WE, THE WEB KIDS:

A comparative study of an Internet manifesto and current

cultural clashes

By
JANA SABINE PETZSCH

Essay submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Honours

degree in

VISUAL STUDIES
VKK 755

in the
FACULTY OF HUMANITIES
UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA

NOVEMBER 2012

Study leader: Mr Rory du Plessis

 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………………. ii
LIST OF APPENDICES……………………………………………………………………… iii

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………… 1

1.1 Introduction…………………………………………………………………. 1
1.2 Background and aims of study…………………………………….. 1
1.3 Literature review…………………………………………………………. 2
1.4 Theoretical framework………………………………………………… 6
1.5 Methodological framework…………………………………………. 6
1.6 Chapter overview…………………………………………………......... 7

CHAPTER TWO: DISCOURSE ANALYSIS………………………………………… 9

2.1 Introduction………………………………………………………………… 9
2.2 We are the web…………………………………………………………… 10
2.3 MeMeMe……………………………………………………………………. 13
2.4 Just Google it………………………………………………………………. 15
2.5 Conclusion.………………………………………………………………….. 18

CHAPTER THREE: CASE STUDIES…………………………………………………. 20

3.1 Introduction……………………………………………………………….. 20
3.2 London Burning………………………………………………………….. 20
3.3 The Arab Spring…………………………………………………………… 23
3.4 #KONY…………………………………………………………………………. 28
3.5 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………… 34

CHAPTER FOUR: CONCLUSION 36

4.1 Chapter summary……………………………………………………… 36
4.2 Contribution of study………………………………………………… 37
4.3 Limitations of study…………………………………………………… 37
4.4 Suggestions for further research………………………………… 38

SOURCES CONSULTED………………………………………………………………… 40

APPENDICES……………………………………………………………………………….. 47

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 LIST OF FIGURES Page

Figure 1: We, the web kids website screenshot, 2012…………………… 9

Figure 2: Kerim Okten, Masked man on the streets of Hackney on 20

the third day of rioting, 2012…………………………………………….

Figure 3: Percentage of population under 30, 2011…………………………. 25

Figure 4: ‘We are all Khaled Said'-Facebook page, 2012……………………. 26

Figure 5: Kony 2012 poster, 2012……………………………………………………. 28

Figure 6: Mocking the Kony 2012 poster, 2012..……………………………….. 32

Figure 7: Condescending Wonka on sharing the Kony video, 2012…… 32

Figure 8: The Truth of the Like Button, 2012…………………………………..... 33

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 LIST OF APPENDICES Page

Appendix 1: Piotr Czerski, We, the web kids, 2012…………………. 47

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 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

1.1 Introduction

The twenty-first century is marred by social unrest where a disillusioned youth often first
voices its discontent online before physically (even violently) protesting against previous
regimes . The spirit of this Web 2.0 generation is reflected in the online manifesto We, the
web kids (2012) by Polish journalist Piotr Czerski, where he argues that the current
generation has grown up “on the Internet”[emphasis added] and sees it as a continually
present layer that is intertwined with their physical reality (Czerski 2012:1). The youth thus
redefine for the present age humanity’s search for knowledge; the relationship between
global culture and individual identity; free access to information; and the changing structure
of contemporary society due to an increasing insistence on transparent, democratic
governments. This discursive study’s main objective is to link Czerski’s arguments to various
contemporary theorists in order to explore the role that social media systems and online
campaigning sites play in effecting wide-scale uprisings. Through the case study of the
#KONY1 phenomenon, amongst others, this essay investigates and critiques the
effectiveness of online campaigns in causing meaningful change in reality.

1.2 Background and aims of the study

The purpose of the essay is to critically analyse the online manifesto We, the web kids by
relating it to other cultural theorists, such as Jaron Lanier, Nicholas Carr and Paul Virilio, in
order to explore how social media can play a deciding role in providing a platform from
which to implement change. This is especially relevant as there is a visible increase in citizens
revolting against governments that resist both a globalised worldview and the demand for
transparent democracy. The study will thus examine how the main arguments of Czerski’s
manifesto relate to different cases in reality (like the Arab Spring2, #KONY and Avaaz’s3

1
#KONY is a viral campaign by the non-profit Invisible Children in 2012 to expose the atrocities committed by
General Kony in Uganda (Suddath 2012).
2
Collective term applied to uprisings all over northern Africa and the Middle East (Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, etc.)
from early 2011 onwards, led mainly by the youth (Huang 2012).
3
“Avaaz is a global web movement to bring people-powered politics to decision-making everywhere”
(Avaaz.org 2012).
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involvement in preventing ACTA4 in Europe). We, the web kids will be seen as representing
the discourse surrounding the current generation’s frustration with their governments and
the Internet as an expanded reality to them. In order to elaborate on this discourse, the
essay aims to describe how other theoreticians have examined ideas of Virtual Reality and
the role of the Internet as a source of knowledge and protest for contemporary young
adults.

Since Czerski’s manifesto was only published at the beginning of this year, his reasoning has
not yet been fully analysed by theorists. Therefore, this study relates the main arguments to
more established manifestos, such as Jaron Lanier’s You are not a gadget (2010), but also to
debates surrounding the democratic agency of the Internet by thinkers like Mark Poster and
Paul Virilio. It further explores how the ideologies and arguments present in the chosen
literature reflect the mindset of the time. The essay will make credible links between events
in recent history and Czerski’s manifesto by connecting it to the increasingly influential role
that social media networks play in shaping global and individual communities. The study
presupposes a certain familiarity with terms relating to Virtual Reality, the Internet and
social media. A basic knowledge of recent political events, such as the revolts that led to the
Arab Spring and the global outcry about General Kony in Uganda, is presumed.

1.3 Literature review

As previously stated, We, the web kids is a very recent manifesto and before its arguments
can be applied to a case study, the discursive formation of the manifesto itself needs to be
evaluated and then likened to other viewpoints. First, however, there are “diverse and
numerous definitions of discourse” where it is often simply assumed that the audience will
know what discourse is (Cheek 2004:1141). Foucault (1972:121,131) himself initially defines
discourse rather cryptically as “a group of verbal performances” before elaborating that it is
“a group of statements in so far as they belong to the same discursive formation […]; it is,
from beginning to end, historical - a fragment of history, a unity and discontinuity in history
itself, posing the problem of its own limits”.

4
ACTA: Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a treaty that aimed to standardise anti-piracy measures and
which was recently rejected by the European parliament after a massive online outcry and ferocious anti-ACTA
lobbying (Arthur 2012:[sp]).
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As Hall (2004:74) states, the idea of “discourse, representation, knowledge and ‘truth’”
purely being valid within a particular historical context becomes significant when looking at
the discourse produced by We, the web kids since it is only within a specific discursive
formation that the text becomes an intelligible construct. Equally important is Foucault’s
notion of the “épistèmé", which Mills (2004b:62) explains as “the complex set of
relationships between the knowledges which are produced within a particular period and
the rules by which new knowledge is generated”. Since the episteme consists of this set of
relations between various discursive practices, it acknowledges the limitations and
constraints that are imposed on a discourse at any specific time (Foucault 1972:211).

Clive Seale’s Researching society and culture (2012) is essential in providing a set framework
to discourse analysis. The chapter on discourse aids in finding and sorting relevant
information and suggests two different approaches to analysing the data – either by
identifying key themes and arguments or by looking for patterns of association or patterns of
variation (Tonkiss 2012:413).

Similarly to Cheek’s (2004:1143) assertion that discourse analysis has a “multidisciplinary

inflection and originates from several areas”, Visual Studies also relies heavily on an
interdisciplinary approach. Thus the literature in review expands on what discursive
strategies will be used, the text in question (We, the web kids) and further considers the
opinions of writers from very different backgrounds in order to comply with the
facetiousness of the research methodology’s post-modern paradigm. Czerski’s manifesto will
mainly be assessed in light of the arguments made in Jaron Lanier’s You are not a gadget
(2010), Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows (2010), and various thinkers featured in Community in
the digital age (2004), edited by Andrew Feenberg and Darin Barney.

In You are not a gadget (2010), Lanier, who is famous for being one of the pioneers of Virtual
Reality, elaborates on the negative aspects of online collective sites by critiquing the idea of
the Web 2.0 as “wisdom of the crowd” (Lanier 2010:55) and investigating how search
engines like Google and Yahoo are making society lazy. Furthermore, the individual voice is
lost and a mob rule is more easily established in the current technological age: Lanier
(2010:17) purports that “the central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network
of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush”. Thus he defends the value of the
individual against the “personal reductionism” of information systems (Lanier 2010:68).
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These ideas clash noticeably with Czerski’s endorsement of easily accessible information and
seeing the Internet as both a global community and a culture that promotes the individual.
The idea of crowd-wisdom links with Czerski’s (2012:2) view of the web as a “shared external
memory”. The ‘wisdom’ of the online community versus the value of the individual user is
essential in the analysis of the #KONY phenomenon and whether or not it is a successful
online campaign for positive change.

By comparison, Nicholas Carr questions whether we are becoming more imprudent through
our increasing reliance on the Internet by exploring the intellectual and social repercussions
in his book The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains (2010). Where Lanier views
this from a Virtual Reality-perspective, Carr explores which inventions throughout history
have influenced humanity in numerous ways, and relates this to discoveries in neuroscience.
Carr hereby examines how new technologies can change our way of thinking by altering the
way our brains process and store data. In contrast to traditional sources of information such
as the book, the Internet provides rapid but superficial bursts of data that need to be sifted
through, which hinders our capacity to concentrate on one task. The author also looks at
how the Internet is built to deliver the type of stimuli that show rapid alterations in brain
function, making it the technology that most powerfully affects not only our lifestyle, but
also our genetic evolution.

This text expands on Czerski’s notions about the web-kids’ access to information and can be
related to the constant need of the current generation to be entertained visually because of
the rapid technological advancements that shape modern living. Carr’s ideas on
neuroplasticity5 inquire into the similar structuring of the brain and the Internet, and link to
Czerski’s argument of the current generation seeing the web as part of reality – the virtual
and the real become identical to a brain that is used to constant adaptation to rapid
technological change. Again, #KONY provides a visual example of how information can go
viral6 in an instant, but that the current generation is easily distracted by newer
developments. Also, the fact that people think they can change the world by ‘liking’ a

5
Indications in brain research where “even the adult human brain is seen as malleable, or ‘plastic’” (Carr
2010:21).
6
“to become extremely popular in a very short time; said of a website, blog entry, posted video, etc. on the
Internet” (Zimmer 2009).
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Facebook status shows the discrepancies between the harsh realities of the child soldiers in
Uganda, and the imagined realities of an online generation.

The collection of essays by Andrew Feenberg and Darin Barney in Community in the digital
age (2004) questions the reality of virtual communities and looks at the social and political
implications of the Internet for society. Contributors include Mark Poster and Sherry Turkle,
who inquire into community and digital technology in their articles.

More relevant however is the section on the democratic potential of the Internet, such as
The Internet and political transformation revisited, by Diane Johnson and Bruce Bimber
(2004), since the authors relate the effect of social media to real-life events. Here, the
political uprisings in the Arab world come to mind as they have (in)directly caused the fall of
previous dictatorships.

Richard Kahn and Douglas Keller’s (2004) article Oppositional Politics and the Internet: A
critical/reconstructive approach in Durham and Kellner’s Media and cultural studies (2006)
further explores the Internet as a contested terrain for social activism. As previously
mentioned, the #KONY video has taken the online community by storm, but one must
question how effective online activism is and what role the Internet plays – can a YouTube
video translate into a changed reality for the Ugandan child soldiers or is it just an online
fad? The prevention of ACTA in Europe through relentless online campaigning by collective
sites like Avaaz is another example that can be analysed in order to explore whether Internet
activism is successful in reality.

Also, Sherry Turkle’s chapters in Life on the screen: Identity in the age of the Internet (1996)
on identity, fragmentation and power relationships in virtual communities like MUDs (Multi
User Dungeons or Multi User Domains) explore how the Internet has contributed to how we
think about the self and place. Since they were published in the mid-1990’s, Turkle’s
arguments provide an interesting platform from which to evaluate how the current
generation has embraced the Internet and whether the sentiments surrounding the effect of
the web on the individual has changed.

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1.4 Theoretical framework

The research methodology of this study will remain within the boundaries of Cultural
Studies, as it is based on the application of discursive studies to a very recent online
manifesto. As Andersen (2003:9) writes, Foucault’s discourse analysis is not a textual, a
literary or a structural analysis. It is rather focussed on how one statement “always belongs
to a series of a whole, always plays a role among other statements, deriving support or
distinguishing itself from them” and how a particular context is always necessary for the
statement to exist (Foucault, in Andersen 2003:12).

Since this manifesto attempts to establish the Zeitgeist, a post-modern theoretical paradigm
suits the approach best as a familiarity with Internet- and Virtual Reality- jargon is assumed
and a host of theoreticians from very different backgrounds are considered in the analysis of
We, the web kids. It is also important to note that although the main constituencies of age,
generational difference, political change and Internet activism appear to be based more on a
textual debate, the visual remains important in that the screen can be seen as a constantly
changing optical interface for interaction. Furthermore, the manifesto can be viewed as a
YouTube video where manga characters recite Czerski’s words; the #KONY campaign relied
heavily on its posters being disseminated and its videos viewed online; and, lastly, social
media systems like Facebook and Twitter can in themselves be seen as a visual
representative of the contemporary youth’s preferred method of communication.

1.5 Methodological framework

As previously stated, this study will rely on Foucault’s discourse analysis; on providing a
historical overview; and on relating the arguments made by the seminal text and related
scholars to relevant visual examples. It is important to refer to Critical Discourse Analysis
(CDA) here as well since it considers the context of language use and the social practice
involved in language as crucial (Wodak & Meyer 2009:5). Jäger and Maier (2009:34) suggest
a Foucauldian Critical Discourse Analysis and Dispositive Analysis where “discourse analysis
and its extension, dispositive analysis, aim to identify the knowledges contained in
discourses and dispositives, and how these knowledges are firmly connected to power
relations in power/knowledge complexes”. Therefore CDA argues that language use is
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always a component of particular social practices, and that these, in turn, have
consequences with regards to status, solidarity and power (Gee 2011:68).

This links well with Rose’s (2012:227) idea of ‘Discourse Analysis II’, which also bases itself on
Foucault through its interest in how human subjects are produced by institutions and its
consideration of the power/knowledge relationship as it is shaped by social practices. If one
considers the Internet (and thus also individual social media systems or online campaigning
sites) as producers of a new kind of subject/object position, Discourse Analysis II becomes
important in the analysis of the social modality of where discourse is produced and how a
specific audience reacts to it.

‘Discourse Analysis I’ becomes equally relevant when looking at Foucault’s curiosity in how
“human subjectivity is constructed” and how discourse is “a particular knowledge of the
world which shapes how the world is understood and how things are done in it” (Rose
2012:190,195). We, the web kids is thus seen as not only embodying a new type of
discourse, but also as representative of how many young people see the world. Discourse
Analysis I additionally considers the “regime of truth” (Rose 2012:193), where the power of
one discourse over another is questioned and the changes and shifts of discourses in search
of the Truth is analysed.

Gee’s (2009:121) ‘ideal’ discourse analysis considers seven building tasks, namely
significance, practices (activities), identities, relationships, politics, connections and sign
systems and knowledge. By incorporating these tasks and the suggestions made by Tonkiss
with Foucauldian discourse analysis, this essay aims to minimise subjectivity and to consider
the multi-facetted state of an interdisciplinary approach.

1.6 Chapter overview

The first chapter introduces the research question and its purpose in a Visual Studies
context. The chapter further explains which methodologies will be utilised in order to
analyse relevant visual examples. It also clarifies the central aims of the dissertation and
reviews the main literary sources before providing an overview of all chapters.

The second chapter focuses on a discursive study of Piotr Czerski’s digital manifesto We, the
web kids. Czerski’s three main arguments are examined individually and then compared to

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the opinions voiced by theoreticians like Jaron Lanier and Nicholas Carr. A Foucauldian
Critical Discourse Analysis is adapted and used to look at how discourse is formed, at
intertextuality, at power/knowledge relationships and at the articulation of a discourse
through dominant institutions which are present in Czerski’s manifesto.

The third chapter applies the findings of the discourse analysis to different case studies,
focussing especially on the #KONY phenomenon, on the use of social media platforms during
the Arab Spring and on the youth revolting violently during the London Riots. The interest
lies in relating the ideology of the current generation, based on their high Internet
interactivity, to events in real life, and to study whether a mind-set that sees the Internet as
part of reality has the power to positively change actual situations of conflict. As the title of
this dissertation suggests, the reality of these case studies is compared to the arguments in
Czerski’s manifesto, and asks the question of whether Internet activism is enough, or
whether people are still needed ‘in the flesh’ to fight for change.

The last chapter concludes with a summary of all the chapters. It also considers the
contributions made by this study, and the limitations imposed on it by its subject choice and
selection of Discourse Analysis as framework from which to place the manifesto in context.
Lastly suggestions for further research are made.

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 CHAPTER 2: DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Figure 1: We, the web kids-website,2012.

Screen shot by author.

2.1 Introduction

ACTA. #Kony. The Arab Spring. The London riots7. WikiLeaks8. Occupy Wall Street9.

These are just some examples of cyberactivism over the past two years, and they
demonstrate a new demand for freedom, transparency and democracy by a globalised
youth. This is reflected in Piotr Czerski’s online manifesto We, the web kids, published
in Poland in February of 2012. Released under a Creative Commons licence, the text

7
Two nights of rioting, looting and fires in various London districts and other British towns in 2011
(Turner 2011).
8
Launched in 2007, “WikiLeaks is a not-for-profit media organisation” whose goal it is to share
important news with the public and to protect freedom of speech and media publishing (What is
Wikileaks?[sa]).
9
A movement that began in September 2011 to oppose the power of the richest 1%, major banks and
multinational corporations, and to identify Wall Street’s role in creating the current recession
(OccupyWallStreet [sa]).

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has been widely translated and heralded by the Web 2.0 generation as representing
their ideology. This chapter thus aims to discursively analyse Czerski’s manifesto.

2.2 We are the web

Critical discourse analysis looks at the social and political context of a discourse, since
to Foucault a statement is not independent of time, place and materiality, but rather
reliant on a context from which to derive a particular meaning (Andersen 2003:12).
This reflects Mills’ (2004a:11) argument that all views on discourse share them to be
“principally organised around practices of exclusion”.

In We, the web kids, Czerski (2012:1) purports to be the voice of a globalised youth,
speaking for all of them and yet acknowledging that he is saying “’we’ only so far as to
talk about us all” since the ‘we’ of the web kids10 is “fluctuating, discontinuous,[…]
temporary”. However, this ‘we’ not only purposefully excludes “the analog [sic]”11 and
older generations who do not have the same embracing stance towards the Internet,
but also anyone who does not have access to the Internet. In effect, We, the web kids
becomes a manifesto of first world problems that have not been solved simply by
tweeting about them and not a true reflection of this generation’s discontent for their
respective governments.

Even though Virilio (2000:2,114) acknowledges the present decline in analogue

thinking in favour of “instrumental, digital procedures”[emphasis in original], he states
that it is precisely this augmented speed of life that distances us from reality and
causes our society to accept the resulting “increasing impoverishment of sensory
appearances”. Thus the “magical change” that Marshall McLuhan (1989:4) describes
when any two ideas trade places erodes since the Internet has taken over previous
ways of thought by imposing its rapid-fire tactic of processing information on the way
the youth of today encounters and interacts with reality. As Barney (2004:32) argues,

10
The term ‘web kids’ will be used throughout this essay as a synonym for the current youth that has
grown up with the Internet and as representative of a new generation who opposes antiquated thinking
by previous governments.
11
To Czerski (2012:1), ‘the analogue’ represents all previous generations that did not grow up with the
Internet as an integral aspect of “every single experience” that shaped them.

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“digital technology impoverishes rather than enriches our shared reality” by
dislocating what we pay attention to. Instead of proposing a scheme where the
analogue and the digital can merge successfully, Czerski speaks only for the digital and
ignores the needs of older generations who have not grown up on the Internet and are
not used to the superficial, speedy bursts of information that it provides.

However, Turkle (1996:255) already stated in the mid-1990s that the culture of
stability had changed and that society was embracing a time of fluidity, adaptation and
change. This is reflected in Czerski’s (2012:1) argument that “the Internet to us is not a
‘place’ or ‘virtual space’”, but rather that is has become part of reality. This mirrors
McLuhan’s (1989:87) argument that every new medium is just “a model of some
biological capability speeded up beyond human ability to perform”. Through the web,
we are accessible at all time. Life is lived on the Internet; it is a constantly present layer
in daily activities. Whether this means Skyping12 with a friend in a different time zone,
verifying film times on one’s iPhone or streaming a video online, to the web kids the
Internet presents a natural aspect to almost all of their experiences.

Nevertheless, Virilio (2000:29) claims that the twentieth century is one that celebrates
the “optical illusion”, which links to Czerski in that to the web kids, the virtual and the
real have nothing to differentiate themselves from the other – they live in a world
where a screen is not a barrier, but merely and extended version of reality. Virilio
(1997:2,131) adds that “our sky is vanishing”, and all previous notions about what is
true are changing rapidly: the very notion of being is redefined by the existence of
cyberspace. Still, one must question the greatness of the role that the Internet plays in
contemporary society’s daily life: as Poster (2006b:57) states, new media such as the
web does not constitute the only way to understand current conditions, and neither is
it the only factor in globalisation.

Similarly to Turkle’s description of a society in flux, Czerski states that the web is “a
process”, constantly changing and adapting. And to “us”, this adapting to dissolving
peripheries is natural and normal since “we are the web” (Czerski 2012:2). Again, the

12
Skype is a freely downloadable application whereby users can make calls over the Internet.

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embracing of the personal pronoun “we” and Czerski seeing himself as representative
of the web kids indicates the one-dimensionality of the writer’s standpoint. This
connects to what Tonkiss (2012:415) refers to as ‘political discourse’, where “strategies
of association and personalisation” are used to portray the author in a more positive
light. Normally, the author’s voice is depersonalised in an attempt to appear objective,
but since this is a web manifesto and Czerski purports to speak for a particular group, a
political discursive strategy is more effective since the youth will identify with being
included in the “we” and it creates a clear distinction between the analogue and the
online generations.

However, Jaron Lanier (2010:75) comments that this society of “cybernetic totalism”
has failed on two levels. Firstly, it is a spiritual failure because the Internet has
encouraged a narrow worldview where “the mystery of the existence of experience” is
denied (Lanier 2010:75). The second failure is at a behavioural level, since Lanier
(2010:75) feels the noosphere13 “undervalue[s] humans” by making them mostly
anonymous online and through crowd identity. This connects to the demise of
“interpersonal interaction” because to Lanier (2010:4), communication has become
fragmentary and impersonal. So as much as the web kids are representative of a new
generation demanding freedom based on the Internet’s framework, there is a loss of
personhood as well.

Lanier (2010:39) fears that by accepting a cybernetic totalism, “we are beginning to
design ourselves to suit digital models around us, and [he worries] about a leaching of
empathy and humanity in that process”. Nicholas Carr (2010:117) mirrors this
sentiment when he states that although “the Net’s interactivity gives us powerful new
tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others”, it has
also turned Internet users into “lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of
social or intellectual nourishment”. Thus, the structure of the Internet invokes a sense
that the individual cannot be intelligent without the help of the crowd, whereby
everything becomes devalued. As Lanier (2010:26) writes, “the digital hive is growing

13
“A collective brain formed by the sum of all people connected on the Internet” (Lanier 2010:16).

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at the expense of individuality”, an aspect of the Net that Czerski and the web kids
have ignored.

2.3 MeMeMe

Mills (2004a:13) explains that “discourses structure both our sense of reality and our
notion of our own identity”. Czerski (2012:2) makes the statement that to the web
generation, “global culture is a fundamental building block of [their] identity” since
through the Internet they have access to everything. They can pick and choose which
traditions, languages, and narratives to embrace or reject, whereas the previous eras
did not have the same world at their fingertips. However, identity and multiplicity are
not always that positive a construct. Through this globalised culture, does not the
individual lose its place? Sherry Turkle (1996:258) saw this as an identity crisis where
online one can “have a sense of self without being one self”. A life that is lived in part
online can nevertheless represent both sides of a coin: to some it is an indication of an
uncomfortable sense of fragmentation, but to others it is also reflective of complete
freedom and relief (Turkle 1996:260).

McLuhan (1989:94) wrote that “the computer moving at a speed somewhat below the
barrier of light might end thousands of years of man fragmenting himself”, but if one
looks at the argument made by Czerski, has man not become more fragmented
through being able to access any part of any culture by simply going online? The
question becomes whether the current generation of Net users has not lost a sense of
belonging through the rootlessness of the “global mélange” that is the Internet
(Nederveen Pieterse 2006:666). Lanier (2010:ix) opposes this fragmented twenty-first
century identity: “you have to find a way to be yourself before you can share yourself”.
To him, open culture on the Internet has encouraged a “pack” mentality where the
individual voice is lost (Lanier 2010:62). As McLuhan (1989:129) predicted, “everybody
will be nobody”.

It is with some degree of irony that discourse is supposed to shape the individual
identity of the web kids’ generation, since Czerski bundles all together: We, the web
kids could be any youth today with Internet access. According to Appadurai

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(2006:597), global culture is constantly in “flux” and cannot provide fixed points of
reference. Therefore, the question becomes whether in the choice of global culture as
a building block of identity does not in fact prevent today’s youth culture from
developing an original character? The intertextual possibilities of a globalised youth
culture might be erasing their possibility to break away from previous generations’
ideas. For instance, Lanier (2010:130) writes that “mainstream youth culture […] has
cloaked itself primarily in nostalgic styles”. Nicholas Carr (2010:227) echoes this
sentiment when he proposes that the Internet culture that Czerski sees as an
extension of the web kids’ reality “isn’t youth culture; it’s mainstream culture”.

Thus the exclusivity that Czerski flaunts when stating that the current generation has
grown up on the Internet, which excludes the analogue generations, is reduced
because in effect the Internet merely reflects what the majority likes. As Appadurai
(2006:596) states,

the central feature of global culture today is the politics of the

mutual effort of sameness and difference to cannibalize one
another and thereby proclaim their successful hijacking of the
twin Enlightenment ideas of the triumphantly universal and the
resiliently particular.

However, Czerski adds that through the Internet, this generation has the opportunity
to share their interests with whomever they chose, whether it is just their friends via
Facebook or anyone with Internet access via an open blog. Through the option of
choice regarding whom to share ones’ online activities with, “culture is becoming
simultaneously global and individual”(Czerski 2012:3). But Hausauer (in Carr 2010:118)
contends that although young adults share a “terrific interest in knowing what’s going
on in the lives of their peers”, this is “coupled with a terrific anxiety about being out of
the loop”. Therefore the web kids might see their constant online presence as a choice,

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when in fact it is merely the twenty-first century version of keeping up with the
Joneses14, or what Virilio (2000:16) deems a “universal voyeurism”.

A similar pattern of association merges with this argument surrounding identity and
culture. The manifesto states that “society is a network, not a hierarchy” (Czerski
2012:4) to the web kids: their view on the social structure of a society is completely
different to the respect and acceptance that previous generations showed towards
their governments. In what Appadurai (2006:585) calls a “schizophrenic” global village,
to the online “us” it becomes normal to tweet to celebrities and receive a response,
because it is no longer social status or psychological distance that matters, but rather
the “content of the message”.

However, here one has to add that the twenty-first century represents the height of
Guy Debord’s “society of the spectacle” and although the message is important, as
McLuhan (2006:108) stated, the medium becomes the message: “the ‘message’ of any
medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that is introduces into
human affairs”. Whereas previous generations did not have access to expansive
domains like the Internet, the current web kids seem to have lost a sense of direction
by having access to all, and at a great speed. As Virilio (1997:65, italics in original)
elaborates, “everything is déjà vu or at least déjà explore: been there, done that”, so
nothing is of interest anymore.

2.4 Just Google it

To Foucault, “all knowledge is determined by a combination of social, institutional and

discursive pressures, and theoretical knowledge is no exception” (Mills 2004a:30).
Czerski writes that in an Internet-age, these pressures make way for the demand for
free access to all information. The web kids “think differently” because to them all the
information they could ever need is merely a Google-search away. By growing up with
the Internet as merely another layer of their reality, the ability to use it to find
information is natural and basic. Similar to the previous argument about a society in

14
The 2012 version could be the slang term FOMO (Fear of missing out), used by the youth to convey an
anxiety about missing an event that could prove to be great (Urban Dictionary 2011).

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flux being the normal state, the web kids adapt equally to their information sources,
evaluating their credibility and swapping old information when newer discoveries have
been made (Czerski 2012:2).

However, Carr (2010: 116) discovered that numerous studies have shown that “when
we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and
distracted thinking, and superficial learning”. So although the Internet does provide an
incredibly vast source of information, we are evolving past “personal knowledge” in
order to become “hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest” (Carr 2010:138).
Although Carr can appreciate the improvements and the detriments of the Internet,
Lanier (2010:59) argues that the idea of “wisdom of the crowds” should be used as a
tool to accomplish a task, whereas instead it is glorified and demeans individual human
intelligence. As Virilio (2000:107) proposed, the Internet is both “the advance of a
limitless […] communication”, but it is also “the disaster – the meeting with the iceberg
– for this Titanic of virtual navigation”.

So although to the online youth “the Web is a sort of shared external memory”(Czerski
2012:2), the need for personal memory is removed since any information can be
accessed at any time, which fragments the need for individual knowledge. The desire is
for “information [to exist] in motion” and for it to be free, because everyone would
benefit from this global exchange of knowledge. Whereas previous generations had
relied on the exclusivity of knowledge in order to compete against others, the web kids
demand that information be accessible to all, since “the desire to be different is built
on knowledge” and the ability to find and understand specific information becomes a
marker of individuality. Poster (2006b:66) agrees with Czerski that the Internet is the
best example of what Pierre Lévy termed “collective intelligence”, since potentially
everyone could contribute to establishing the Net as “a vast cultural object”.

Jaron Lanier (2010:101) does however not approve with the idea of readily accessible,
free knowledge, since he believes “most people would embrace a social contract in
which bits have value instead of being free”. By adding value to select information, it
contrasts with the ‘I don’t need to remember it because I can just Google it’ mentality

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of the web kids. Carr (2010:143) agrees that the Internet is an enormous library of
information, but that it diminishes “the ability to know, in depth, a subject for
ourselves, to construct within our minds the rich and idiosyncratic set of connections
that give rise to a singular intelligence”.

In what Johnson (2010:21) calls ‘Zuckerberg’s Law’, it is predicted that each year we
will share twice as much information online as we did before. For Johnson (2010:21)
the consequences are that when his children reach puberty, they “will be comfortable
living in public in ways that will astound and alarm their parents”, since the old
parenting advice of not talking to strangers is ignored in an age where “strangers have
a lot to give to us that’s worthwhile, and we to them”. Johnson’s support of the
sharing of intimacies online with strangers mirrors Czerski’s assertion that to the web
kids, culture is global and everyone, regardless of age, race, social status or sex, is
equally accessible.

But although the manifesto calls for open access, it does not advocate an abusive
culture of illegal downloading. Instead, Czerski proposes that businesses should stop
defending their “obsolete ways” and present the customers with something that they
would want to pay for. This “added value” could be in the form of better quality,
instant access, innovative packaging, etc. (Czerski 2012:3).

Again, Poster (2006b: 50) agrees that “the Net is an amorphous, myriad constellation
of ever-changing locations” that opposes how information was treated by previous
media and that can be altered by anonymous users worldwide. He elaborates on the
threat of the digital by stating that digital files do not require the same amount of
money to be produced, and can be distributed easily without loss of quality (Poster
2006b:198). Poster (2006b:200) continues that “digital reproduction […] does not fall
within copyright at all because the kind of materiality of digital files is not
characterized by the economics of scarcity: […] there is nothing to pay for”. This ties in
with the web kids desire not to want to “pay for [their] memories”, arguing that old
products from their childhood should be freely accessible since in “the external

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memory network these are simply memories” and not products for sale (Czerski
2012:3).

2.5 Conclusion

Czerski (2012:4) writes that what the web generation values most is freedom:
“freedom of speech, freedom of access to information and to culture”. In order to
attain this freedom, the ideological “monuments” of past generations need to be torn
down and a transparent, proficient system put in place. But Lanier (2010:112) sees the
web kids’ desire for freedom as merely a perception, because ultimately the Internet
caters more to the interests of multinational corporations and governments that it
does to the needs of the average person. Thus, Lanier (2010:131) writes that freedom
“is moot” because it is a wasted construct that is abused and starves the commercial
media industries.

To Czerski (2012:4), democracy in its current form is a relic of a past that refuses to let
go of stability and embrace a constantly changing culture. Therefore, the web kids
demand “real, genuine democracy” not only to secure the rights of the current youth,
but also to protect the rights of future generations. Archaic state apparatuses need to
be eliminated in order for positive advancement to happen. The web kids cannot
support governments that have refused to acknowledge the rapid change and the ease
of access that the Internet has provided. As Virilio (1997:84, bold in original)
purported, “a new and final form of cybernetics, at once social and political, has
emerged in the history of society. Our democracies have every reason to fear it.”

Nonetheless, the manifesto represents an idealist, simplified and one-sided view of

how the Internet has affected society. By writing for an entire age bracket, Czerski
omits the opinions and wisdom of previous ages and fails to elaborate on real-time
concerns with valuable suggestions. As Mark Poster (2006a:537) writes, “vast
inequalities of use exist, changing the democratic structure of the Internet into an
occasion for further wrongs to the poorer populations”. Nye (in Johnson & Bimber
2004:242) contrasts that although the Internet increases cheap access to information
and could thus also simplify political participation, a “thin democracy in which

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deliberation has greatly diminished” could be more detrimental to the plight for
democratic processes worldwide.

Instead of simply demanding democracy, the manifesto should expand on its definition
of democracy. Also, it is questionable whether the Internet can be seen as a true
democracy. As Turkle (1996:244) states, “if the politics of virtuality means democracy
online and apathy offline, there is reason for concern”.

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 CHAPTER 3: CASE STUDIES
3.1 Introduction

Integral to this dissertation is the question whether Piotr Czerski’s description of the
current youth and their bond with the “reality” of the Internet has any effect on
whether they perceive their actions online to have the same consequences as
becoming engaged in the flesh. Has the Internet become the main mode of
communication, or do older mediums still matter? This chapter aims to elaborate on
this by looking at moments of social uprising over the past two years, such as ACTA,
#KONY, the London riots and the Arab Spring, and substantiating whether after the
uproar all of the happenings created online, anything in reality has improved. Is it just
“democracy online and apathy offline”, as Turkle (1996:244) wrote, or have the web
kids managed to make the Internet a true extension of reality? As Kahn and Kellner
(2005:720) argue, “while recognizing that Internet politics can serve as a ‘soft activism’
that provides an illusion of political action through typing on a computer”, it needs to
be connected to broader projects of political activism.

3.2 London burning

Figure 2: Masked man on the streets of Hackney on the third day of rioting. 2011.
Photograph by Kerim Okten. (London riots escalate police battle for control 2011).

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Schillinger (2011) explains that at a meeting concerning the role of social media during
conflict at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Alec Ross from the State Department “equated
the rise of social media to a democratization of world politics, shifting the balance of
power from nation-states to individuals and smaller institutions”. However, the
negative aspect of that shift “is the exacerbation of fragmentation by way of the social
media megaphone”.

This duality can be seen in the phenomenon of the London Riots, where on the eighth
of August 2011 uprisings broke out in London, Manchester, Birmingham and other
British cities after Mark Duggam was accidentally killed by the police. Similar to the
revolution incited by Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia when he set himself alight in
protest of his government (Andersen 2011:41), one innocent’s death caused a whole
nation to react. However, the conditions and reactions were vastly different. Whereas
Tunisians fought for their liberation after decades of dictatorship under Zine el-Abidine
Ben Ali, British youth proceeded to ransack and torch stores, buildings and vehicles
during four nights of complete mayhem (Thornburgh 2011:18). As can be seen in
Figure 2, the rioters disguised themselves as they proceeded to torch buildings and
vehicles, ransack stores and attack police officers.

During the riots, social media was also a potent force in fuelling the riots as the first
online gathering of people mourning Mark Duggan’s death took place on Facebook.
Just mere hours after the first public show of protest, people who had ‘liked’15 the
Facebook page incited the violence that would continue for four days (Halliday 2011).
However, the preferred medium for communication of the events was BlackBerry’s
BBM service, as most messages are untraceable and can easily be sent to a network of
contacts (Halliday 2011). In an effort to combat the riots, Twitter helped to pinpoint
areas of violence, organised community clean-up groups and alerted people of
alternative routes they could use, whereas BlackBerry said it was cooperating with
police (Doods & Satter 2011).

15
To ‘like’ a page on Facebook means to press the ‘like’-button in order to receive news and updates
that are posted on that particular page by members of the group and to show one’s personal affiliation
with the ideologies presented by the group.

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In We, the web kids, Piotr Czerski (2012:3) suggests that having free access to
information does not equal demanding that “all products of culture be available to us
without charge”, but that instead the current generation is “prepared to pay” for
creativity. Although in his manifesto Czerski centres around the role of the Internet as
part of reality in the lives of the web kids, his arguments can be transposed onto the
London Riots because it is the same youth, using social media to communicate.
However, this violence shows the vicious implications that the web kids’ ideology can
have: as Czerski (2012:4) writes, the current generation does not feel the same respect
(or was it fear?) for the government as their parents, they do not have the same
reverence, “rooted in the distance between the lonely citizen and the majestic heights
where the ruling class reside”. Thornburgh (2011:19) maintains that although one
Manchester police official said that the rioters had “nothing to protest”, to the
majority of British citizens it was a potent sign of “class war on the streets of Britain”.
As Czerski (2012:4) argues, the main concerns of the web kids are freedom and “real,
genuine democracy”. Nevertheless, one must doubt that the violence and lawlessness
of the London Riots, aided by the use of social media and cell phone communication,
were what Piotr Czerski had in mind when he penned his manifesto.

Lindsay Johns (2012) in turn believes that the riots across Britain did not have as much
to do with class difference and protesting the government, but was rather seen by the
youth as an opportunity to take what they wanted because they have grown up with a
“rampant, hedonistic materialism with no thought for the consequences of their
actions and no desire for hard work, the culture of meretricious, instant gratification”.
Furthermore, the addiction of the web kids to gadgets needs to be overcome as it is
“an addiction which effectively stymies the art of real conversation and the
development of genuine human communication” (Johns 2012). Echoing Lanier
(2010:49) in his fear that there is a vast human potential that is wasted by a tendency
to rely on the intelligence of machines and not of the individual, Johns (2012) states
that many young people are “functionally illiterate and unable to string a sentence
together or make themselves understood in proper English”.

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3.3 Arab Spring

Margolis and Resnick (in Johnson & Bimber 2004:242) state that despite expectations
to the contrary, the Internet “has not become the locus of a new politics that spills out
from the computer screen and revitalizes citizenship and democracy”. Instead,
cyberspace has been captured by ordinary politics in order for virtual reality to
resemble the real world (Margolis and Resnick in Johnson & Bimber 2004:242). When
looking to uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East in 2011, one must however
acknowledge the role that social media, and by implication the Internet in general, has
played in effecting change.

Socialcapital (2011) wrote that it is not enough to just be active online, but rather that
“social media must work hand-in-hand with an ability to mobilize citizens, […] the
challenge is to put boots on the street, as protesters in Tunisia, Egypt or Libya know
only too well”. However, they admit that social media aid in the rapid mobilisation of
protesters and opposing a regime’s legitimacy by being able to expose it
internationally (Socialcapital 2011).

With regards to the Arab Spring, a working paper from the University of Washington
called Opening closed regimes (2011) by Philip Howard, Aiden Duffy, Deen Freelon,
Muzammil Hussain, Will Mari and Marwa Mazaid, found that social media truly played
a role in effecting change: the researchers focused mainly on Tunisia and Egypt and
analysed “more than 3 million Tweets based on keywords used” (Howard et al 2011:2).
The study produced three key findings: social media played a central role in shaping
political debates in the Arab Spring, a spike in online revolutionary conversations often
preceded major events on the ground, and social media helped spread democratic
ideas across international borders (Howard et al 2011:2-3).

Even though the study has proven that sites like Facebook and Twitter were important
in contributing to the revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East, Malcom
Gladwell (2010) argues that people sign up online because one is not “asking too much
of them”. In comparison to previous uprisings such as during the 1960s in the United
States of America and the 1980s in East Germany, online revolutions do not expect the

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same kind of “participation” from their audience (Gladwell 2010). Gladwell (2010)
writes that previously any protests were started by “strong-tie” phenomena, where at
the centre of each protesting group there were individuals that knew each other well,
and that the group at large would become a group of friends-of-friends. By
comparison, “the kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all. The
platforms of social media are built around weak ties” where you are not required to
confront any socially entrenched norms and would still be socially acknowledged and
praised (Gladwell 2012). To Gladwell (2012) social media is practical in getting to
commit as little as possible whilst still making them feel like they are helping to change
something. And although this might be effective in protesting against Wall Street or in
getting people to buy #KONY t-shirts, in a situation where the general populace faces
off against its government it is a mass of manpower that creates a situation of change,
not the fact that #protest was the most popular hash tag on Twitter that day.

Although this might be true of a case like #KONY, which will be addressed below, one
could argue that the Arab Spring is ultimately the best combination of social activism
online and banding together human opposition to injustice and corruption in reality.
Huang (2011) writes that “nearly 9 in 10 Egyptians and Tunisians surveyed in March
said they were using Facebook to organise protests or spread awareness about them”,
but that “all but one of the protests called for on Facebook ended up coming to life on
the streets”, illustrating that although online campaigning is important in rallying
people together, it is the crowd itself that can effect change and not the social
platform that helped create an “event”.

Fareed Zakaria (2011:22) writes that the effects of the Arab Spring are unlikely to fade,
since it is driven by “two of the most powerful forces changing the world today: youth
and technology”. In the Middle East, about 60% of the population is under the age of
thirty (Figure 3), and thus represents what Czerski names “web kids”: they have grown
up with the Internet as a constant layer added onto their reality.

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 Figure 3: Percentage of population under 30. 2011.
(Ghosh 2011b:29)

The web kids also oppose the “archaic interface” of government and do not need
“monuments” of the past leading them (Czerski 2012:3,4). Instead, they rally for “a
system that will live up to our expectations” since they have learnt that “every
uncomfortable system can be replaced” by one that is better suited and provides
better opportunities (Czerski 2012:4). Zakaria (2011:22) agrees, citing a survey that
found the primary desire of the youth in nine Middle Eastern countries to be to live in
a free country (see Figure 3). Ghosh (2011b:24) concurs that all protests lead by an
Arab youth used the same modern tools like the Internet and “texting over mobile
phones”, and all had the same demands: the right to choose their own leaders and to
improve their countries.

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Although the main argument is that for online activism to have any effect in reality it
needs to “put boots on the street”(Socialcapital 2011), one needs to acknowledge the
influence of social networking sites like Facebook and mobile communications through
SMS in order to get people away from their screens and into the streets. The Arab
youth had suffered through a myriad of little humiliations by their governments, but
the web kids’ generation first started opposing it by creating blogs and chat rooms
online. When young businessman Khaled Said was brutally beaten to death by police,
the Facebook page “We are all Khaled Said” (see Figure 4) became an online platform
from which to mobilise protest in real life.

Though Ghosh (2011a:29) writes that most people who joined the “march of millions”
on February 1,2011, did so spontaneously, he also credits the ‘We are all Khaled Said’
Facebook page with having planned the demonstrations weeks in advance. This is an
example of how social media serves as a practical and efficient way to inform people
about events, but that ultimately physical action is required to effect the “real, genuine
democracy” that the web kids generation demands (Czerski 2012:4).

Figure 4: ‘We are all Khaled Said’-Facebook page. 2012.

Screenshot by the author.

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However, Zakaria (2011:24) elaborates that calling the events of the Arab Spring a
Facebook revolution would be oversimplifying a much more complex situation.
Instead, he argues that technology as a whole, and that includes television, mobile
phones and computers, has had a powerful impact because it informs, educates and
connects the population (Zakaria 2011:24). Ghosh (2011a:29) agrees that even though
pages like ‘We are all Khaled Said’ had an effect in creating a platform for exchange, it
was not merely Facebook that played an important role, but rather an amalgamation
of every medium possible: Facebook, Twitter, going door to door, passing out flyers,
random phone calls, YouTube videos and text messages urging people to “look at
what is happening in Tunisia. This is how people change their country” were all used to
mobilise the masses.

On January 27, 2011, the Egyptian government decided to block Internet access for
five days, which instead of breaking up protests caused the people to flood into the
streets. Ahmed Shahawi (in Ghosh 2011a:30) had been actively participating on
Facebook to oppose the Egyptian regime, but he states that “when you block the
Internet, you are asking people to come on the streets”, which resulted in the one
million person march on February 1, 2011. In contrast with the senseless violence
displayed by the web kids during the London Riots, Ghosh (2011a:28) describes that
the violence presented to the world via the Internet, television and traditional media
that related to the Arab Spring only erupted after pro-Mubarak16 forces “confronted
the protesters with rocks, machetes and Molotov cocktails”. Zakaria (2011:23) wrote
that “young people are not always a source of violence” and that the high number of
web kids (as can be seen in Figure 3) in the Middle East and North Africa could add to a
country’s economic strength.

Corresponding to Czerski’s (2012:4) call for democracy and freedom, Zakaria (2011:23)
maintains that if a regime wants to support the aspirations of betterment of its own
people, “openness becomes an economic and political necessity” in order to embrace
progress. As long as governments remain “monuments” to the past, they remain

16
Hosni Mubarak, president of Egypt from 1981-2011. (Encyclopaedia Britannica [sa])

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stagnant and cannot improve commercially, which poses a major obstacle to reducing
youth unemployment and providing economic growth (Zakaria 2011:23). As Ghosh
(2011b:27) argues, not only the Arab youth but the web kids in general “prefer
freedom that comes with democracy to the straitjacket of political autocracy”, again
complementing Czerski’s (2012:4) own assertion that for the current generation,
freedom lies at the heart of their demands. However, in light of recent bombings in
Egypt that killed the US ambassador Chris Stevens on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11,
Ghosh(2012:22) asks whether the Arab Spring did not effectively make the Middle East
more dangerous. The argument is that although the youth’s revolt replaced old
dictatorships, it did so with new governments that have shifting loyalties and no real
security forces. As a result, the whole region is a “more chaotic and unstable place”
(Ghosh 2012:24). This development of the Arab Spring is however outside the scope of
this study, and would warrant further investigation.

3.4 #KONY

Figure 5: Kony 2012 poster.

(Invisible Children 2012)

Invisible Children, a non-profit organisation, launched Kony 2012, a 30-minute

documentary about General Joseph Kony, a Ugandan warlord who had been
kidnapping and murdering people for more than two decades, on the fifth of March

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this year (Suddath 2012:1).Within days, the YouTube video had gone viral and the
organisations homepage crashed after millions had tried to access it. But how did one
online campaign manage to be almost instantly successful? Jason Russell, one of
Invisible Children’s co-founders, had two seemingly mismatched aims for the video: on
the one hand, it had to explain a conflict that was happening on a very different
continent to a First World audience. On the other hand, the video had to become
extremely popular for it to have any effect at all. As a result, “Russell did away with
much of Kony’s back story and focused instead on the target audience: teenagers and
twentysomethings browsing Facebook (FB) and Twitter” (Suddath 2012:1). The video
was shortened, some dubstep music was added as a score and “he added some feel-
good philosophy about the interconnectedness of society” (Suddath 2012:1).
According to Claire Suddath (2012:1), Russell also cast his young son because one of
the organisation’s directors stated that “if you want to get something watched online,
you either have to put funny cats in it or little kids.”

The method worked, as within a week over 100 million people had viewed the video,
with a Pew Research Centre poll finding that within ten days of the film’s release 52 %
of US adults had at least heard of Kony 2012, and almost a quarter of those aged 18 to
29 had actually watched it (Suddath 2012:1). As Suddath (2012:1) describes, “it was
viewed by more people in a shorter amount of time than any other video in the history
of the Internet”. Although Invisible Children were active online before the Kony 2012
campaign, it is the video and the resulting #KONY Twitter feeds that pushed their
following to almost four million (Suddath 2012:3). Their main target audience are
Czerski’s web kids, young people who have grown up with the Internet and are used to
its short bursts of information. Richard Honack (in Suddath 2012:3) explains that these
millennials also donate their money differently: whereas previous generations like
giving to organisations that are familiar to them, the web kids “donate money without
even thinking about where it’s going” to organisations like Invisible Children who have
cause some sudden buzz because they simply “assume they’re doing something good”.
Therefore, Carr’s (2010:94) argument that although the Internet is an incredible source

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of information, it also significantly lessens our attention span becomes valid as to the
Net generation; it is the marketing that draws them in, not necessarily the cause itself.

Fischer (2012:7) wrote that the campaign’s actions would conclude with ‘Cover the
Night’, a campaign launched one month after the release of Kony 2012 where their
audience would simultaneously do something good for their communities, like
cleaning up, and put up #KONY posters all over the world in a last attempt to raise
awareness. However, the event was a failure since not many online supporters wanted
to get their hands dirty in reality. As Suddath (2012:3) writes, “the event—or rather
the lack of one—has been held up as a prime example of social media’s limits,
evidence that the ties of online relationships are too weak to inspire real change”.

Suddath (2012:4) states that the only way to measure the success of the movement is
whether or not Joseph Kony is actually apprehended. However, the Invisible Children’s
overall campaign did cause a great amount of awareness and through the donations
they have received have been able to create scholarships for victims of the Lord’s
Resistance Army17 (LRA) and President Obama signed the Lord’s Resistance Army
Disarmament and North Uganda Recovery Act, where he allocated $45 million and
deployed 100 military advisers to the region. As Kahn and Kellner (2006:706) write,
“Internet politics [is] not just a matter of circulating discourse in a self-contained
cybersphere but a force that [can] intervene in the political battles of the
contemporary era of media culture”.

However, Welch (2012) argues that “the ripple effect of a campaign such as Kony 2012
stops once you switch off your router, and once again we are left with a void in our
international consciousness until the next overdue guilt trip”. Echoing what Honack
wrote about the web kids’ donating habits, it seems that they believe clicking the share
button is enough to effect change when in reality one needs a larger organisation to
bring together a project of political activism.

17
“The L.R.A., led by self-appointed prophet Kony, snuck into towns at night and abducted people,
including children, often forcing them to kill their families to ensure they’d have no home to return to.
Young girls were taken as “brides” for L.R.A. officers. Kony is believed to have kidnapped more than
66,000 people” (Suddath 2012:2).

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Keating (2012) adds that the campaign did not reflect the truth of the matter, since
firstly “Joseph Kony is not in Uganda and hasn't been for 6 years” and secondly “the
LRA now numbers at most in the hundreds, and while it is still causing immense
suffering, it is unclear how millions of well-meaning but misinformed people are going
to help deal with the more complicated reality”.

Peter Bradshaw (in Curtis & McCarthy 2012) additionally mentions that the way the
film was shot “could be seen as insufferably condescending, a way of making US
college kids feel good about themselves” because in reality, one needs to “admit that
effective action entails an old-fashioned boots-on-soil invasion of a landlocked African
country, with all the collateral damage that this implies”. Social campaigning cannot be
as easy as pressing the ‘like’ button on Facebook or re-tweeting something with a hash
tag (#) in front of it.

Fischer (2012:7) has termed this type of engagement as ‘slacktivism’, where the person
participating feels as though they are significantly contributing to a meaningful cause
like #KONY without really taking any action. Invisible Children had raised awareness
before the Kony 2012 went viral: after returning from their trip to central Africa, the
main members were engaged in campaigns at universities to engage students in their
cause. As Perry (2012:26) elaborates, “by 2008, the campaign had made the LRA and
Kony the No. 1 foreign issue for American students, on par with the anti-apartheid
campaign for an earlier generation”.

Although there had been many positive responses and the new awareness had helped
in aiding some of Kony’s victims when the video went viral, the web kids’ tendency for
slacktivism becomes evident when regarding the visual material that appeared on
mock-Facebook sites Lamebook and 9gag. Invisible Children’s main poster (see Figure
5) shows the symbols of the Democratic and the Republican parties of American
politics, namely the donkey and the elephant, merging to form a white dove, signifying
peace and hope. In a year of new presidential elections, the tagline “one thing we can
all agree on” plays on the friction between the political parties and separates the Kony
issue as being more important than current politics because spreading democracy and
peace is supposedly what the USA stands for.

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 Figure 6: Mocking the Kony 2012-poster,
2012.
(Lamebook.com 2012)

The poster’s colour palette is furthermore kept similar to that of the American flag,
with red and blue dominating and the white dove standing out in the middle of the
image. The wording of “KONY” is done in stark black to contrast with the white dove in
the centre and to draw the eye to the posters. In Figure 6, this is mocked when
someone reposts the official Kony 2012 poster, but adds in a status update “Who’s this
guy Kony and why should I vote for him? I can’t even tell if he’s a democrat or
Republican from the poster…”.

Figure 7: Condescending Wonka on

sharing the Kony video, 2012.
(Justin 2012).

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 Figure 7 features an image of Condescending Wonka18 who asks the
question “Oh you shared the Kony video?” and sarcastically answers
“You must be quite the activist”, also mocking the slacktivist illusion
of being able to change something by merely clicking a button. The
same contemptuous tone is applied to an image on 9gag entitled The
Truth of the Like Button (Figure 8) which illustrates how pressing
Facebook’s ‘Like’-button will automatically bring water to children in
Africa, and ends with a “are you fucking kidding me” face 19(All the
rage faces [sa]). Even though Figure 8 does not connect directly to
#KONY, it does illustrate the same misconception that merely
reposting something on Facebook will have any real effect.

Figure 8: The Truth of the Like Button, 2012.

(skdmc89:2012)

Czerski (2012:3,4) states that to the web kids, society is a network

where “culture is becoming simultaneously global and individual”. In
light of the #KONY online activism, Michael Poffenberger (in Perry
2012:26), the CEO of Resolve20, stated that the way in which people
got involved in the campaign was unprecedented, and that it was
amazing how “it’s a social movement of mostly young people

18
Condescending Wonka is a meme of actor Gene Wilder from the 1971 musical Willy Wonka and the
Chocolate Factory. As its name suggests, the captions can be characterised as patronizing and sarcastic.
A meme is a concept (in the form of an image, a tag (#), a video, a hyperlink, etc.) that spreads rapidly
via the Internet.
19
Rage Comics are series of web comics with characters, sometimes referred to as “rage faces”, that are
often created with simple drawing software such as MS Paint. The comics are typically used to tell
stories about real life experiences, and end with a humorous punchline. (Rage Comics 2012)
20
Resolve is a non-profit advocacy organization opposing the LRA and serves as the rallying point for
political action to stop these crimes against humanity. (About [sa])

Page | 33
attempting to address a moral issue halfway around the world which had little or no
ramifications for them”. If one considers Czerski’s (2012:2) resolution that the current
generation embraces “global culture as a fundamental building block of [their]
identity”, it is only natural for them to want to participate in a campaign that might
help thousands.

However, if one considers the Internet memes (Figures 5-7) explored previously, one
must admit that there is a distinct split between a rather naïve type of web kid who
believes in the democratic potential of the Internet to transcend into reality, and a
very sarcastic type of web kid who has grown up in a world used to being disappointed
by previous generations and refuses to believe that Internet activism can in fact effect
any positive response.

Nevertheless, the increasing impact of a noosphere-mentality in real life cannot be

ignored. For instance, Iceland is drafting a crowdsourced constitution after recent
banking crises and citizen protests by looking at feedback from users on Facebook,
Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr to shape it (Valinsky 2012). Although this can be seen as
merely an extension of what Czerski (2012:1) calls “the natural Internet aspect to every
experience that has shaped us”, Meyer (2012a) argues that it is the convenience of the
Internet, and it’s “low barriers”, that gave two-thirds of Icelanders the opportunity to
vote for a crowd-sourced new constitution. It must be noted however that ultimately it
is still an elected representative that has to approve any crowdsourced laws, but
through the Internet “the proposals are public and open and impossible to ignore”,
which reinforces the democratic potential of the noosphere (Meyer 2012a).

3.5 Conclusion

By comparing the arguments made by Czerski in his online manifesto We, the web kids
(2012) to the role played by social media in recent political events, this chapter has
looked at whether the description of the web kids by Czerski is an accurate portrayal
when compared to their actions in reality. Although the lawlessness of the youth at the
London Riots is not fuelled by the same need for immediate political change as was the
Arab Spring, both have provided valuable case studies in order to make Czerski’s words

Page | 34
more applicable in reality. Most notable as case study in this chapter has however
been the Kony 2012 campaign by the non-profit Invisible Children, as they purposefully
targeted a young audience through social media like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube in
order to get the world to pay attention to an otherwise unknown Ugandan war
criminal. The various case studies have established that although the web kids do see
the Internet as merely another layer to their reality, in order for the activism which
they commit to online to become effective in real life, they need to move beyond the
comfort of their screens. Czerski’s main argument is that this generation demands true
democracy, but the case studies have shown that a combination between using social
media as an organisational platform and then coming together in reality proves most
effective when wanting to change a society drastically.

Page | 35
 CHAPTER 4: CONCLUSION
4.1 Chapter summary

The first chapter of this essay explores the necessary background and the aims of the study
in relation to the primary text, Piotr Czerski’s We, the web kids (2012). It also contains a
literature review in order to define what discourse is since the discursive formation of the
text is the main point of analysis. Other relevant works by Nicholas Carr, Jaron Lanier, Sherry
Turkle, and others are introduced. The theoretical and methodological frameworks, relating
to the context from which the main text is analysed and the influence of Foucauldian
Discourse Analysis, is explored before a chapter overview is given.

The bulk of the next chapter is formed by discursively analysing the main arguments Czerski
makes and relating them to other thinkers. Although one would think that Jaron Lanier, who
is known as the “father of virtual reality technology” (Lanier 2010, back cover), would
embrace Czerski’s arguments that the Internet is the only true democracy by being the
shared external memory of all who use it. However, Lanier (2012:17) is the main opposition
to what he deems a “groupthink problem”. In turn, Nicholas Carr weights the positive and
negative aspects of our increasing interaction with the Internet, whereas a host of other
theoreticians are used to elaborate on themes of a digital generation, open access, the
globalisation of culture, and the quest for true freedom and democracy.

Chapter Three relates the findings of the discursive analysis of the previous chapter to
various recent examples and uses them as case studies to elaborate on Czerski’s notions of
what constitutes a web kid, and how the new generation uses the Internet to demand
democracy. The use of BlackBerry’s BBM messenger and Facebook is looked at in the London
Riots, whereas the role of social media in general is analysed in relation to the Arab Spring in
North Africa and the Middle East, and to the #KONY phenomenon at the beginning of 2012
by the non-profit Invisible Children.

Lastly, this chapter provides a short chapter summary and looks at the contributions if this
particular study. Furthermore, the limitations provided by using only one method of analysis
and choosing an online manifesto as key text are explored and suggestions for further
research are made.

Page | 36
4.2 Contribution of study

Although We, the web kids has become a well-known online manifesto and has been
translated into numerous languages, it is mainly the generation of young adults described in
the text that has read it. For the older, analogue generation an open-source manifesto by an
unknown Polish journalist is of no real interest. Therefore, the contribution of this essay is a
critical discursive analysis of the arguments made by Czerski. By relating them to other
thinkers of the time, the manifesto becomes more than a simple text accessible to all on
some strange looking website.

Whereas previous generations, like the baby-boomers and the Generation Xers, were clearly
defined in set categories, the current set of web kids has not yet found a specific
classification. We live in a post-post-modern era where nothing fits as easily into previously
established categories. This essay has not only looked at how the current generation of
young adults sees itself, but also at the increasing influence of the Internet as merely a
“metamorphosis of reality” (Czerski 2012:1). Through the various case studies in Chapter
Three, Czerski’s manifesto has been related to real-life events which all had an Internet-
factor and which were all started by a youth in discontent with current societal structures.
Also, it has been found that online protest on its own is not enough to be an instigator of
change, but that rather a combination of social and other media, and meetings in real life,
are best for a successful campaign.

4.3 Limitations of study

Since the only method of analysis used in this essay is Discourse Analysis, there are many
aspects of Czerski’s manifesto We, the web kids (2012) that could still be explored from
different angles. Furthermore, the second Chapter focussed on using a very limited amount
of theorists because a consideration of other thinkers like Jean Baudrillard or Ray Kurzweil
would have led the study in a different direction and distracted from the central question of
the Internet’s influence in the web kids’ lives as merely an additional truth and cultural
clashes in reality.

Also, reviewing the manifesto from a Visual Culture Studies perspective does impose some
limitations although it is an interdisciplinary field. At the centre of Visual Culture Studies
remains that which can be seen, and although the Internet is made visible on computer

Page | 37
screens and iPads (and any other device that supports Internet access), it is not in itself a
tangible image. Therefore, the manifesto had to be related to case studies that not only had
a high social-media/Internet factor, but that also made use of images to relay their message.
If the manifesto were to be analysed from a different field, such as Political Sciences or
Economics, it would lead to very different conclusions.

Another restriction of the study is created by placing only a singular manifesto at its centre.
Instead, Czerski’s notions could also be used in a series of comparisons between recent
manifestos about current culture, like David Shield’s Reality Hunger (2011) or John Palfrey
and Urs Gasser’s work Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital
Natives(2010). Older works such as Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (1929-1935), or
recent feats of indignation by an older generation seeing the changes, such as Stephane
Hessel’s Time for outrage (2010), could further be considered.

This essay is limited in its exploration of case studies as well, as it focuses on the London
Riots, the Arab Spring and #KONY. Instead, one of the case studies could have been explored
on its own in more depth, or various other recent social events, like student protests in
Greece or the Occupy Wall Street movement, could have been included.

4.4 Suggestions for further research

As stated previously, the manifesto We, the web kids was analysed solely from a Discourse
Analysis perspective. Since it does propagate open access and providing information for free
through the Internet, a Marxist analysis of the manifesto could form the basis of a different
study because it could also relate the findings to other case studies. The manifesto itself
could also be looked at from a different field, such as political sciences, where the
implications of globalisation for the web kids could be explored, or from an economic point
of view the consequences of all information being openly accessible to anyone could be
investigated.

It would be interesting to relate both the case studies and the manifesto to an increase in
political involvement by the general population in Europe. Finland and Iceland have already
partially approved crowdsourced constitutions through so-called ‘Open Ministries’, although
they still need to be voted on by elected representatives (Meyer 2012b). In Germany, the
Pirate Party has gained many followers in a short time span. Kron (2012:1) argues that it is
Page | 38
similar to the Communist Party because it is the result of “an emerging economic and social
era driven by a new technology, and that it advocates for people's rights in, and postulates
new rules of engagement for, how to live in this new era of new advances”.

Another consideration could be to focus solely on the effect of online-campaigning, either by

looking at political campaigns in the USA or by examining whether any of the online petitions
by Avaaz.com had an effect. If one is not interested in either politics or global social activism
through the Internet, one could also look at projects created through crowd-funding on
Kickstarter or Indiegogo, which are both online platforms for creative projects to be funded
by a large group of people.

For further research, one could either ignore the case studies or the manifesto and thereby
branch off into new explorations of topics, but in order to relate the web-manifesto to Visual
Culture Studies in particular, one will have to elaborate with images taken from other events
that relied on visuals to transmit their message, or from artists that explore the reality of the
Internet in their work. A final suggestion could be to examine the impact of various
technologies on the art and writing produced during the time the advancements were made.
This could in turn be related back to arguments made by Nicholas Carr in The Shallows
(2010) where the studies the impact of technologies on the brain development of man. It
could further be questioned whether technical advancement benefits all societies equally, or
whether it creates an even larger gap between the First World and the Third World.

Page | 39
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 APPENDICES

APPENDIX 1:
Piotr Czerski
We, the Web Kids.
(translated by Marta Szreder)

There is probably no other word that would be as overused in the media discourse as
‘generation’. I once tried to count the ‘generations’ that have been proclaimed in the past ten
years, since the well-known article about the so-called ‘Generation Nothing’; I believe there
were as many as twelve. They all had one thing in common: they only existed on paper. Reality
never provided us with a single tangible, meaningful, unforgettable impulse, the common
experience of which would forever distinguish us from the previous generations. We had been
looking for it, but instead the groundbreaking change came unnoticed, along with cable TV,
mobile phones, and, most of all, Internet access. It is only today that we can fully comprehend
how much has changed during the past fifteen years.

We, the Web kids; we, who have grown up with the Internet and on the Internet, are a
generation who meet the criteria for the term in a somewhat subversive way. We did not
experience an impulse from reality, but rather a metamorphosis of the reality itself. What unites
us is not a common, limited cultural context, but the belief that the context is self-defined and
an effect of free choice.

Writing this, I am aware that I am abusing the pronoun ‘we’, as our ‘we’ is fluctuating,
discontinuous, blurred, according to old categories: temporary. When I say ‘we’, it means ‘many
of us’ or ‘some of us’. When I say ‘we are’, it means ‘we often are’. I say ‘we’ only so as to be
able to talk about us at all.

1.
We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes us different; this is what
makes the crucial, although surprising from your point of view, difference: we do not ‘surf’ and
the internet to us is not a ‘place’ or ‘virtual space’. The Internet to us is not something external
to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly present layer intertwined with the physical
environment. We do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet and along it. If we were to tell
our bildnungsroman to you, the analog, we could say there was a natural Internet aspect to
every single experience that has shaped us. We made friends and enemies online, we prepared
cribs for tests online, we planned parties and studying sessions online, we fell in love and broke
up online. The Web to us is not a technology which we had to learn and which we managed to
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get a grip of. The Web is a process, happening continuously and continuously transforming
before our eyes; with us and through us. Technologies appear and then dissolve in the
peripheries, websites are built, they bloom and then pass away, but the Web continues, because
we are the Web; we, communicating with one another in a way that comes naturally to us, more
intense and more efficient than ever before in the history of mankind.

Brought up on the Web we think differently. The ability to find information is to us something as
basic, as the ability to find a railway station or a post office in an unknown city is to you. When
we want to know something - the first symptoms of chickenpox, the reasons behind the sinking
of ‘Estonia’, or whether the water bill is not suspiciously high - we take measures with the
certainty of a driver in a SatNav-equipped car. 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. We have learned to accept that instead of one answer we find many
different ones, and out of these we can abstract the most likely version, disregarding the ones
which do not seem credible. We select, we filter, we remember, and we are ready to swap the
learned information for a new, better one, when it comes along.

To us, the Web is a sort of shared external memory. We do not have to remember unnecessary
details: dates, sums, formulas, clauses, street names, detailed definitions. It is enough for us to
have an abstract, the essence that is needed to process the information and relate it to others.
Should we need the details, we can look them up within seconds. Similarly, we do not have to be
experts in everything, because we know where to find people who specialise in what we
ourselves do not know, and whom we can trust. People who will share their expertise with us
not for profit, but because of our shared belief that information exists in motion, that it wants to
be free, that we all benefit from the exchange of information. Every day: studying, working,
solving everyday issues, pursuing interests. We know how to compete and we like to do it, but
our competition, our desire to be different, is built on knowledge, on the ability to interpret and
process information, and not on monopolising it.

2.

Participating in cultural life is not something out of ordinary to us: global culture is the
fundamental building block of our identity, more important for defining ourselves than
traditions, historical narratives, social status, ancestry, or even the language that we use. From
the ocean of cultural events we pick the ones that suit us the most; we interact with them, we
review them, we save our reviews on websites created for that purpose, which also give us
suggestions of other albums, films or games that we might like. Some films, series or videos we
watch together with colleagues or with friends from around the world; our appreciation of some
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is only shared by a small group of people that perhaps we will never meet face to face. This is
why we feel that culture is becoming simultaneously global and individual. This is why we need
free access to it.

This does not mean that we demand that all products of culture be available to us without
charge, although when we create something, we usually just give it back for circulation. We
understand that, despite the increasing accessibility of technologies which make the quality of
movie or sound files so far reserved for professionals available to everyone, creativity requires
effort and investment. We are prepared to pay, but the giant commission that distributors ask
for seems to us to be obviously overestimated. Why should we pay for the distribution of
information that can be easily and perfectly copied without any loss of the original quality? If we
are only getting the information alone, we want the price to be proportional to it. We are willing
to pay more, but then we expect to receive some added value: an interesting packaging, a
gadget, a higher quality, the option of watching here and now, without waiting for the file to
download. We are capable of showing appreciation and we do want to reward the artist (since
money stopped being paper notes and became a string of numbers on the screen, paying has
become a somewhat symbolic act of exchange that is supposed to benefit both parties), but the
sales goals of corporations are of no interest to us whatsoever. It is not our fault that their
business has ceased to make sense in its traditional form, and that instead of accepting the
challenge and trying to reach us with something more than we can get for free they have
decided to defend their obsolete ways.

One more thing: we do not want to pay for our memories. The films that remind us of our
childhood, the music that accompanied us ten years ago: in the external memory network these
are simply memories. Remembering them, exchanging them, and developing them is to us
something as natural as the memory of ‘Casablanca’ is to you. 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 the
Little Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks. Can you imagine that someone could accuse you of
breaking the law in this way? We cannot, either.

3.

We are used to our bills being paid automatically, as long as our account balance allows for it;
we know that starting a bank account or changing the mobile network is just the question of
filling in a single form online and signing an agreement delivered by a courier; that even a trip to
the other side of Europe with a short sightseeing of another city on the way can be organised in
two hours. Consequently, being the users of the state, we are increasingly annoyed by its archaic
interface. We do not understand why tax act takes several forms to complete, the main of which
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has more than a hundred questions. We do not understand why we are required to formally
confirm moving out of one permanent address to move in to another, as if councils could not
communicate with each other without our intervention (not to mention that the necessity to
have a permanent address is itself absurd enough.)

There is not a trace in us of that humble acceptance displayed by our parents, who were
convinced that administrative issues were of utmost importance and who considered interaction
with the state as something to be celebrated. We do not feel that respect, rooted in the distance
between the lonely citizen and the majestic heights where the ruling class reside, barely visible
through the clouds. Our view of the social structure is different from yours: society is a network,
not a hierarchy. We are used to being able to start a dialogue with anyone, be it a professor or a
pop star, and we do not need any special qualifications related to social status. The success of
the interaction depends solely on whether the content of our message will be regarded as
important and worthy of reply. And if, thanks to cooperation, continuous dispute, defending our
arguments against critique, we have a feeling that our opinions on many matters are simply
better, why would we not expect a serious dialogue with the government?

We do not feel a religious respect for ‘institutions of democracy’ in their current form, we do not
believe in their axiomatic role, as do those who see ‘institutions of democracy’ as a monument
for and by themselves. We do not need monuments. We need a system that will live up to our
expectations, a system that is transparent and proficient. And we have learned that change is
possible: that every uncomfortable system can be replaced and is replaced by a new one, one
that is more efficient, better suited to our needs, giving more opportunities.

What we value the most is freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of access to information and
to culture. We feel that it is thanks to freedom that the Web is what it is, and that it is our duty
to protect that freedom. We owe that to next generations, just as much as we owe to protect
the environment.

Perhaps we have not yet given it a name, perhaps we are not yet fully aware of it, but I guess
what we want is real, genuine democracy. Democracy that, perhaps, is more than is dreamt of in
your journalism.

"My, dzieci sieci" by Piotr Czerski is licensed under a Creative Commons Uznanie autorstwa-Na
tych samych warunkach 3.0 Unported License:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Contact the author: piotr[at]czerski.art.pl

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