While not utterly surprised, I was astonished by the frequency of these questions, which raises some important issues: What does it mean if we have to expect that information published by our friends in online publics is distorted, not to fool us, but to trick data mining companies and identity thieves? What does it mean for our society if we encounter some of our most important publics – social networks – with distrust, so that we do not feel free to publish personal information there? Will this “virtual distrust” make online public spheres less open, welcoming spaces? What does this mean for our ability, and will, to communicate with others, especially strangers?

Later on, I stood together with another guest. Via Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age” (there’s an interview with him by David Weinberger on Radio Berkman), we arrived at the question what digital goods – documents – ought to be preserved. And, more importantly, how to choose them.

For most of human history, the idea of preservation did not even exist. Things were either used or abandoned. What they were built from would become a natural resource for later generations. The Colosseum became a quarry, and vellums with the writings of Aristotle were recycled to contain Byzantine prayers.

At some point, our societies started chronicling human history by preserving artifacts and documents. They had – and still have today – designated places for them (museums) and experts (archivists, curators) who are in charge of deciding what is worth keeping – and what’s not.

Just as newspaper editors, curators are an elite. They are gate keepers, filtering a ubiquitous ressource (information here, artifacts there) for cultural value. This has been an important task, as space is limited, in newspapers as much as in museums.

But, as Clay Shirky writes in “Here comes everybody”, in the digital space the paradigm has shifted from “filter, then publish” to “publish, then filter”. Subsequently, the Digital Museum ought to preserve anything ever published on the Web – and let users sort through it using search functions and rank exhibits by popularity. In fact, Archive.org is doing just that.

But memory capacity isn’t a ubiquitous ressource. Even Archive.org needs to make decisions about what to preserve and what to let vanish. The obvious solution is to crowdsource the exhibits of the Digital Museum. Now the question is: Do we have to fear mob rule?

The answer was one of the most interesting parts of Friday’s panel discussion. As Mercedes Bunz remarked, there has been another paradigm shift. While the industrial age was marked by a trend towards homogenity, the networked information society shifts towards customization.

What does that mean for the Digital Museum? It does not have a main exhibition, but consists of a plethora of theme rooms, each catering a small subculture or niche interest.

This is not absolutely positive. If today we go to an exhibition, we will most likely be confronted with exhibits that we would not come across were they not paired with others that we are interested in. It’s the same with newspapers, or conferences.

In the Digital Museum, this ought not to happen. We, the visitors, with our questions (queries) decide exactly what we will see. In return, the museum will only show us what we already know about.

Imagine such a museum in the analog world. You fill out a questionary about your preferences upon entering and will be served accordingly. At Transmediale 10 yesterday science fiction novelist Bruce Sterling talked about atemporality. If you want to be an astronaut, he said, just dress up as one. You will look ridiculous, but by what standards?

The Digital Museum is bound to feature equally ridiculous situations. As I joked, a Nazi will only get to see Hitler memorabilia, a Communist Soviet agitprop. In the analog world, the question is: What happens if two Nazis and a Communist enter a room together? Will the majority rule, or will the exhibits split to equally represent visitors’ preferences?

In the Digital Museum of customization, people can enter together without noticing each other, neither their differences nor what they have in common. It is possible to fully withdraw from public discourse, one of the pillars that support our democracies.

The study only refers to it briefly. Its authors use the term for the generation they are writing about, those who are 12 to 19 years old at the moment. “Digital natives” has become a name for a generation rather than a description of certain habits.

That’s different from what it was when Marc Prensky coined it in his 2001 work “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants”. Back then, there was no generation grown up in the age of ubiquitous Internet access. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say on the origin of the term “digital native”, as used by Prensky:

The term draws an analogy to a country’s natives, for whom the local religion, language, and folkways are natural and indigenous, over against immigrants to a country who often are expected to adapt and assimilate to their newly adopted home. Prensky refers to accents employed by digital immigrants, such as printing documents rather than commenting on screen or printing out emails to save in hard copy form. Digital immigrants are said to have a “thick accent” when operating in the digital world in distinctly pre-digital ways, for instance, calling someone on the telephone to ask if they have received a sent e-mail.

In their 2008 book “Born Digital”, John Palfrey and Urs Gasser make it explicitly clear: Not everybody growing up in these times, as Internet use is the norm, is a digital native. The authors rather describe them as the heavy users and early adopters of the Internet and the social web among the young generation.

Which is probably a good distinction to make. As the study I cited above shows, sophisticated use of social media is far from being the norm among Germany’s youth. While Internet penetration in this group is close to 100 % and nearly everybody uses it – with instant messaging and social networks being the most popular applications – participation stays at a low level.

Only 37% create own content on the web at least once a week. In most cases, this means writing a forum entry or uploading photos or videos. As a blogger and twitterer, I am clearly not a common example for my generation. According to the study, only 4% each do this daily or several times a week. But today, I am also a professional. For me, it’s no longer “user-generated content”. It is (also) writing for a living.

So while on the one hand the promise of participation and democratized media does not seem to appeal to Germany’s youth, they just love passivity on the other hand. Nearly two thirds say it’s great you don’t have to actively look for content on TV. Is this a Bradbury generation? (Well, no. Book reading has increased by two percentage points since 1998, the study says).

In fact, nothing may have changed with the Internet. At least that’s what digital anthropologist danah boyd is saying. “There’s nothing native about young people’s engagement with technology”, a recent (very read-worthy) article in The Guardian quotes her. She goes on:

Young people are learning, they’re learning about the social world around them. The social world around them today has mediated technologies, thus in order to learn about the social world they’re learning about the mediated technologies. And they’re leveraging that to work out the shit that kids have always worked out: peer sociality, status, their first crush.

The JIM study might suggest danah is right. For the youth of today, the Internet is a communication medium. But it’s not the borderless cyberspace the utopists in the ’90 dreamed of. Only 7% say they have befriended people in social networks they haven’t met face to face. For this generation, the World Wide Web is a very local thing. Just as communication was ever before.