It's been 20 years since the creation of the world wide web and
every aspect of our lives has been touched by this digital revolution.
Tim Berners-Lee created something of unbelievable power.
I think of the web as humanity connected.
Human civilisation as a whole is now witnessing the connection of
people everywhere on Earth, through this web.
But what are the consequences of this extraordinary new access to information and people?
Caught up in the instant connections of the web, few of us pause to wonder what it's doing to us.
What is the effect on our relationships?
Is the web even changing how we think?
Whether we realise it or not, through the web all of us are
participating in an extraordinary and unprecedented experiment
for humankind, where the outcome is far from certain.
The great fear is that this revolution is making our senses and
imagination dependent on screens,
shifting us from the real world to the virtual.
It's a world that has no consequences.
It s a world dominated by senses.
Why do you need cognition? Why do you need meaning?
Why do you need metaphor?
Is it going to bring us a different, better life,
or is it going to bring us a different style of communication?
I ask that question. I don't have the answer.
We worry that our kids are being sucked into superficial online culture.
Are they, for better or for worse,
evolving from Homo Sapiens into some sort of Homo Interneticus?
A lot of this is a kind middle-class, middle-age panic about the web.
They are panicked by the future, they are panicked by what they think their children are doing.
I'm going to plunge into the fear and the hype.
I want to find out whether the web really is trivialising
our relationships and rotting our brains.
At its heart, this is about what makes us us,
and whether the web distorts or enriches our very humanity.
This is the Gutenberg Bible, the printed manuscript
that revolutionised society
by taking information from the few and giving it to the many.
This book irrevocably changed Western civilisation.
When Gutenberg invented the printing press,
few of his contemporaries could have predicted the consequences.
They thought it was just about churning out a lot of books.
But the new media, the printed word, unshackled
people from old ways of thinking and fuelled the Renaissance.
500 years on, the web seems to be another
great leap forward in how we think.
Its characteristics mimic some of those
in the eco system of the printing press
in that the entry barriers for individuals are extremely low.
And the role of ideas, knowledge, information is central.
It makes it much easier for information to be distributed
much more quickly and to be copied much more easily,
which is what the printing press did.
But it's fundamentally different in that it also makes possible for anyone to create information.
So I think it is probably more important than the printing press.
Over just 20 years, we have seen how the web is transforming almost every aspect of our outward lives...
its huge impact on culture, politics and business.
But we've yet to understand its deeper impact on our psychology.
The first place to look for answers is the place where people use the web more than anywhere else.
If we are to see the web's revolutionary
effects on human beings, then we should find them here.
This is the most wired nation on earth - South Korea.
In this digitally enhanced country, the web can be accessed virtually anywhere.
South Korea's fibre optic cabling has ten times quicker
download speeds than the broadband we have in Britain.
62% of Korean three to five-year-olds regularly use the internet,
spending over eight hours every week online.
Surveys suggest this is approximately
twice the exposure of British five-year-olds.
It's the young people that the South Koreans are most concerned about.
Sped into the digital age and surrounded by hi-tech
since they've been in nappies,
they command the headlines for all the wrong reasons.
Koreans are increasingly worried about internet addiction.
Their government's own figures
reveal this affects up to 210,000 children,
many spending up to 18 hours every day online.
80% of those afflicted need medication,
20% have to be admitted to hospital.
I'm going to meet Mr Koh -
the government's key advisor on what has become a growing problem.
What are the symptoms of internet addiction?
TRANSLATOR: If they don't use the internet, they feel anxious and unstable.
They don't feel satisfied, their friends don't talk to them any more,
and a lot of friction builds up with the relationship with their parents,
and those are the consequences of too much internet usage.
In Korea there were cases of people
using the internet for 18 hours a day.
Korea may seem to be an extreme case, but it does show that
the web's effect on our psychology can't be dismissed.
And it offers us a glimpse of what might be our future.
The experiences that Korea is facing as a country with internet addiction
are the kind of experiences that countries like yours will face in three to five years.
The fear for coming generations extends well beyond South Korea.
Back in Britain, the ultimate sceptic is the neuroscientist Susan Greenfield.
She tirelessly voices her concern about how the web may be distorting children's sense of reality.
When a child is in the real world
even if it is a world of a doll's house,
this is a world where your doll might break, someone might stamp on your toy soldier.
So you are learning that actions have consequences.
So imagine you are a young person on a computer.
It is a world where there is a strong premium on hearing and vision, on strong sensation.
There is a triumph of the senses over the meaning.
If you give a human brain an environment where actions don't have consequences,
if you give that brain an environment that is just literal,
where there is no significance, might it not be the case
that that brain stays in an infantilised state?
When I talk to parents and people individually,
I've yet to meet someone who has disagreed with me.
Everyone seems to feel a kind of uneasy fear
and a poorly articulated worry that they can't really put into words,
but nonetheless they feel that there is something that needs to be done.
Susan Greenfield represents the most extreme view, but across Britain
there is unease that children are growing up only knowing life online.
That this is a generation consumed by the web.
I have friends and family who are struggling with their children over new technologies.
Even the most technologically-savvy amongst them find it strange that
their kids are more comfortable in front of the screen than they are.
Now I happen to visit many of the same sites that their kids are on.
And while I have got used to them, I do still feel like a bit of a tourist.
I'm constantly amazed at what Generation Web can do with new technology.
So I'm going to find out what living with Generation Web is really like.
Parents across the country need no introduction to this familiar scene.
Their lives are completely centred around their computers.
I chat to friends and like do comments and stuff.
Usually Facebook and Hotmail and stuff.
The kids come home and are on Facebook while they are having their first cup of tea.
You can communicate with people and look into their lives and stuff.
When I was young we didn't even have a home telephone.
Can you imagine life without the web?
Um, no. No.
I think it would be like removing her arm if you took her Facebook site away from her.
What do you think life was like before the web?
Really boring, yeah.
What do you think people did?
Read books.
By the time Generation Web reach adulthood,
they will have spent over 10,000 hours online
and a huge proportion of those will have been spent on social networks.
For the first time on television,
using a data sample of eight million people we can reveal how far the UK
population has been sucked into the orbit of the online social networks.
The size of each of these web planets
represents the number of visits it receives over each month.
There's Bebo for the early teens, MySpace for the music lovers,
but the biggest of them all is Facebook.
According to Facebook,
350 million people worldwide have Facebook accounts.
If it were a country,
it would be the third largest behind China and India.
Britain is becoming a Facebook nation.
There are 23 million active Facebook users. That's one in three of us.
And that's right across the country.
The Facebook capital of Great Britain is Sunderland.
More than half of UK Facebook users log on daily,
on average for an hour every time.
It's so pervasive that Facebook has become
the main target of parents' angst.
People my age, mid 40s and up,
are wringing their hands over what kids are doing on Facebook,
as if we would not have done these things
had Facebook existed when we were young.
How dare these children now not suffer the way I did?
They should be having the life I did - made to read, made to do this,
they should not have this freedom, this access, or if they do,
while I can approve of it,
I ought to suggest it's dangerous, it's going to go wrong.
The key criticism of Facebook is that it makes friendship meaningless
and that undermines society.
The label of friendship is just as easily attained
by lifelong buddies as it is
by total strangers hoarding connections.
How true is this?
To find out more, we need to understand why Facebook became so popular.
On the 24th May 2007, just ten days after his 23rd birthday,
Mark Zuckerberg shuffled onto this hall and explained the secret of Facebook's triumphant success.
Today, together,
we are going to start a movement.
At Facebook, we're pushing for the world to be a more open place and we do this by...
Zuckerberg's aim was that Facebook would become the destination to connect
to friends and share information - text, photos or social events.
All that you need to do is sign up...
create a profile, find your mates
and have them agree to become your Facebook friend.
In this way, each Facebook member carves out their own group
of friends, all within the larger network.
What we are building is a massive network of real connections between people,
through which information can flow more efficiently than it ever has in the past.
And it's changing the way the world works.
But to change the way the world works or putting it a bit more cynically,
to build up marketing potential,
Facebook needs to attract a huge number of users.
What Facebook is trying to achieve
is something called a network effect.
This is a term coined 100 years ago
by American telephone industrialist, Theodore Vail.
This is the essence of what Theodore Vail outlined.
If you have a telephone, just one...
it's pretty useless because you can pick it up, but there is nobody
on the other side, there is no one to make a connection with.
But...if you add another telephone...
..add another and another
and another
this guy can talk with this guy,
who can talk with this guy, who can talk with this guy...
and so on and so on.
The more phones you have connected,
the more benefits for the individual users,
because the user has more possibilities of people to connect with.
And the more people that they can connect with, the more other people will want to join.
The system becomes self-sustaining and self-fulfilling.
It's as simple as that.
So the power and value of Facebook
increases by the number of friends it connects.
Many of these things are a sort of scale leads to scale.
That is if your friends are on it, you go on it.
You don't do some objective evaluation of,
"This one is better in this way and that one is better in that way."
You know, it's like why is the phone, with its dial, why did that catch on?
Well, critical mass eventually becomes the big thing.
For a while, Facebook forced you to be friends with somebody
if they wanted to be friends with you.
And that didn't happen to work for me because I was getting 10,000 friend requests a day.
People have the experience of having thousands of friends.
Well, no-one really has thousands of friends. It's, it's...
either the word thousands or the word friends has to be struck out
for that sentence to make any sense.
We've seen how Facebook needs volume.
The problem is the commodity it wants to accumulate is human relationships.
So what does that mean for those relationships?
What does it mean to have 10,000 friends?
Could a Facebook friend be something as trivial, cheap and disposable
as fast food, worth no more than a burger?
Seriously, in 2009 a well-known fast food chain
created a page on Facebook that offered the chance
of a free Whopper for people who 'de-friended' ten of their Facebook friends.
In less than two weeks, the love of a whopper
proved to be stronger than 233,906 friendships.
This brazen marketing stunt surprisingly seems to reveal
something fascinating about the value of our Facebook friends.
The underlying issue was, "You're on here, we're all on this Facebook,
"we all love it, it's fun, great. But what's the point?"
Steve Schiff was one of thousands of Facebook users who decided to
trade in his online friends for a grilled piece of meat in a bun.
How do you choose which, you know, to get rid of first?
To be honest with you, it was incredibly easy.
It was not that tough to find ten people
that I really didn't need to have that online connection with.
This isn't something that is happening in real life.
So let's just cut to the chase,
let's cut our losses, let's get our free burgers and everybody wins.
So, if we're willing to get rid of friends for a burger,
does that mean social networks are changing the face of friendships in the 21st century?
Or are there some immutable aspects of human friendship that Facebook can't change?
I need to find out more about the evolution of relationships itself.
I'm meeting the world authority on primate groups,
Oxford Professor Robin Dunbar.
Can you talk me through what's going on here?
What's the social life of a primate group all about?
It's all about social bonding,
personalised relationships between individuals.
Primates live in a really intensely social world.
They spend a lot of time grooming each other.
That gives them the sense of bonding.
The problem with grooming is it's a sort of a one-on-one activity.
It just sets an upper limit on the size of groups in the end, so the
most social species only have average group size of 50 or 60 in primates.
In 1992, Dunbar came up with a formula that predicts the
upper limit to the number of bonds any primate like us can ever have.
And it's proved so reliable
that it has become known as the Dunbar Number.
So we sort of plugged human brains sizes into the equation and it gives this number of 150.
And sure enough, this number turns up in all human communities.
It turns up in the military, It turns up in average village sizes.
It is in the Doomsday book, 1087 AD.
It turns up in hunter gatherer communities.
So what does the Dunbar Number mean
for the Facebook generation, Homo Interneticus?
Has Facebook actually changed the upper limits of friendship previously set by nature?
When Facebook's in-house sociologist analysed all active networks,
they found that sure enough, nature is playing out online.
The reality is that the average Facebook member currently has well below Dunbar's upper limit of 150.
In fact, the number of Facebook friends they interact with on
a daily basis is surprisingly small, typically only five or six.
So while you can claim you have this huge network of
people you know in some vague sense,
most of those relationships I wouldn't call relationships.
They're voyeurs.
So through the Dunbar Number, we've found that Facebook's drive
for network effect isn't changing our relationships.
For me, there is something deeper going on,
beyond this superficial issue of numbers.
The point about Facebook is that it does something else
to relationships, it puts them in a constant loop
of digital information.
To understand what that means, we need go back to the very origins
of the phrase "in the loop"
and some important science developed in the Second World War.
WAILING OF AIR RAID SIRENS
'The enemy again and again broke through the coastal defences.'
Night after the night, the brave anti-aircraft gunners stood
by their posts and tried in vain to shoot down the German bombers.
British military scientists realised they were facing a grave problem.
The problem that the anti-aircraft gunners had was
that while the radar could spot the planes,
and the gunners could fire at them, they still missed the target.
It would be an American mathematician, Norbert Wiener,
who would provide the answer.
When Wiener heard what was facing the British gunners,
he decided to come up with a solution
that tackled the problem in a completely different way.
Wiener asked a simple question, "When we walk, why don't we fall over?"
Wiener argued that what keeps us upright is a constant loop of
information to and from the brain,
a loop of action and reaction that allows us to predict future action.
So Wiener saw the gunner, his gun, the plane
and the pilot not as separate entities,
but all embedded in the same loop of continuous feedback.
Only through thinking in this way,
linking human and machine together as one,
could the gunners successfully hit their targets.
One of the big innovations of Facebook is to apply this constant action and reaction to friendship.
In fact, I believe that they are key in understanding
how our online relationships have transformed forever.
What Facebook pioneered before anyone else was status updates fed between friends in real time.
But at the beginning, it wasn't like that.
Back in 2004, it was a simple college student website.
Legend has it that one night after a bad date, Mark came back and hacked
into the student database to create a website
for rating all of the women on campus.
Two hours later, 80% of the student population had voted,
crashing the entire student computer servers.
Mark was the type of person who was always thinking of
technical solutions to social problems.
Seeing the demand for connection,
Zuckerberg started a new venture, Facebook.
I built the first version of Facebook in a couple
of weeks in my dorm room at Harvard. I built it because I wanted
the people around me, the students at Harvard, to be able
to share information and stay connected better.
I emailed a few of my friends and they emailed a few of their friends
and within a few days, I think,
thousands of people were on it at Harvard.
All of us, particularly students caught in the social
whirl of college life, crave news and gossip about our friends.
But Zuckerberg realised that while the web made information available,
people didn't always know it was there.
The problem was browsing Facebook was like poking your head into
someone's room every time you wanted to find out what they were doing.
You had to go to your friend's pages every day or you missed something crucial they posted.
If you missed something crucial, then you didn't respond
and if you didn't respond, your friend though nobody was watching
and what's the point in bragging if nobody cares?
What changed everything is what Zuckerberg did next.
He completed the loop of information on Facebook with something he called "News Feed".
It meant that anything you posted on your site is instantly broadcast to all your friends and vice versa.
They don't have to go looking at your site, all updates came to them.
We launched the product at midnight.
We were convinced that people were going to love it.
And we thought, "This is the kind of thing that could change the web."
It seems all so normal now, but at the time, Facebook users hated it.
They saw it as an appalling intrusion into their lives,
a terrible wrench from the Facebook they were used to.
The first thing I saw was that someone had broken up with someone
and so when I saw those things,
I just kind, I was really put into shock, I was like,
"That's so much stuff broadcasting."
Then I realised that all my stuff was being broadcast
in the same way too, and I didn't really want that.
As soon as we launched the product, we started looking at the feedback
coming in from our users and it was universally bad.
It was, "I want my homepage back. I don't like this, please turn it off."
I was emailed by almost everyone I knew on Facebook to say,
"Why did you do this to us?"
It was personal. And right before we were leaving, I think we were called
and told there were security guards coming
because there was going to be a protest outside.
This was hours after we launched.
I started to make a protest against it,
and created a group called Students Against Facebook News Feed.
By the third or fourth day, at its apex,
it was at 750,000 people in the group.
But Zuckerberg stuck to his guns.
He was determined that Facebook users would live life in the loop.
Within a few days, we could see in our stats already that just the amount of page views
that people were doing and the amount of engagement that they had on the site was going up,
because what they were coming on the site to do was to see
what their friends were doing day to day and this made it so much easier.
It's this culture of real time updating and not the numbers
of friends that is the big shift in all of our relationships.
Constant status updates, this being in the online loop,
has dragged the web into a new age,
inspiring many imitators, most famously, Twitter.
But more importantly, what does this shift mean for you and me
as we live our daily lives?
I'm going to meet Sherry Turkle, an eminent clinical psychologist
who's been studying our relationship with technology for 20 years.
She's actively researching how the webs feedback loops
challenge our sense of who we are.
I think you've started to get almost a new personality type.
It moves from, "I have a feeling, I want to make a call,"
to, "I want to have a feeling, I need to make a call."
There is a sense in which you almost need the validation and the support
of the community to in fact feel the feeling in the first place.
Bringing other people into the loop
of feeling your feeling, this is very seductive.
So as a recipient of all of this information,
how do you think this is affecting me?
You start to want to hide. I cannot live the Blackberry
version of my life. I cannot
be, read, know...
all of the places and spaces and feelings and the Facebook...
My life is more than I can live.
We are no longer nourished, but consumed in some way by what we've created.
I genuinely believe we co-evolve with our tools
and most of our network's tools are smart phones
where we can check e-mails, desktop computers, laptops,
they encourage us because it's so convenient to consume
lots of information and little snippets.
We recently crossed the one billion view mark per day
that we're serving.
We're also receiving close to 24 hours of video
every minute on the site, which is a phenomenal amount of data.
In my life, it's increasingly rare
that I have time on my own, to think.
I have a Twitter account and several blogs to maintain,
plus my Facebook status updates, my photo diary,
my video blogs and my podcast that I have to record.
And that's the content I create.
There's also the content I consume,
not least of which are the emails in my inbox
and the messages on my answering machine.
I was away for a week and I had 283 emails that I had to go through.
Living in the loop, Homo Interneticus,
appears to be slowly drowning in a rising sea of information,
but there is an even deeper change.
The architecture of the web seems to encourages us to use
our brains in a whole new way to digest the abundance of information.
Here at MIT in Boston, 60 years ago,
one scientist had an extraordinary vision of the future,
how technology and the mind might work together.
Vannevar Bush was involved in many of the great scientific advances of the 20th century,
from designing some of the world's first computers
to the development of the atom bomb.
In 1945, he published an article that foretold our digital age.
"As We May Think."
This is Bush's original article and with great insight,
he described all of today's problems with information overload.
At heart, he was focusing on the same problem that I'm grappling with in these archives.
I'm searching though all of these files associated with Bush.
And they're labelled Vannevar Bush A through B, C through D,
photographs, correspondence etc.
But the irony is, this isn't how Bush thought our brains worked.
For example, when he thought about his Aunt Susie he didn't think about
all of the people he knew whose names began with S.
He thought about where he was when he last saw her,
how she did her hair.
What she smelled like. How she held her fingers in front of her when she talked, that kind of thing.
And so on and so on until he built up a picture of her.
In other words, he didn't think our minds were linear,
he thought they worked through association.
Bush put on the table the problem.
He said, "Here is a scientist.
"Imagine our scientist, he has before him the human record,
"in other words, all the things that science has decided in its collective wisdom are true.
"How is he going to manage to work effectively with the knowledge that includes all that stuff?"
Bush believed working in this associative fashion would open up
the library of human knowledge to us all, liberating our minds from the constraints of linear thinking.
Almost half a century later, it was this concept of linking
information that was at the heart of Tim Berners-Lee's data retrieval
system he called the world wide web.
The brain is good at doing those things, first finding
those coincidences and then building on them to find the pattern.
Berners-Lee built into the design of the web what were called hyperlinks,
the ability to leap from one piece of information to another.
But the question is whether hyperlinked associative thinking is good for us.
In mirroring the way the brain functions, darting from subject
to subject in a click, does this make us lazy and easily distracted?
I think science shows us that our brain wants to be distracted.
In what the web does by bombarding us with stimuli, and with information,
it really plays to that aspect of our brain.
It keeps our brain hopping and jumping and unable to concentrate.
The internet simply reflects who we are.
So our inability to concentrate, our focus on real time,
the fact that we're obsessed one week
with Michael Jackson, the next week with Twitter,
the week after with terrorism,
simply reflects that inability to concentrate.
When you grow up expecting to find information at a moment's notice,
what does it do to your ability to internalise information?
We used to be trained in the discipline of reading and writing at length.
Now the generation raised on the web's associative links seem unable
to face the rigours of such linear thinking,
even, it turns out, at our top universities.
What I notice about students from the first day I see them
when they arrive at university
is that they ask, nervously, "What do we have to read?"
And when they are told the first thing they have to read is a book,
they all now groan, which they didn't used to do five or ten years ago.
And you say, "Why are you groaning?" And they say, "It's a book. How long is it?"
Just take your own doctor.
Would you be happy if your doctor simply skimmed the abstracts of
Lancet and all the major databases,
and never read anything in detail? How happy would you be?
I still think that books are at the heart of what it means to be educated and to try and educate.
And I think the generation of students that I teach see books as peripheral.
I happen to think that long-form reading is very important because you
can learn things from long form that you can never learn from short form.
You know, you can't read Remains Of The Day
and not come away with a better understanding of life regret.
And those are things that you can only get
in sort of book-length reading sessions.
But are these just the grumblings of an older generation?
Beyond anecdotes, can we find any evidence that the web is really changing how we think?
At University College London,
Professor David Nicolas was the first academic to systematically
study people's online behaviour
by analysing millions of anonymous data records.
In one survey, he found that 40% of people
never revisit the same web page,
that they only view up to three pages from thousands
that are available online.
The really big surprise was that people seemed to be skipping
over the virtual landscape.
They were popping in from sites, looking at one or two pages
going to another site, looking at one or two pages and then going on.
Nobody seemed to be staying anywhere for very long.
Professor David Nicolas's study hints that the web's hyperlinked
network of information may be converting us from thinking linearly
to thinking associatively.
These two types of thinking can be termed fox and hedgehog.
Foxes are people that embrace all kinds of ideas,
like the wisdom of the crowd, bounce from here and there
and pick things up and that's how they acquire their knowledge.
Then there are hedgehogs.
Hedgehogs like one big idea, they repeat,
they go back to the same source.
These people like the peer-evaluated environment because they are certain of that.
These people represent quite a different group of people.
Now we want to find out whether the younger generations are becoming more fox like than hedgehog.
So we've joined forces with UCL in a unique experiment, that you too
can take part in online, to find out which species of web animal you are.
Our aim is to discover the impact the web is having on our brains.
Is this test a genuine first?
Absolute first, a global first.
Nobody has ever done this before. Nobody even knows what will come out of it.
To give us a first indication, we've brought together 100 people who represent different ages, genders.
Some use the web rarely, others all the time.
Look at your screen, concentrate on what you have to do, click start and that game will begin.
We are especially interested in the 12 and 18-year-old age groups because
their brains have been formed only knowing life with the web.
How does their behaviour compare to people who rarely use the web
and to serial users like myself?
Got to look at the pictures, got to look at the numbers, got to look at the letters, got to make a decision.
Is it an odd number, is it an even number, is it a vowel, is it a consonant? Aagghh.
It's a bit too much for my brain.
The results from our initial survey of 100 volunteers seem
to confirm what many suspect.
Generation Web seemed to display more fox-like behaviour.
They answered their questions
after looking at half the number of web pages
and only spending one sixth of the time viewing the information
that their elders did.
So it seems pretty clear to me that for good or ill,
the younger generation is being remoulded by the web.
Facebook's feedback loops are revolutionising how they relate.
There's empirical evidence now that information overload and associative
thinking may be reshaping how they think.
For many, this seems to be a bleak prospect.
Young people, bouncing and flitting through a thoughtless, throwaway virtual world.
But are we being too harsh?
Are we failing to spot something valuable about this new culture?
We go on singing the old song of fragmentation and alienation because
every society always looks at the preceding age
while living in the current one.
Never sees the age it is living in.
You may be surprised to learn that this was recorded in the 1960s and
the person speaking was the Canadian maverick thinker, Marshall McLuhan.
In 1968, McLuhan took up a year's professorship in New York.
It was the perfect destination for him as he was enthralled by the hustle and bustle of modern life.
He positively welcomed the kind of future
that the web has now given us.
McLuhan thought that the coming of the electronic age would speed up
the movement of information,
injecting new life into the mundane mechanical era.
He thought that the rules, regulations and beliefs of the 19th century
would be overturned as we were forced to dance to the faster rhythm
of the electronic information loop.
In the 1960s, he told a story of how in the future, we'll all be connected
in real time and our messages will sort of just flow
as if we were sitting next to each other.
You know as if we were right there
and that is just a profound thing to say in 1968.
I'm off to visit web entrepreneur Jonah Peretti, who believes
McLuhan's dreams are now playing out in Homo Interneticus.
That spoof cat videos and dancing men are actually
evidence of a sophisticated, interactive culture at work.
McLuhan realised that people always judge new media
by the standards of old media.
So in this case, you see that the internet is all about social
relationships and the network,
but people still judge it as if it were static content.
So you look at it and you say, "Oh, this is a silly cat video,"
and judge it as content, instead of saying, "This is something
"that one person created in their garage, that three other people collaborated on
"and added to, that is now being used to satirise a political campaign."
And that it's part of a web of creativity and a network of sharing
that is more interesting and important than the media itself.
I think a lot of people would look at so much of what goes on online.
The memes, the silliness, the kittens that are stuffed inside
glass vases and all those kinds of things that literally get
sent around everywhere as a distraction,
as a bit of a waste of time, as not particularly worthwhile, but at
the same time, you're seeing it as something that has a sophistication.
Oh, yeah. When you think about things that are a waste of time,
think about the average sitcom, or the average Hollywood movie,
you sit there passively, there's not really much to do except for just
passively consume this media that is for the lowest common denominator.
When you look at viral culture, what you see is people much more engaged.
So, you mentioned kittens in glasses.
The bonsai kitten project was a fake site
that made it look like instructions for how to make bonsai kittens
where you put them in jars and they get funny shapes
and you can make your very own.
It was a total prank and the person who created it
launched it by telling a bunch of animal rights activists about it saying, "You'll love this!"
He knew that they would freak out and hate it and send it all around,
but then as a consumer when you see you have to go through
a sophisticated thought process where you say, "It's a joke.
"I think it's funny and I like it and I'll send it to people," or,
"It's a joke and I think it's still offensive
"and I'm going to fight it and act and organise."
It breaks people into groups about how they feel about it and they can
react and interact with the media and become part of the story,
where the people are powering the media,
that is spreading around and changing and evolving.
Once you figure out some of the principles
of how things spread online,
how do you make something that when people see it,
they want to share it, pass it along, bring more people in?
It can work for silly things or for serious things.
The apparently superficial culture of young people on the web
can have a serious side and a direct impact on the real world.
One of the most powerful examples for me
can be seen in how Generation Web is re-engaging with politics.
What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility,
a recognition on the part of every American
that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world.
I made the decision in February of 2007 to a leave from Facebook
and go work full-time for the Obama campaign.
The campaign from the start was really interested in running
a bottom's up grass roots initiative,
which happened to intersect directly
with everything that was happening online in 2006, 2007, 2008.
Barack Obama!
The young users of YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter
became central to the campaign.
We had members of congress on Twitter, we had protesters organising
through Twitter outside, we had the president
on Twitter using it to campaign
and we had everyone in the country, well, not everyone,
but a lot of folks, using Twitter to express their opinions
on the hot topics, so we had the entire spectrum.
During the election year, Obama had three million Facebook friends
and studies show a third of all under-30-year olds
used social networking to communicate their politics.
That figure was negligible four years earlier.
Two thirds watched political videos online,
a quarter forwarded them on or re-mixed the material.
# Cos I got a crush on Obama
# I can't wait till 2008 Baby, you're the best candidate... #
What we were able to do was figure out how people could do it their way
and there was, really, a groundswell
of energy and enthusiasm, both in terms of fund-raising
but also in terms of time spent volunteering for the campaign.
America, we have come so far, we have seen so much,
but there is so much more to do.
Election night in Chicago was something I think everyone who
was there would say would never happen again.
It was indescribable.
It was a really important moment for the country, above everything else.
We were all so emboldened by the fact that not only had we done it,
but we'd done it differently
and that made everything all the more powerful.
The technology of the web, with its feedback loops and associative connections,
appears to have attracted young people to politics on a scale that hasn't been seen for generations.
All around the world, as we've seen, young people, for better or worse,
are harnessing the power of the web to fight their causes.
From the uprising in Iran...
..to the young Russian hackers
who claim to have launched cyberwar against Estonia...
..they recognise the power of the web to connect and collaborate.
For many this is a very positive development.
Web guru Steven Johnson believes ultimately, collaboration,
a kind of pooling of intelligence allowed by the web,
has always been a key driver of human progress.
One of the things about ideas that is so interesting is that we have
this myth that they come to people in a eureka moment,
where somebody is sitting in their study and they think,
"Ah! I understand gravity!" Or, "I understand how to build a nuclear reactor!"
But in fact what tends to happen much more than we realise is that ideas are much more collaborative.
If you look at the history of invention
what you find is that inventions are
dramatically disproportionately centred in urban areas.
One of the great things about cities is that they are filled with these
public spaces like a coffee shop where people come together
who might have some shared interest, but come from different backgrounds, work for different companies,
artists meeting writers or film makers.
And in that point of convergence, they sit around and they talk
and they share ideas and it becomes a kind of connected space.
So the web is in some senses a sort of virtual version
of what cities have historically done.
You have lots of people connected in a way
that was never possible before and part of it this basic principle
built into the architecture of the web.
The web is at its core a platform for linking things.
When you look at a city,
with its teeming masses of people,
each of whom have their own dreams,
desires and expectations, it shouldn't work,
but it does.
So could it be that the essence of what makes a city truly great,
the gossip, connections, the serendipity,
can also work on the web?
I believe that at best, the web can be like an exciting, innovative
metropolis that eventually could benefit the younger generations.
Earlier, we saw that some people view South Korea,
the most wired nation on earth, as a nightmarish vision of web addiction.
But along with the downsides come hidden benefits.
As young South Koreans grow up in their super-charged digital world,
they regularly top the world's education league tables.
I'm meeting the President of the Korean National Information Society Agency, who claims that Korean
children's advanced achievement is not due only to great education system,
but because from an early age,
they interact and work together on the web.
This generation is growing up with the web.
It is growing up with it as part of their education system,
what hopes and expectations do you have for them in the world when they grow up?
I look forward to that.
Every kid starts with an incredible an incredible amount of curiosity.
Why are some materials string? Why are some materials weak?
Well, you know, I asked that when I was a kid and nobody could answer.
Now, my son will get the answers and want to ask more questions.
So I think it is a huge change.
Human civilisation as a whole is now
witnessing the connection of people
everywhere on Earth through this web,
in ways that actually do mimic the growth of a human brain.
And the analogy is imperfect.
But it's also real.
We are seeing the emergence of a global brain.
In this series, we've seen the importance of studying the impact
of the web on all our lives.
The web appears to give us all a voice and to level society.
But we've seen that the ongoing cycle of this virtual revolution
is also encouraging mega brands
that track and trade us,
and governments that can spin and spy as never before.
The way in which small groups of elites dominate
in cultural, political and economic terms,
it reflects our values, our narcissism,
our views, our obsessions.
Even as it opens up extraordinary new possibilities, the web is weighed down
by the limits of our imagination, our desire to profit and control.
The web holds up a mirror to human nature, the good and the bad.
Yet in this film, we've seen the new generation
not just reflected in the web, but maybe evolving with it.
My hope is that the web will eventually show us new horizons,
liberate humanity and change human nature for the better.
All this great stuff that's emerging in social media
is people trying to find new, interesting ways of communicating.
To become more efficient, become more engaged, become more informed,
and I think it leads, ultimately, to having more empathy.
The web isn't going to, you know, solve disease or solve poverty.
But it makes it so people can share information more effectively and know what's going on out there,
and when people are better informed, people can make better decisions.
Hopefully social change happens gently.
The sort of thing which the internet brings, by connecting people,
is openness and understanding of other people's ideas, on a good day.
So I hope we have a lot of those good days.
We have the knowledge of the ages gathered for us to browse in our pockets.
And if we seriously think that's a bad thing, if we seriously think
that's something we should turn our backs on or sniff at,
then we really deserve a slapping.
This is astounding technology
and we should take a moment to celebrate the power
and the reach it gives us across time and across ideas
and across continents, both past, future and present,
to connect with people.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about this revolution
is we've seen all of this profound change over just twenty years.
This isn't the end...
it is merely the beginning.
Don't forget to go online and take part in our web behaviour test.
With your help, this major experiment will discover
the impact the web is having on our brains.
As well as fox and hedgehog behaviour,
we've identified other key web species.
What kind of web animal are you?
Visit...
..where you can also follow the links to the Open University
for more from those reshaping the web and the world.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk