on the fact that Google exposed its API for all of its map technologies.  It would have cost us 35 million dollars to build that site five years ago, and we built the initial prototype for $50,000 because we didn't have to invent a whole geographic system; we could just go to Google's API and get all of that stuff from them, right?

So what's interesting here is -- and what I was saying this morning -- it was like, the Library of Congress should just have a big API.  And so, if it's all about, you know, kind of getting the information out.  And I know that copyright and intellectual property is a big hurdle here, but conceptually, if you could get around that, particularly for the stuff that's in the public domain, if you could just say, "Listen, this is all of the data we've got, and here are the reliable ways to come in and grab that data and remix it, and repurpose it, and figure out lots of interesting things to do with that."  That's what the model of a public institution should be in the 21st century.  

And the irony is that the institutions that are doing the most innovative work there, and the most open work, are actually for-profit companies.  I mean, you know, one of the most valuable companies in the world, Google, is giving stuff away.  Every part of their business, they give stuff away.  They have APIs for all sorts of things.  And one thing they don't really have an API for is the search technology --

[laughter]

-- so, we have reason --

[laughter]

Edith Ackerman:
Nobody's perfect!

[laughter]

Steven Berlin Johnson:
And their list of advertisers.  But a lot of the other, you know, parts of the business are about here, take it.  Go run with it, and we'll ultimately profit by learning more about what people are doing with maps if we let people freely take it.  We don't pay Google a cent for this stuff.  We hit that API thousands and thousands and thousands of times a day, and they don't charge us anything for it.  So if you have these big private institutions that are doing that, you know, then it seems to me that we've entered a weird world where, actually, the people who are supposed to be all about closed proprietary data are way more open than the public institutions that are actually more closed.

Derrick de Kerckhove:
There's one there and then, after that, there.

Male Speaker:
This is wonderful.  Every now and then I do believe in face-to-face, and this is great.  You, I think, began to answer the question I'm going to ask.  I'm interested in the massive online game called politics.  And if I had my way, I would want to use the things we've just been talking about to make people smarter, about challenges like global warming, like genetic engineering, and so forth, so that the seven-year-old can tell me things in the same way that Wyatt schooled you.  When I look at online politics from one perspective, I see a lot of participation, a lot of motivation; I see a lot of partisanship.  A lot of the participation is about how, "You're a dummy, and I'm going to spend my time proving that you're a dummy," whereas, for example, the example that you had with Lost, it seemed to be much more directed towards the game.  There was some sense of an objectiveness there.  Now, maybe there's partisanship in those communities as well.  

The other difference that I see, perhaps, is efficacy.  In a lot of the online games, I can do my thing, whereas if I have a great idea about tax reform, or Iraq, or whatever else, all I can do is hope that Barack, or John McCain, or Hillary are listening to me, but mostly it's not that same thing.  So I guess my question to the panel is, if I were a policymaker and I wanted folks both to school me and to school them about the complexity, so we get away from bowling scores, how would I set that up?  And I think APIs is part of the answer.

Steven Berlin Johnson:
That's a great question.  I mean, in terms of the vitriol, you know, most of you probably know there's an old, old classic law from the early days of the Internet called "Godwin's Law."  And Godwin's Law is -- in any online discussion, given enough posts in the discussion, it is inevitable that someone will say somebody else is a Nazi, basically.

[laughter]

But all online conversations lead to somebody calling somebody else a Nazi.  And that seems [laughs]-- it seems to be true down the line, so you're going to see that.  I am amazed that, actually -- one of the things that I love about the kind of Internet and politics now, is how much I know about the campaign.  There's so much information out there -- I mean, the race.  If you think about -- when I first started really getting into politics, when I was just in grad school, in '92, and was really interested in the Clinton/first Bush race, there's just -- you know, I would watch Crossfire and I would read The Times, and I'd read The New Republic, and they would come out once a week, and I would kind of, you know, be really excited to dig into all of the kind of details.  And now, just the incredible detail I have, of what the polls are saying here, and how this thing played out here, and I'm watching the videos here, and the commentators.  And the range of voices that I kind of sample, minute by minute, and that stuff.  I really feel like I know a lot more, and I feel like I have a richer understanding.  It's built out of smaller blocks, blog posts and little comments, but because there's so much of it, and because it's all kind of networked together, I really feel like I'm able to follow it.  But that's following the race, right?  So, the tools are getting great for following the race.  

Now, the question is, you know, what happens to the things we're actually talking about in the race?  And I felt like this -- when everybody was talking about the Howard Dean campaign being the great Internet campaign the first time around, I was like all he's doing is raising money using the Internet, you know, which is great.  But, like, where is -- you know, if this is really a bottom-up campaign like the ideas aren't trickling up, but just the cash is trickling up, you know.

[laughter]

And I think there is a lot of, you know, there is a lot of room for that.  I mean, there are a lot of tools that people are kind of floating around of, kind of, idea generating tools, where somebody has an interesting idea and it can get kind of amplified, and organizations are starting to use that.  Google has a pretty interesting kind of online suggestion box inside the organization, where people can kind of throw out ideas, and they can get kind of voted up by other people in the organization.  And I think that some of the sites -- I think that MoveOn has explored this a little bit in some ways, and so there is the beginnings of that.  I think there's an awareness that, that's the next logical step.  

On the other hand, you know, there's a role for leaders, too.  I mean part of the problem we had with the Howard Dean campaign is the movement turned out to be kind of stronger than the person who was running the movement, in some ways.  And with the Obama campaign, I think you have this interesting possibility where, like, there is this incredible grassroots movement with a leader who kind of fully lives up to it, potentially, and who understands the potential, kind of, network system that he's playing a part of.  

So, I think there's a lot of work to be done, but I feel like we're starting -- you know, it's going to take -- sometimes things are slower than you think.  Because everything else --

[laughter]

You know, you get YouTube so quickly, but then, there's certain things, certainly technical things -- you're like, "I still can't get a remote control that will turn off my DVD player and my TV.  Why haven't they figured that out?"  [Laughs]  And, you know, they still haven't figured out how to make the politics things work.  But I feel like we're getting closer.

Mark Prensky:
I don't remember who it was who said that, "We tend to overestimate the importance of these new technologies in the short-term, and underestimate what they are in the long-term."  I've noticed a big shift, not just in politics, but in almost everything, from total top-down, to a sort of more of a balance of top-down and bottoms-up.  And, you know, that's the people who, 10 years ago, or however long -- 15 years ago -- knocked on Bill Gates' door to say, "There's an Internet out there."  He never listened.  But that's the people who go to Iraq and Afghanistan and have the wrong equipment, and start writing and blogging.  That's the blogosphere in politics.  

And in all of the domains, the tools allow for the voice of the bottom to rise and be heard.  And I guess IBM had its gems.  And that is, I think, in the long-run going to make a profound difference.  Because I think about the schools a lot, and it used to be -- I show a diagram, which is kind of funny, which is one bird at the top of a perch, and then two birds, and then four birds, and then eight birds.  And guess what the birds are doing on each other?  Right?

[laughter]

And the person -- top-down is great for the people at the top, and it's really, really lousy for the people at the bottom.  And we've always tolerated that, because we didn't have another way to deal with that.  Well, now that we do, we're starting to see a generation, a group of people, who say, "No, I'm not going to take that.  I'm not going to pay my dues; I'm not going to do any of this kind of stuff.  I'm going to participate because I can, and if you don't let me do it through the formal system, I'll create my systems outside the formal system, and I'll do it that way."  And that's, over the long-term, going to make a profound difference.

If you extrapolate how much more powerful technology will be, and you just say it's growing, it's doubling in power every year, which for many reasons some people believe, in 30 years it's going to be a billion times more powerful, two to the thirtieth.  A billion times.  Now, that's a lifetime of many of us, and certainly all of our children, and all of our students.  If you think about that, and how people are going to control those machines that are a billion times more powerful, why aren't we teaching our kids programming or, you know, how to control machines?  Well, because we don't have any idea.  The kids are learning it on their own.  They're teaching themselves.  And that's really important and we've got to catch up.

Derrick de Kerckhove:
Yes, first, this lady there, and then...

Female Speaker:
A comment, and then a question.  First of all, when you were describing the phenomena like Buffy and Lost and all of that, you know, I was thinking back to 20, 25 years ago, when Dungeons and Dragons and Star Trek, and people had the same desire to connect or share the maps, or do the Klingon dictionaries and all of that, but the big change I see is that technology has lowered that threshold of entry, and has also lessened the commitment.  I mean, you know, 20 years ago you had to collect addresses, and do newsletters, and take them somewhere and, you know, mail them out, and it was really involved, and you really had to be committed to the idea.  Whereas now, you know, you get done with an episode, you go up, you post a blog in five minutes.  So, I think some of the propensities have always been there, but the threshold of entry is much, much lower, from the technology.  

And the question, or more if you could comment on the idea, since so much of this is now being -- the learning and sharing is being done virtually, and through gaming and, you know, things like SimCity, have you seen any changes in the perception of consequences for actions?  I mean in the virtual world it's very easy to start over.  And how is that translating?  Okay, they're learning economics or, you know, political systems or whatever in the virtual world, but how is that translating to the real world and the view of consequences for those actions?

Steven Berlin Johnson:
Well, two things.  I'd say first to that first point, it's a great one, in a sense that one of the ways you can see this story of the last 30 years is that the, kind of, subculture of the nerd culture became the dominant culture.  And, you know, "triumph of the nerds" kind of story.  And I think that that's true.  Those things were there.  I played a little Dungeons and Dragons, but no one would ever play with me.  So I bought all of the books and would just sit there and kind of read the like Dungeon Master's Guide.  It's very sad.

[laughter]

And I did the same with dice baseball games, you know.  They were incredibly elaborate mathematical simulations of baseball, that I got more and more into and obsessed with, and I eventually, like, bought these -- they weren't even games anymore, they were just like sheets of paper with numbers on them, and you would roll, like, six dice, and it was just incredibly accurate simulations, but it wasn't clear that it was fun.

[laughter]

And I ordered, when I was writing Everything Bad is Good for You, I ordered them on eBay, because they're still sitting around on eBay.  And so, these games that were like the greatest thing in my life when I was 10 started to arrive at my house, and I hadn't seen them for 20 years.  So, I sat down with my wife and I like showed her, I was like, "This was what I was doing when I was 10."  And she was like, "Oh my god, I can't believe you were such a nerd.  I had no idea!"

[laughter]

So, that was the thing.  You know, it's interesting about the consequence thing, because you're absolutely right.  And I'll bet Edith has some things to say about this, too, but I'll just say one quick thing.  It is true you can start over.  On the other hand, again, think about the mindset.  Think about what it's like to be in your head as you're playing a game, versus reading a novel, versus watching a TV show, watching a narrative, looking at a great work of art.  You are thinking, all of the time, about consequence, when you're playing a game.  Your whole mindset is, "If I do this, what is going to happen?"  And, you know, "Am I going to get rewarded for this, or am I going to get punished for this?"  And, you know, "Is it worth it to risk this given these other things?"  

So a great novel -- you know, one of the things that novels are incredibly good at -- like some of my favorite novels were all about, you know, kind of great choices; where people had to make an incredibly difficult choice.  And they come to an intersection in their life, and they're trying to figure it out.  Middlemarch is a great example of that.  They just have to decide between all of these things.  And so, we learn, you know, from kind of watching somebody else make a choice, and mentally map out all of the different potential consequences and act, and we learn from watching that.  But games do that every single second of every single game.  You're like, "What are the consequences going to be and can I live with them if it goes south on me?"

So I think, yes, you can restart and, yes, there is this kind of sense of all right, it's fake.  But on the other hand, again, that exercising of the kind of consequence mapping muscle, it's more prominent in games than in any other form.

Edith Ackerman:
Yeah, I, again, what I think is important is that the world of gaming, like the world of pretend with children -- or I would like to say, theater, or even psychoanalysis for grown-ups -- is it allows to think about intentions, actions, and consequences in an environment where you can take risks that you otherwise couldn't because it would have consequences that are untakable and tolerable.  So, what I believe is that the analysis of consequences in a displaced environment -- think of psychotherapy.  The type of consequences that you draw from your actions are not literally the way you are going to do it once you are in the situation with difference constraints.  Quite the opposite.  Probably, in the world of games, you have the right to explore intolerable aspects of yourselves in ways that you cannot do in the real world, but because -- and this is very Bettelheim, what I am saying -- because you can learn to domesticate your angers and your drives in the make-believe world, you actually become more responsible when you deal with these same problems in the real world.  

And this is why I am this old-fashioned digital immigrant, because I like it.  And I think for children it's important to somehow understand whether right now they are in the world of play or in the world, let's say, of theater, or what kind of displacement?  And when I dream of a way of teaching children to be creative and also critical thinkers of the medium, is to be able to judge for themselves what they have in front of them.  And if I have one criticism -- it's not even a criticism in doubt, for example, about television, it is not about highbrow versus lowbrow.  

When I arrived in this country I was used to listening to television where it was very clear when it was news, when it was, you know, fiction, or when it was advertisement.  When I arrived here, I open, I don't know what's happening.

[laughter]

And that can trouble a little bit, precisely these ways in which you are very able at drawing different kinds of consequences of our actions, depending on the pragmatic context in which we are.  And again, I play my role as this developmental psychologist last time.  I was saying that children, for example, explore the power of the world in very different ways when they are pretend playing, or when they are, you know, on the dinner table with their parents, or in the lap of mama reading a book together.  And believe me, they draw different conclusions about how far they can go, and so forth, and so on.  

So again, this is an open question.  I am this old-fashioned immigrant.  When I watch something and I don't know any more at all of what kind it is, I don't know how, then, to solve your problem.  But as soon as you have a vague idea of the types of constraints, of the types of settings, you know how to do those translations.  People are very good at this.  And it's not literal; it's not direct.  It's almost the opposite.  You go through day two [spelled phonetically].  I really think of psychotherapy as the nicest example, you know, where people can, all of the sudden, you know, not just intellectually express some otherwise intolerable feelings, but they can feel them.  But then, it doesn't mean that they are going to exploit these, and annoy all of their friends in a similar way, in other contexts.

Derrick de Kerckhove:
There, right behind you.

Male Speaker:
Yes, I'd like to, first, thank you very much for your reflections.  I'd like to speak to the issue of games, because you've dwelled quite a bit on that.  I have a son who plays Gears of War fanatically, night after night, so I'm fairly interested in the topic from a personal angle.  I have been impressed, eavesdropping, on just how much, even in what I think of as a mindless first-person shooter, how much negotiation goes on between his partners in the U.K., Europe, and across the U.S. and Canada.  They negotiate who's the host.  That has an impact on how well weapons work, and which ones to choose in terms of the combat scenes, and who's got the best bandwidth, because that tends to determine outcomes in a very decisive way.  All of that I appreciate.  

On the other hand, I wonder if what you've given us isn't sort of an image of games and TV shows that are sort of like a great books presentation of modern reality.  These are the ones that are really -- Lost is fantastic.  Sims is fantastic.  Second City is great.  I'm wondering how many people -- if there are studies showing how people actually, kids, are actually using these things?  And I say this for a very simple reason.  My son also works at Game Stop.  They sell tons of cheat code books.  They fly out of the stores.  And when they play together, when they come to a conflict situation, they don't waste time trying to figure out how to get to the next level.  They flip through the cheat codes and, boom, they want to move onto that next level as fast as humanly possible.  Now, I don't see this as being radically different from the guys that used Cliffs Notes to get through The Great Gatsby.

[laughter]

Derrick de Kerckhove:
Or the dictionary.

Male Speaker:
Or the dictionary.

[laughter]

And I'm sort of wondering, here, if this kind of great books presentation, if there's any kinds of studies showing how the kids are actually using these things, these games, when they play.  How often they're actually working them through, and facing the kind of complex decision-making sequences that you're describing so eloquently.

And my second question has to do with consoles.  You kind of left consoles out of this.  You talked a lot about computer games and TV, but consoles are very big, particularly in Asia and places.  And the kind of games that are played, a lot of them are these first-person shooters.  I wonder if you could introduce some reflections on how you understand that, and integrate that with the rest of your talk?

Steven Berlin Johnson:
Yeah, sure.

Edith Ackerman:
Quickly said, you have too good a taste in the games --

[laughter]

Steven Berlin Johnson:
[Laughs]  Well, you know, it's interesting --

Edith Ackerman:
In your popular culture people --

Steven Berlin Johnson:
-- if you look at the best-seller list for games, right, there are always some first-person shooters.  Now, right now there's Grand Theft Auto, which is an extremely violent game, but also, I think anybody who's spent any time around it recognizes it's a very complex, interesting work of art on some level, even though it's incredibly violent and problematic in some ways for those things.  But if you look at the best-seller list, what you find is, you know, there's always kind of one or two of those.  There's a huge amount of space devoted to sports simulations.  And those -- I could have just as easily done the presentation with those.  

I mean you are managing an NFL franchise; you're calling all of the plays yourselves; you're trying to figure out the best strategy; you're executing the plays; you're trading players; you're running a budget.  I mean, it's just, you know, compared to sitting around and watching professional football, you know, you're actually doing it yourself.  So there's much more engagement in that and stuff like that.  And then you'll have the Age of Empires, Civilization, SimCity kind of games will have a place there, and sometimes you'll have a puzzle game, or kind of a quest game like Mario. 

So you get the impression from the popular accounts of it, that it's all first-person shooters, and that is just absolutely not right.  It's a mix.  They are about a quarter of, kind of, the big best-sellers.  Even, you know, more so on the consoles, but the consoles have a lot of the sports games, too.  And Madden is, you know, the huge hit on the consoles as well.  

But to me, with the worst of the games, part of what I was trying to do with this book is to say, "We don't even have, you know, a developed vocabulary to talk about why the games can be valuable.  All we have is just this broad-based assumption that they're all a waste of time, and that it's a more sophisticated delivery of stupidity," right?  And so, what I was trying to say in this book is, "There's a lot that you can get out of games from a lot of the games, from a lot of the popular games, just as there is a lot you can get out of many popular television shows, just as there continues to be a great deal to get out of reading Middlemarch."  

And what I feel like, as a parent, and as a some-time educator, and as someone who writes and thinks about these things, I feel like what we should be advocating for is a balanced media diet.  It's your responsibility as a parent to make sure that your child, kind of, is growing up in a world where they're exposed to the different forms of media, and they learn how to use them best.  They understand that, you know, if they're trying to persuade somewhat of a complicated idea, then writing a book is probably the best way to do it.  That's a great format for that.  And if they're trying to figure out a way to kind of share their life in public in an interesting way, then a blog is probably a great way to do that.  And if they're trying to learn how to systematically think about the world, a game is a great exercise for that kind of thinking, right?  But you can't build a balanced diet of media if there are a whole, kind of, class of, you know, food groups that you think are just a total waste of time.  

And so, what I was trying to do in Everything Bad is Good for You is say, "Listen, these are the values that we get out of them.  They're different.  They're not narrative values; they're not psychological kind of portraits; you're not going to get any of that.  That's what we have novels for and great cinema for.  You're going to get problem-solving, and abstract reasoning, and system thinking, and that's what you're going to get out of these games."  And I would, you know, for me personally, now that my kids are getting to the age where they're playing games is, you know, I would like to see a kind of cognitive engagement rating system as much as I would like to see a violence rating system.  Because I'm just as interested in knowing -- there are some dumb games out there, and I don't have the time to play them anymore -- part, because I stupidly went and had these kids who take up all my time, right --

[laughter]

-- when I could be playing games.  And so, you know, if we get better at saying, "Okay listen, there are these types of games that are really great, and there are lots of them, and there are lots of different genres, and some of them can be violent, that's fine.  You know, if your kids like to have that because it's exciting, and they want to kind of do that, okay, if you're comfortable with that as a parent." And then, there are some of these games here where it's just a really lame first-person shooter, and there's really nothing that they're getting out of it.  Let's be able to kind of identify that as well, because there certainly are some games that are like that."

But I think that it's not -- yeah, that's what I have to say.

Mark Prensky:
I'd give the answer to your question from a different point of view.  First of all, it's clear that there are different ways to play whatever game.  And there are people who play the game mindfully, and there are people who play the games mindlessly, and you have to think about that.  And there are some people who've studied that, especially at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.  Jim Gee and his group when he was there did some work with that.  I don't think that you can talk about mindless games very much from the point of view of the people who create the games, because the people who create the games are a class of very, very smart people who are thinking about what they're putting in.  And so, there's often a lot more than you think.  

The real problem is this:  if there's a novel that your son is reading, a book, and you question its value; you read it; he reads it; you talk about it.  If it's a movie; you see it; he sees it; you talk about it.  If it's a game; he plays it; what do you do?  You can't play it.  So, you have no idea, really, what's going on in that game, unless you figure out a way to open up a conversation with your son that says, "What do you like in this game?  It looks to me" -- because I just see the screen -- "it looks to me like it's a mindless shooter."  Well, you know, last time I said that to people they -- to kids, literally, who were shooting each other in some game -- they said, "No, there's strategy!"  And I said, "Well, tell me about it," and they started telling me about it.  

So, really, the level of understanding of what's in these games, and the depth -- I mean, there's the what you do, the how to do things, which is at the level, but there's the level of the rules that you have to figure out, because they're not given.  There's the level of the strategy, which is how you use the rules.  There's a whole environment that you're learning about.  And there's even moral stuff, when or whether to do stuff.  Do I run?  Do I shoot this guy?  Do I frag him?  Or am I better off going around him?  Just because I can hit somebody over the head with a baseball bat in this game, should I?  Now, that's a real question in the world, right?  That's in Brooklyn, anyway --

[laughter]

-- you know, where I come from.  So, unless we have those discussions, and that's really the point of Don't Bother Me, Mom -- I'm Learning.  It turned out to be less a book about games, and more a book about communication.  And unless we can open up those lines of communication with respect, and really say to young people, "Is there -- I'm not going to judge you.  Tell me!"  Because if you sit there for hours and hours and days, there must be something that's doing -- 

And the reason that's so important is because you want to be sure they're not drawing the wrong lessons.  And my favorite example is from the Bible.  If a kid read the Bible, and had no guidance, he would have every right to conclude that if there was a group that was really oppressing you hard, you could go out and kill their first-born.  Right?  You would just slay their first-born, and you could get the hell out of there, right?  Now, that's what the Bible says happened, and God did it, so it's got to be okay.  Well, obviously, we interpret that.  We think about those things.  We have conversations about what they mean, and why it's metaphorical, perhaps, or however we want to interpret it.  And until you can have those kinds of conversations with your kid about those games, then you really are building a wall instead of building understanding.

Derrick de Kerckhove:
Well, it's said that if there was a good party you should always leave it when it's in full swing, so that you don't have -- you know, don't let it disappear.  I would like to thank a lot of people, and mostly pay tribute to those who have come back.  And I mean that by saying, first of all, that our principal guest, Steven Johnson, has actually come back to one of my invitations --

[laughter]

-- but I also want to point out [laughs] the great generosity of Mark and Edith, who have actually made a point of coming back to be with us, and will -- at least I know Mark is planning to come back again, and if Edith can she, will as well.  I'd like to also welcome back the Librarian, who has made this all possible for me.  I'm very glad to see him.  And also, many of you, who were here the first time, I invite you, then, to come back again for the next one, which will be with Mike Wesch: the YouTube Anthropologies.  Actually, he's an anthropologist generally, and has 18 students working on YouTube to see what happens with this segment of the "Digital Natives."  So, thanking everybody again, and particularly the Papamarkou Chair and the Library of Congress.  I wish you a very nice evening.

[applause]

[music]

[end transcript]