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Unlike any previous information conduits, Open Media are conceived, developed and dominated by the young, especially college kids with access to high-speed bandwidth and teenagers with lots of time and expertise. Change or die time. Third in a series.

This youth domination has been true of no other mass medium -- adolescents and post-adolescents shaping an information structure they know more about than almost any sub-set of adults.

A first-rate piece in Brill's Content 's August issue, by writer Austin Bunn, reports on a soon-to-be-released HomeNet study, scheduled for publication this winter in the journal Human Computer Interaction. It documents in society-at-large what's been clear for some time on the most vibrant Open Media websites -- online, the young are shaping information culture. They are the gurus, visionaries, technicians, repairpersons and authorities on the Information Revolution. There are plenty of older Net visionaries and users as well, but they don't dominate open media in the way the middle-aged have always dominated information before.

While politicians and journalists have been clucking about sex, isolation and the decline of Western civilization, younger people -- teens through 30s especially -- have been acquiring and mastering computing technology. So-called "games," messaging systems, and free music and software-sharing sites have served as their universities and career ladders, indoctrinating a generation into the most sophisticated and powerful information systems ever seen. The spread of broadband online access to universities and private homes has been a huge spur, driving younger people online, providing the opportunity to learn and experiment once they got there. Napster is one well-known example. So are ICQ, Gnutella and C-Net, and this site. Lesser-known and more specialized OM sites include chickclickers.com and myvideogames.com, or the pioneeer weblog www.camworld.com.

This adolescent and post-adolescent technical expertise, writes Bunn, has translated into a broader cultural savvy, upending the traditional power balance, inspiring college students to found their own companies, reducing parents, journalists, teachers, CEO's, teachers and other adult authority figures to bystanders. For generations, Dad was the household figure who knew how things worked. Now he and Mom have to ask their kids. For even longer, media was run by aging and imperious white men who decided what was news and what wasn't. Today, these media movers and shakers are desperate, scrambling to find anybody who can tell them what's going on. Usually, the person they're asking is under 30.

These Open Media sites -- weblogs, webpages, messaging systems, software -- sharing and research communities -- are increasingly founded by the young, a trend with mind-boggling implications. These kids have grown up with the Internet; they know intuitively how to use technology. And they have radically different cultural, political, technological and social sensibilities.

According to a May study by the Pew Center for Media Research, roughly half of American families now have Internet access. There are also more Americans turning 18 now than ever before, points out William Strauss, author of "Millenials Rising: The Next Generation." The approximately 78 million Americans aged 21 and younger account for 28 per cent of the population. What TV was to the Boomers, computers are to their children. This evolutionary demographic is behind much of the rise in Open Media.

Whatever their commonality as members of the Open Media, the differences in these emerging sites are striking. Open Media embraces interactivity -- they reflect ideas, commentary and information from a wide range of sources, especially their readers. They don't merely provide the occasional link to other sites on the Web, as traditional sites. Rather, they use the Net infrastructure to make links an organic part of their content. They aggressively ask their readers to help set editorial agendas. Each reader becomes a highly-wired reporter, foraging on his or her own favorite sites, seeking particular kinds of information.

Using mostly digital transmissions, stories get spotted, suggested and linked to by readers. Readers also have access to the editorial figures on the website. Through story input, moderation or discussion forums they have a say in how the site operates.

Rather than divide a site into pay-versus-free areas, revenue comes from advertising, the sale of specialized merchandise, or other sources. But the information itself is almost always free, moving continuously through the site like a river. These young new media entrepeneurs embrace popular culture as strongly as technology. They gather almost continuously to discuss movies, TV shows, certain magazines and books.

Diversity is rarely as big an issue as it is for their parents. Possibly because of the anonymity possible online, or perhaps because of natural social evolution, differences in race, religion and sexual orientation rarely come up. They are comfortable talking about sex. They've experienced almost total freedom of expression online, much more than older Americans have. If this trend continues, this generation may free itself --- and its editorial agenda -- from many of the issues that dominated their parents' lives of their parents.

They are almost totally disconnected from the mainstream political and media system -- the network newscasts, major newspapers, TV talk shows and political events that dominate conventional, closed media. Such subjects rarely surface on Open Media sites. Yet despite the inherently democratic nature of their media creations, their lack of interest in the larger political structure is already posing problems and challenges.

Young Netizens seem flabbergasted when the adult value system collides with and changes their world -- in arguments over copyright and Napster or the passage of laws like the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. They don't seem to grasp that their lack of political acumen and organizing skills not only make such legislation possible but increasingly inevitable in encounters with a legal and political system dominated by those older and non-technologically-centered.

Understandably, the architects of this new media are arrogant. At the epicenter of one of the most revolutionary technological advances ever, they know much more about it than parents, teachers, journalists or politicians. They discovered early on that many of the people who lecture about them and their culture are clueless, and they learned to ignore moral posturing and hectoring. As a result, they'll form their own moral code in their own good time, apart from conventional social, religious and cultural values. As yet, no single value system has emerged beyond some libertarian notions about government and freedom.

They are free-marketeers and democrats. They are comfortable making money, unabashed about taking entrepeneurial risks (the Brill's Content article focuses on 13-year-old Ilya Anopolsky, founder of the Web-design firm Devotion, Inc., as well as Michael Furdyk, 18-year-old founder and business development manager of BuyBuddy.com.

Although today's Net-connected youth are denounced for being technology-addicted or socially isolated, the truth is they use the Net and the Web to communicate with one another, not to disconnect. For them, the Net is a social as well as a technological medium. They gather in chat rooms, on mailing lists and messaging systems and form enduring relationships that frequently last for years.

This generation of media engineers celebrates the accessibility of traditionally out-of-reach information. They have literally grown up downloading music, text, and almost every other conceivable form of intellectual property. Branded "pirates" by corporatists and politicians, they grasp what much of American society hasn't yet comprehended -- they posess the technological skills to gather all the information they want, and no authority has yet amassed an equivalent amount of expertise to slow them down or stop them.

Spasemunki writes: "This link showed up on Ars Technica the other day. It's an article on Brill's Content on the sociological impact of a society where the younger generation has all the technical know-how, and parents are left to seek the advice of their kids on how to keep things running. It discusses patterns in computer use and knowledge, and the rising economic and social power of the young and computer saavy. Includes some words from Shawn Fanning of Napster fame."

Spasemunki writes: "This link showed up on Ars Technica the other day. It's an article on Brill's Content on the sociological impact of a society where the younger generation has all the technical know-how, and parents are left to seek the advice of their kids on how to keep things running. It discusses patterns in computer use and knowledge, and the rising economic and social power of the young and computer saavy. Includes some words from Shawn Fanning of Napster fame."

The ever-vigilant Brill's Content sent a freebie to the ever-vigilant Politech that makes us long for vigilante justice. It seems the odds-on favorite for this century's Big Brother, DoubleClick, has contracted to put 1x1 pixel graphic Web bugs on porn and medical sites. Read all about it. But don't worry, we're assured by the porn sites that although "DoubleClick [secretly] collects the information [that you, John Q. Doe, personally spent 12.2 minutes at a girl-on-girl fetish page and then spent 19.7 minutes reading up on your prostate problems], it does not have the technical skill to understand it."