Hi all,
I’m taking a break from end-of-year packing to introduce myself, and this blog, to you. Mine is a big packing job, since I’m heading back to the US of A after 9 months as a Visiting Student in this watery isle and spire-y university. The year’s been incredible, and I leave with rich impressions of England and the English, most of which I’ve published in my opinions column at the Brown Daily Herald. If you’re interested, check out my musings.
I’ve been writing for the Herald since 2004, on politics, culture and how our generation (Y, if you were born between 1980 and 2000), experiences the world. Oftentimes, defining Gen Y culture has a lot to do with the technology and trends (iPods, e-books, wikipedia, facebook and blogs like this one) for which we 20-somethings are the guinea-pigs.
If there’s one place that the Internet has made its biggest impact, it’s in schools and universities—can you imagine writing an essay without Google or JStor? I can’t. And if you believe social theorists like David Brooks, who say that the biggest culture wars occur over education, that people are defined by educational experience, then changes in our world, in the lives of 20-something students, are the harbingers of changes in the world at large.
The second front in the Internet culture war is the world of journalism. As a Herald columnist, a blogger here and elsewhere and a news reporter for Cherwell and Cherwell24, I’ve watched news media slowly adjust to the Internet Age. Mainstream print papers are diving into the blogosphere; blogs are turning into big business. As the place we turn for the truth about our world, changing news media means big changes in our social worldview. Once again, as the first group to grow up with GoogleNews, LexisNexis, RSS feeds and CNN Pipeline, we, generation Y, are the test case.
Here at Instant Cappuccino, I’ll post news stories and videos about our changing world. I’ll post my thoughts on technology, politics and popular culture. As a forum for students, Cappuccino will focus on issues in education and the spread of information. As a blog, Cappuccino will be part of the transformation.
Of course, what makes our culture of Wikipedia and YouTube different from the first Internet revolution of Yahoo and Netscape, is that interaction is overtaking information as the premium capital.
So please, post your own thoughts. Tell me when (and this happens often) I am wrong about what’s trendy. Link to Cappuccino on your own blogs, and tell me what other sites I should be following. With your participation, over a cup of virtual coffee, we can make sense of the new world we live in, and predictions for the world to come.
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