Digital Youth, Italiano

Speaking about digital youth in the U.S. to university students at theUniversity of Genoa and to women in the Associazone Italo Britannica inChiavari was a fascinating experience across cultures and generations. Professor Massimo Bacigalupo of the University of Genoa, a gracious and charming professor and translator of Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and many others, was the conduit to both of these talks.

The first was for an American literature class studying "Imaginary Community" in Wharton and Morrison, as taught by Professor Gabriella Ferruggia. For this group, I talked about how, in the works of Wharton and Morrison, there is often a discrepancy between law, custom, and action. The class was reading a novel written before Female Emancipation in the U.S. and I emphasized the irony of the great woman writer, with her clear-eyed view of American democracy and society in action, not being able to vote or be a full-fledged citizen of the nation she wrote about. For Morrison, segregation--both legal and by racist custom--meant that, in her novels, characters must survive around and against accepted law, custom, and community standards.

From that conversation, I then talked about online communities and the ways law, custom, and community standards work there as well. I talked about the incomparable exercise in democracy that comes from creating one's own social site and then having to determine the laws that will govern it, the codes (on all levels) of action that are or are not acceptable, and then the ways that customizing (literally) works in, around, and through those laws, codes, customs, and rules. The class was wonderful--about thirty very interesting and interested students who took a lot of notes and were clearly well-connected and well informed. One student pulled out a Time magazine that had a survey indicating 63% of current American high school students use expressions such as "lol" or emoticons in their high school written work. We had a laugh about that, and also a fascinating discussion. YouTube is an excellent example of a community that constantly breaks official laws (copyright, IP) but somehow, for other reasons, including advertising revenue and data mining, gets away with it. Wharton and Morrison, to loop back to their course work, constantly show who can "get away with" breaking laws, what power supersedes law. How do we take care of such disparities of power in Second Life? In World of Warcraft?

Translating words such as "blogopshere" or textings like "lol" turned out to be hilarious since often the same words are used in Italian but simply with an Italiano accent. There was much merriment but also insight into the neologisms transnationally. They also all knew what "otaku" meant, to make a different exercise in translation.

The students at the incomparably beautiful University of Genoa (some of which is in a late-Renaissance palazzo, filled with sumptuous frescoes) were in their twenties. I next gave a similar talk at the Associazone Italo Britanica of Chiavari, a community group that meets weekly to talk to one another in English at one of the many charming cafes that line the main streets of Chiavari, a formerly powerful town of the Renaissance with both Roman and ancient Etruscan roots, now primarily a town known for its physical beauty and a frequent tourist destination.

The group were mostly women, mostly over forty I would say (except for one delightful seventeen year old man who was utterly fearless about being in such a group and eager to learn English and who was the best test case ever for "digital youth": he spends much of his time online, wants to do digital filmmaking, and was comfortable in an audience that would have sent most teenage boys running for the hills!) For this group, I began historically. I talked about how Jefferson and other Founding Fathers were frightened by the new technology of mass printing and were afraid that this new cultural form of the popular novel would leave female readers susceptible to sexual predators while also making them more promiscuous, would lead astray working class youth (male and female) from more industrious activity which would foster their future adult work lives, would fill their minds with fantasies, would make them both too solitary and prone to mob violence, and would lead to so much distraction that they would never be able to focus again on serious learning. In other words, just about exactly what critics now say about video games, texting, social networking sites, etc etc.

The women were very surprised to learn about recent studies indicating kids who spend a lot of time on line also read more books than the average kid, have more friends online and off, and so forth. They were shocked when I repeated statistics on sexual predation on line and that the numbers are infinitesimal. One is far more vulernable to abuse by a parent, stepparent, sibling, near relative, teacher, counsellor, neighbor, religious leader, etc. It was a lively discussion. Some people weren't buying it. They were sure the internet was bad and that was that. But many came with one view and left surprised and pleased.

And also a little sad. Chiavari is one of those places where people of all social classes drop by the local cafe in the morning for a cup of coffee and some social life, where there are close knit social groups and still families who have lived there many years. Some found the idea of social networking sad because so un-tactile. When I was thanked, and hugged, and kissed goodbye several times by many new Chiavarian friends, I understod what they meant. It's a nice life. And, as many of them understood at the end, that, while a solitary life can be enhanced by online sociality, the converse is not necessarily true:  a real, lived, f2f life of affection and friendship is not "spoiled" by the digital communities of the kind that we--including those lively, engaged students at the University of Genoa--create online.