 So, Dr. Cole, thank you so much for taking the time for this interview and welcome you to Qatar. It's wonderful to be here. Really, my first time and I'm already fascinated in figuring how quickly can I come back. Thank you so much for this and we hope, we do hope that you come back. First, we'd like to know from you, from your World Internet Project experience, what do you do there and your work in several countries around the world? Our project, the World Internet Project, came out of something, I was somebody who always worked in television and I was always taught that we lost this great opportunity with television. Television, the only mass medium we knew ahead of time was going to be a mass medium. There was no question around the world that radio listeners were going to embrace radio with pictures. So what I was taught that we should have done but didn't do is we should have followed people, tracked people before they had television and gone back to them year after year to see how television changed their lives. And I became convinced in the late 90s that the impact of digital technology, first the web and now mobile, was going to be far more powerful than television. So believing that we lost a great opportunity with television and that the impact of digital was going to be even greater, ten years ago we started this World Internet Report. We started in the US, Singapore and Italy. We went back to the same people ten years in a row and watched as non-users went to dial up, dial up users went to broadband. That's where we saw broadband changed everything. We watched as some people drop off the web each year and one of them leaves in Y and more importantly do they return. And we tracked the never-users. And we're now in 30 countries around the world. We have several countries we work with in the Middle East. We work with Iran. We work with the United Arab Emirates. We'd love to find a partner here in Qatar. That would give me the opportunity to come back. But beyond the Middle East we're also throughout Europe, Asia, Latin America and increasingly in Africa as well. So children and teens are usually said to be digital natives since they are really familiar with the online technology. But is being a digital native a digital native? Does it necessarily mean being digitally literate or not? Certainly to be a digital native means you're not afraid of the technology. You don't think it's anything special. You use it easily and you're comfortable with it. Our partners in Sweden show that half the five-year-olds in Sweden are online. So to be a digital native is not to be impressed to just think that's the way it is. But it doesn't mean necessarily that you really understand the best use of the technology. For example, one of the problems with literacy that digital natives have never having used a library in most cases probably will never use a library. They don't always understand where information comes from, what's reliable or good information. So being a digital native certainly makes you unafraid and unconcerned and very comfortable using the technology. Children now have to explain to parents how their mobile phones work. Children have to program the television set. That part comes easily. But literacy is still learned. So you said that broadband changed everything. How do you think impact our broadband on people's attitude toward technology and digital literacy? Broadband really does change everything. It's what integrates the internet into your life. Before broadband, with dial-up, the internet was something you went to two or three times a day for 20 or 30 minutes. Broadband means the internet is everywhere around you. It's in your desk, it's in your car, it's in your pocket, it's everywhere. And you can use it during natural rhythms and pauses of the day. It's not something you have to plan for and since it's always on, you don't have to log on, dial up, do anything. It just becomes part of your life. So it certainly enhances digital literacy because it makes it like language. It becomes a constant thing in your life that you're constantly using. As far as attitudes, broadband just really... I think we're just now beginning to see people reach teenage years who have only used broadband. Those who grew, even some of the most of the digital natives grew up on dial-up and now are using broadband. And those who have only used broadband just think of this as a fluent, constant part of our lives. Those of us who started to use dial-up and now use broadband, look at it more different. Look at it a little differently. Some say that teenagers are not interested anymore in reading newspapers online. How do you think the statement is true? We certainly believe teenagers are not interested in reading newspapers offline. Our work shows that 30 years ago teenagers didn't read newspapers, but started to when they got into their 20s and 30s. Today, teenagers don't read newspapers and we don't think they ever will. A lot of people look at that and say, well, they just don't care about news. They just care about what's happening on Twitter or Facebook. That's not true. Teenagers around the world have figured out that what happens halfway around the world could change their lives. They are well-informed. They're just not going to the paper. They're going online. Every country in the world we're in, when internet penetration gets to 30%, offline newspaper sales begin to decline. Every time a newspaper reader dies, they're not being replaced by a new reader. In America, newspaper circulation is in free fall. I think most papers will be gone in less than five years. Our San Francisco Chronicle has lost 25% of its circulation in the last 12 months. In other countries where newspapers are stronger, Sweden, the UK, Australia, I think it's more like eight to ten years. But newspapers offline, I think on paper, are disappearing. On the other hand, there are real opportunities for newspapers on the web where all of a sudden they're not once a day on your doorstep. They don't require trees being cut down. Newspapers have audio. They have video on the web. I think newspapers have new and exciting life. Okay. How do you think social media and user-generated content generally is contributing to the megabytes of fame that teenagers are seeing on that? Sir, we just never anticipated when the internet came along that user-generated content was going to transform everything. As I said in my talk here, it's reversed 550 years of media trends. It's both a wonderful and a worrisome development, all this user-generated content. I mean, one of the exciting things that we've seen in the last ten years is anybody can start a newspaper. And that means that in an era of consolidation and in an era of rising costs, all of a sudden that people with good ideas can just start a newspaper is a wonderful idea. One of the scary things about what's happening with the internet today is anyone can start a newspaper. Lack of professional training, standards, ethics. So what we're seeing is we've never seen so much information out there. Some of that information is better than anything we've ever seen. Much of it isn't, which really calls for the need for literacy. The ability to really take advantage of the good content, to be able to identify it and use it and to ignore the bad content or teachers can even teach with bad content by showing what bad content is. So we are in a world where we lived, we grew up in a world with a limited amount of professional information. We're now living in a world with unlimited amounts of information, some of it good, some of it bad. Or some of it good, much of it bad. How do you think children or teenagers' online relationships overshadow their offline relationships or would be both bad? It's an interesting question about how relationships are affected by being online. We've seen, as I've mentioned, we've seen that two years ago 43% of internet users said their online communities were as important as they were off or the worlds they formed online or as important as the worlds they formed offline. And last year went up to 55%. So this is a key part of their lives. And distance, of course, is not only irrelevant, it can be an advantage. The really interesting positive development we're seeing there is none of this time, none of this Twitter, Facebook, mobile phone time seems to diminish teenagers' desire to be together. We're seeing the teenagers are using this technology more than any other generation around them, but they're using it to communicate with their friends when they can't be with them face-to-face. Early in the morning, late at night, when they're away on vacation. But we do measure how much face-to-face time people spend with their families and with their friends. And even among the heaviest users of digital technology it's not diminishing their face-to-face time with their friends. And keep in mind one of the biggest uses of email and social networking and IMing is to set up personal meetings. And 15 years ago, if we wanted to get together for lunch I might leave you a message. You might not get it to late at night. We may trade phone calls for three days before we actually can figure out when we can have lunch. Now we can do all that almost immediately. So it doesn't diminish face-to-face time. Okay, my final question. How do you think parents are finding it easier or difficult to regulate their children's online behavior nowadays? Well, parents are concerned about the internet. We know that parents think there's a tremendous amount of bad content on the web and there is. And normally you wouldn't let your children anywhere near something that had so much bad content. But just as many parents think it's essential that their children learn how to use this technology that jobs and education in the future are going to require an understanding of the internet. And so parents want to regulate their children's internet use just as a generation ago they learned how to regulate television use. The problem was television is really simple. Really easy. There's really only two buttons if you add the volume three. There's really only two vote buttons on the television set parents had to learn. The on and the off and the channel switching. The internet's more complicated. Now actually parents who don't use the internet are afraid it's more complicated than it actually is. When parents do actually sit down and learn the internet they find it's not so complicated. But as far as regulating there are so many on television there are usually one or two channels that you have to keep your children away from and there may be a couple of programs on the other channels. On the web there's so much information you don't want your children to see. And parents frequently have to turn to their children and ask them how do I regulate your internet use because the kids know how to do it better than they do. But the real lesson here I somebody who spent the 90s looking at television violence issues and I think the lesson we are the recommendation we made to parents for television is very similar to the recommendation we made to parents for the internet. We used to say to parents you have to sometimes sit down with your children and watch your children watch television. Explain things to them look at the lessons they're learning and talk about it. And I think if you have a good relationship with your children you'll spend some time online with them not all the time they don't want to be online with you all the time if you're a parent. Sometimes you notice your children you notice who their friends are the way they're acting I think you can begin to effectively deal with concerns about the internet.