SINGAPORE — What’s it like to be part of the “first digitally native generation in history”?

That’s what 89plus wants to share with us. It’s an international long-term project by hotshot curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Simon Castets that makes its way to Singapore for The OPEN after trips to Munich, New York, London, Miami and Italy. Basically, they’re roping in creatives from this Internet (or post-Internet) generation — from artists to scientists — to showcase in programmes and discuss things.

89, of course, stands for 1989, an important year in 20th century history — the fall the Berlin Wall, the Tiananmen Massacre, the Satanic Verses controversy, the birth of Daniel Radcliffe…

And, of course, the year the Internet began, the global network that took humankind (and, eventually, their obsession with cats) to the next level.

Today’s (Saturday) 89plus talks — featuring young creatives like Ho Rui An, Amanda Lee Koe, Grace Teng, Matthew Claudel, Brigitta Isabella (and the timeless Lee Weng Choy to mix things up) — painted a picture of optimism and utopia with very little hiccups, touching on the implications of an increasingly digitising world, the national/local identity in a supposedly post-national scenario, the relationship between this generation and the one that preceded it. (As well as yet another of Ho’s interesting lecture-performances — although not on the level of his wonderful The Waves — and Lee using the analogy of octopus tentacles to talk about art biennales).

But to be honest, I was slightly disturbed by the rather breezy, smiley proceedings (which, I assume, peaks with the feel-good vibes of The Sam Willows gig at 10pm). I have no problem with what I heard (and enjoyed some of it). It was what I thought should’ve been acknowledged but wasn’t that proved an issue for me — what about the “89plus” generation that aren’t plugged in completely or even just plugged in? Surely referring to an “Internet/post-Internet generation” comes with certain qualifiers? Yes, this new network might have “changed the world forever” (as The OPEN programme says) but, at the risk of sounding like I’m throwing a cheap shot, surely there are fundamental issues that remain unchanged despite the past 25 years of being connected. Like, well, poverty and human rights violations. Or uneven distribution of wealth and resources.

Or maybe it’s just a matter of taking “changing the world forever” and the whole 89plus project with a teeny-weeny pinch of salt.

Still, there’s one more panel discussion tomorrow (Sunday) that will apparently tackle “activism in today’s networked environments”. So perhaps it’s going to be brought up there.

Nevertheless, today’s 89plus talks were balanced out by the darker, bleaker proposition of Web Junkies, a documentary about patients of an Internet addiction clinic-cum-bootcamp in Beijing. Non-stop online gaming is essentially the new mainlining — it’s been nicknamed “electronic heroin” and the government considers it a growing, major threat to the country.

The clinic’s martial-meets-family therapy approach is rather engrossing and while the film’s focus is on the teen patients and their struggles against Internet addiction, it does point out how this unusual but apparently prevalent situation is linked to a larger social malaise — the alienation of teens in single-child families, and the film eventually comes full circle, pointing to the government’s one-child policy. The Internet is somewhat absolved of its “crime” as larger social, economic and political forces are revealed to be at work here.

Obrist and Castets will be talking about 89plus on July 12, 5pm, when The OPEN wraps up. (Tickets for this is at S$45, with S$25 concession and certain SIFA-related discounts). The deadline for calls for the private 89plus workshop on July 13 is tomorrow (July 6) via http://89plus.com/submit. For more information, visit http://theopen.sifa.sg/. For more on SIFA, visit http://www.sifa.sg/