FRI., MAY 23, 2008
eMusic Q&A: Cory Doctorow, Pt. 2
by Sarah Weinman
Why target this book to a YA audience instead of an adult one? Is it a case of wanting the message to get through to teens first and then propagating to older audience, not unlike what Marcus and his friends are doing in the book? And did you make a point of talking with current teenagers to get a sense of their reaction and use of technology?
When I was a teenager, the computer gave me access to technologies that were new and precious and allowed me to meet people in networks and groups that were completely off-limits to me without the Internet. If not for the Internet…today, if I were 17, I would have radically different view of technology. Now the average 17 year old views technology as a way to control, spy or snitch on you.
Little Brother is, I suppose, more of an extrapolation. If I was 17 and 10 times more the geek than I am, how I would have coped with technology as it stands now? Of course I have friends who write young adult novels, and I read a lot of YA lit, but I didn't really have to study young people closely or in any organized way. We're all people, and we were all teens once.
In its review of the book, Strange Horizons really gets at what I think is the take home message: "However intense the surveillance, there is nothing that adults can come up with that better technologically acclimatized children and teens cannot evade."
I hope Farah [Mendelsohn, the Strange Horizons reviewer] is right — it was certainly part of the subtext of the book for a couple of reasons: first, technology gives the advantage to attacker rather than the effecter. Those who invent a system or earthworks need to make things perfect. Those who want to break it just need to find one breach. Guess who's going to win more often? Children tend to be a little more skilled, not to mention they are in possession of a large amount of free time. The general way security for kids works — [things like] filtering or child-tracking — reassures parents, but don't actually succeed. So then kids have every motivation to spend as much time as they can muster to defeat the security bounds placed upon them. I used to write for Information Week, which is a very stodgy magazine, not the kind of things kids read. One day my editor was going through comments in a blog post and discovered several exchanges written by two twelve year old girls, things like "who is a skank," or "I don't like her" — which had nothing to do with the blog post. So he asked them what they were doing here and their reply was that "everything is blocked. MySpace is blocked so we use your site because no one blocked it." There's so much time and energy spent on evading blocks and no economic incentive to create real control for kids.
To read more of Sarah Weinman's interview with Cory Doctorow, including the reason why Doctorow including two afterwords in Little Brother, click here.
When I was a teenager, the computer gave me access to technologies that were new and precious and allowed me to meet people in networks and groups that were completely off-limits to me without the Internet. If not for the Internet…today, if I were 17, I would have radically different view of technology. Now the average 17 year old views technology as a way to control, spy or snitch on you.
Little Brother is, I suppose, more of an extrapolation. If I was 17 and 10 times more the geek than I am, how I would have coped with technology as it stands now? Of course I have friends who write young adult novels, and I read a lot of YA lit, but I didn't really have to study young people closely or in any organized way. We're all people, and we were all teens once.
In its review of the book, Strange Horizons really gets at what I think is the take home message: "However intense the surveillance, there is nothing that adults can come up with that better technologically acclimatized children and teens cannot evade."
I hope Farah [Mendelsohn, the Strange Horizons reviewer] is right — it was certainly part of the subtext of the book for a couple of reasons: first, technology gives the advantage to attacker rather than the effecter. Those who invent a system or earthworks need to make things perfect. Those who want to break it just need to find one breach. Guess who's going to win more often? Children tend to be a little more skilled, not to mention they are in possession of a large amount of free time. The general way security for kids works — [things like] filtering or child-tracking — reassures parents, but don't actually succeed. So then kids have every motivation to spend as much time as they can muster to defeat the security bounds placed upon them. I used to write for Information Week, which is a very stodgy magazine, not the kind of things kids read. One day my editor was going through comments in a blog post and discovered several exchanges written by two twelve year old girls, things like "who is a skank," or "I don't like her" — which had nothing to do with the blog post. So he asked them what they were doing here and their reply was that "everything is blocked. MySpace is blocked so we use your site because no one blocked it." There's so much time and energy spent on evading blocks and no economic incentive to create real control for kids.
© 1992 - 2009 All Media Guide, LLC