Berkley Center

My generation loves the Internet. We have a well-established dependence on its ever-expanding resources. Ask any young American, across almost every socio-economic divide, where they most frequently access culture, news and entertainment, and their answer will be the World Wide Web. Our professional and social lives are tied to its networks, and more and more we seek truth, practical and existential, in its great depths of information.

Our deep appreciation for the Internet is no doubt intertwined with our identity as a cohort, and how we separate ourselves from those that came before us. Though our parents’ generation has caught on to the idea of Facebook and Twitter, it is clear that despite her best effort Aunt Jill will never quite understand the social function of the poke button. In the same way, Uncle Murry will never fully grasp the cultural marker of an @aol.com email address. As young Americans, negotiating the social nuances of the Internet is second nature, and our mastery of new technology defines part of our collective identity. Though the whole world is continually increasing its online presence, grounded deep in millennial culture is the belief that we claim social ownership of online space.

The generational divide became evident this January as Congress drafted legislation to increase the regulation of the Internet to curb, among other things, flagrant copyright infringement. According to Wikipedia, which led the online protest of the bills on Janurary 18, SOPA and PIPA “would be devastating to the free and open web.” For Millennials, the Internet is free space for the free exchange of ideas and innovation. It is our place to engage in questions of identity, morals, and purpose with limited oversight from the older demographic. We have seen Twitter and Facebook as tools of revolution and YouTube as a messenger for the oppressed. SOPA and PIPA represent a dramatic invasion of the networks of information that young people cultivated. The dramatic reaction to bills, plastered across Facebook newsfeeds, gives us great insight into the values of young people today. Government efforts to protect copyrights online fall on dead ears because young Americans have grown to see ideas differently.

In an age where information is instant, we are choosing access over ownership. We would rather see a video open to everyone than a corporation expand their bottom line. SOPA and PIPA struck us so deeply because it threatened our growing commitment to the spread of knowledge in a space we have grown to see as ours. I acknowledge I risk romanticizing the Internet; I am certainly not naïve to the Internet as tool for abuse and exploitation. However, its greatest asset is the platform it provides for the free exchange of ideas, an idea young Americans have incorporated into their identity. As the government takes steps to regulate this vast network, it must expect protest from the Millennial generation, online and elsewhere.