Illinois secedes from Myspace

In a bold act, this bill proposes to block access to social computing sites in all public schools and libraries.

Most will focus on the difficulty of using technology to solve a problem. Some will decry the impingement of liberties. I won't deny that either is not important.

For myself, it is another signpost. Things are changing. I've talked about media changing, our expectations of technology changing. Etc.

This is a moment that illustrates how far we have come. Myspace is just another mashup, one of many to come and go at the end of the day. What it represents is not new at all.

The collision of internet space and education space is spectacular right now. I can't believe that no one has noticed this. It is well beyond the blah blah of netgen bs, which is a term coined by the plus 40 crowd in an attempt to understand the sub 30 somethings on their terms (pejoratives like multitasking, short attention). Where is visual learning? Where is the old school making stuff to understand concepts?

Things have changed. Things will continue to change. Netgen denies this in my opinion. The term is for those that analyze, without really understanding that it is not a trend, but continuation. Media and technology can have profound impact on how we see the world in ways that are irreversible. Books change people's lives. Movies do that too. Of course Myspace and other things will have the same effect.

This bill is of course stupid. But it will come up again. People will talk about it. Maybe someone will actually succeed in passing and implementing it. It really won't have much impact in the end, and maybe the person who drafted it understood that -- it's just a cheap attempt to get some cred.

But the fact that it has gotten this far is important. Something is being said here. And it will come back again.

--hal