We, the pre‑Web Kids

When I finally got to page 1,963,873,702 of the Internet, I read about web kids with great interest. A 'web kid' is someone who: "grew up with the Internet and on the Internet." I grew up with comic books and on the saddle of my bike. I saw Star Wars at my local cinema when it was released in 1977. I don't know what generation this makes me, but it's not the web-kid generation.

I'm only 10 years older than Mr Czerski, so I'm probably not the main target of his frustration with doddering oldies, but there are several elements of this manifesto that I have to argue with:

1. "One more thing: we do not want to pay for our memories… We find online the films that we watched as children and we show them to our children, just as you told us the story about Little Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks. Can you imagine that someone could accuse you of breaking the law in this way?"

I may have grown up in an era when phones with buttons on them were regarded as witchcraft, but we were a bit more advanced than sitting around the fire recounting Little Red Riding Hood to each other from memory. I learned fairy tale narratives from books, which my parents had to buy, or steal. What's the difference?

2. "The films that remind us of our childhood… Remembering them, exchanging them, and developing them is to us something as natural as the memory of ‘Czterej pancerni’ is to you."

When I was young we also 'exchanged' and 'developed' stories from films. This mostly involved chasing each other around the woods with big sticks making laser sounds. Also, every story I wrote in creative writing lessons in primary school began with the words: "A small spaceship flew low over the sands of a desert world…" This taught me two lessons that have been invaluable in later life: how to avoid being whacked on the head by big sticks and how to steal elements from good stories.

3. "We know that we are going to find the information we need in a lot of places, we know how to get to those places, we know how to assess their credibility."

This would be wonderful, if 99 percent of people weren't lazier than a sloth on Christmas Day. Sure, you can lookup multiple sources and make an informed decision on which one to trust, but real people just go with whatever Wikipedia says. When I was young, it was almost impossible to hack basic sources of information.

My family had a large blue encyclopaedia known colloquially as 'The Blue Book.' It contained definitive answers to the kind of questions asked by eight year olds, and was never compromised by drunk people inserting the words "Piotrek is gay" into articles on the rules of Ping Pong. I did once attempt to trick my dad by crossing out the words "The Battle of Thermopylae took place in August 480 BC, in southern Greece" and writing "…last Tuesday in my friend Colin's back garden" in my neatest handwriting, but he saw through it pretty quickly.

4. “We do not feel a religious respect for ‘institutions of democracy’ in their current form…What we value the most is freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of access to information and to culture”

This is where I really do start to feel old. Young people have been claiming that they will deliver ‘true freedom’ since the 1960s. What this has invariably turned out to mean is ‘true freedom to buy stuff.’ The Internet doesn’t belong to the web kids, it belongs to Cisco and Google. You can have all kinds of social fun and interaction on the Internet, but it’s not really any different than chatting with your friends in the McDonalds in your local shopping centre– you can be as anarchic and critical as you like, but you’re still going to buy some Chicken McNuggets.

Jamie Stokes