Keeping the internet healthy #WLIC2016

Day 2 of the IFLA World Library and Information Congress in Columbus, USA. I'm attending the IFLA President's session which is focused on the IFLA Trends report. It started with four talks and then there will be a discussion, but I won't liveblog blog it all. One of the talks was from Mark Surman (Executive Director, Mozilla Foundation - he's shown in my photo). He started by mapping the development of the Internet from being open and diverse, to being dominated and filtered. He cited some research that showed that many people using Facebook on their phones didn't realise they were using the Internet. He also highlighted that money-making apps were mostly produced in North America, certain parts of Europe and certain parts of Asia-Pacific. However the largest growth in mobile devices is in other regions such as Africa. In a striking phrase he said that now there is "a fight over what is imaginable and possible" on the Internet. He urged us to make the health of the Internet a mainstream issue everywhere. As part of this he emphasised the role of libraries and of digital (though not information) literacy. Finally he had a particular message about copyright and he talked about their copyright campaign.
I asked after his talk about talking about digital literacy rather than information literacy. He said that one of the reasons they chose digital literacy was because they wanted to emphasise that being literate with digital information was as important as traditional reading and writing. Mozilla Foundation have a slogan read, write and participate.
This is Mozilla's open policy and advocacy blog: https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/