The Great Shutdown, or how to learn about the “new new media”

The article is dedicated to the ever growing criticism of large IT corporations that are trying to take the full control over the global Internet. The author analyses the reasons of the setback in the reflexion regarding the capabilities of the social media, ranging from firm optimism to equally firm pessimism. The creativity offered by those media becomes the product made by the global corporations who started by offering the website searching services and ended up keeping their authors and users under surveillance. The article poses the questions about the education method for the young Internet users, for whom the technologies present in the web 2.0 (and 3.0 or mobile) became the element of their everyday life. In order to understand the nature of these technologies one needs to regard them as things, objects and tools, in other words to “switch them off” intellectually