Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project 2008
Living and Learning with New Media | The MacArthur Foundation 35
Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project 2008
Conclusions and Implications
The goal of our project has been to document the everyday lives of youth as they engage with new media and to put forth a paradigm for understanding learning and participation in contemporary networked publics. We have worked to understand youth culture, and to bring this youth-centered perspective into the debates about digital media and learning. Although youth are often considered early adopters and expert users of new technology, their views on the significance of new media practice are not always taken seriously. Adults who stand on the other side of a generation gap can see these new practices as mystifying and, at times, threatening to existing social norms and educational standards. Although we do not believe that youth hold all the answers, we feel that it is crucial to listen carefully to them and learn from their experiences of growing up in a changing media ecology. In this concluding section, we translate some of what we learned from youth to adult concerns, summarizing the findings of our research in relation to implications for learning, education, and public participation.
Participation in the digital age means more than being able to access “serious” online information and culture; it also means the ability to participate in social and recreational activities online.
The notion of networked publics offers a framework for examining diverse forms of participation with new media in a way that is keyed to the broader social relations that structure this participation. In describing new media engagements, we have looked at the ecology of social, technical, and cultural conditions necessary for certain forms of participation. We found that ongoing, lightweight access to digital production tools and the Internet is a precondition for participation in most of the networked publics that are the focus of attention for U.S. teens. Contemporary social media are becoming one of the primary “institutions” of peer culture for U.S. teens, occupying the role that was previously dominated by the informal hanging out spaces of the school, mall, home, or street. Further, much of this engagement is centered on access to social and commercial entertainment content that is generally frowned upon in formal educational settings.
Although public institutions do not necessarily need to play a role in instructing or monitoring kids’ use of social media, they can be important sites for enabling participation in these activities and enhancing their scope. Social and recreational online activities are jumping-off points for experimenting with digital media creation and self-expression. Rather than seeing socializing and play as hostile to learning, educational programs could be positioned to step in and support moments when youth are motivated to move from friendship-driven to more interest-driven forms of new media use. This requires a cultural shift and a certain openness to experimentation and social exploration that is generally not characteristic of educational institutions, though we did see many instances of media production programs and parents supporting these activities.
In addition to economic barriers, youth encounter institutional, social, and cultural constraints to online participation.
Fluent and expert use of new media requires more than simple, task-specific access to technology. Youth who engaged in a dynamic range of learning opportunities with new media generally had robust technology access, ample time and autonomy to experiment and explore, and a network of peers who supported their new media interests. Sporadic, monitored access at schools and libraries may provide sufficient access for basic information seeking, but is insufficient for the immersed kind of social engagements with networked publics that are becoming a baseline for participation on both the interest-driven and the friendship-driven sides. Adult lack of appreciation for youth participation in popular culture has created an additional barrier to access for kids who do not have Internet access at home. We are concerned about the lack of a public agenda that recognizes the value of youth participation in social communication and popular culture. When kids lack access to the Internet at home, and public libraries and schools block sites that are central to their social communication, youth are doubly handicapped in their efforts to participate in common culture and sociability.
Although we have not systematically analyzed the relation between gender and socioeconomic status and participation in interest-driven groups, our work indicates a predictable participation gap. Particularly in the case of highly technical interest groups and complex forms of gaming, the genre itself is often defined as a masculine domain. These differences in access are not simply a matter of technology access but represent a more complex structure of cultural identity and social belonging. In other words, girls tend to be stigmatized more if they identify with geeked out practices. Although we may recognize that geeked out participation has valuable learning properties, if these activities equate with low status in friendship-driven networks, many kids are likely to opt out even if they have the technical and social resources at their disposal. The kinds of identities and peer status that accompany certain forms of new media literacy and technical skills (and lack thereof) are an area that deserves more systematic research attention.
Networked publics provide a context for youth to develop social norms in negotiation with their peers.
Young people are turning to online networks to participate in a wide range of public activities and developing social norms that their elders may not recognize. On the friendship-driven side, youth see online spaces and communications media as places to hang out with their friends. Given constraints on time and mobility, online sites offer young people the opportunity to casually connect with their friends and engage in private communication that is not monitored by parents and teachers. The ability to browse the profiles and status updates of their extended peer network in sites such as MySpace and Facebook offers youth information about others in an ambient way, without the need for direct communication. On the interest-driven side, youth turn to networked publics to connect with like-minded peers who share knowledge and expertise that may not be available to them locally. By engaging with communities of expertise online in more geeked out practices, youth are exposed to new standards and norms for participation in specialized communities and through collaborative arrangements. These unique affordances of networked publics have altered many of the conditions of socializing and publicity for youth, even as they build on existing youth practices of hanging out, flirting, and pursuing hobbies and interests.
In our work, contrary to fears that social norms are eroding online, we did not find many youth who were engaging in behaviors that were riskier than what they did in offline contexts. Youth online communication is conducted in a context of public scrutiny and structured by shared norms and a sense of reciprocity. At the same time, the actual shape of peer-based communication, and many of its outcomes, are profoundly different from those of an older generation, and are constantly being redefined. We found examples of parents who lacked even rudimentary knowledge of social norms for communicating online or any understanding of all but the most accessible forms of video games. Further, the ability for many youth to be in constant private contact with their peers strengthens the force of peer-based learning, and it can weaken adult participation in these peer environments. A kid who is highly active online, coupled with a parent who is disengaged from these new media, presents the risk of creating an intergenerational wedge. We do not believe that educators and parents need to bear down on kids with complicated rules and restrictions and heavy-handed norms about how they should engage online, particularly if they are not attuned to the norms that do exist among youth. Simple prohibitions, technical barriers, or time limits on use are blunt instruments; youth perceive them as raw and ill-informed exercises of power.
The problem lies not in the volume of access but the quality of participation and learning, and kids and adults should first be on the same page on the normative questions of learning and literacy. Parents should begin with an appreciation of the importance of youth social interactions with their peers, an understanding of their complexities, and a recognition that children are knowledgeable experts on their own peer practices and many domains of online participation. If parents can trust that their own values are being transmitted through their ongoing communication with their children, then new media practices can be sites of shared focus rather than anxiety and tension. We believe that if our efforts to shape new media literacy are keyed to the meaningful contexts of youth participation, then there is an opportunity for productive adult engagement. Many of the norms that we observed online are very much up for negotiation, and we often uncovered divergent perspectives among youth about what was appropriate, even within a particular genre of practice. For example, the issue of how to display social connections and hierarchies on social network sites is a source of social drama and tension, and the ongoing evolution of technical design in this space makes it a challenge for youth to develop shared social norms. Designers of these systems are central participants in defining these social norms, and their interventions are not always geared toward supporting a shared set of practices and values. More robust public debate on these issues that involves both youth and adults could potentially shape the future of online norms in this space in substantive ways.
Youth are developing new forms of media literacy that are keyed to new media and youth-centered social and cultural worlds.
We have identified a range of different practices that are evidence of youth-defined new media Living and Learning with New Media | The MacArthur Foundation 38
literacies. On the friendship-driven side, youth are developing shared norms for online publicity, including how to represent oneself in online profiles, norms for displaying peer networks online, the ranking of relationships in social network sites, and the development of new genres of written communication such as composed casualness in online messages. On the interest-driven side, youth continue to test the limits of forms of new media literacy and expression. Youth are developing a wide range of more specialized and sometimes exclusionary forms of new media literacies that are defined in opposition to those developed in more mainstream youth practices. In geeked out interest-driven groups, we have seen youth engage in the specialized “elite” vocabularies of gaming and esoteric fan knowledge and develop new experimental genres that make use of the authoring and editing capabilities of digital media. These include personal and amateur media that are being circulated online, such as photos, video blogs, web comics, and podcasts, as well as derivative works such as fan fiction, fan art, mods, mashups, remixes, and fansubbing.
It is important to understand the diverse genre conventions of youth new media literacy before developing educational programs in this space. Particularly when addressing learning and literacy that grows out of informal, peer-driven practices, we must realize that norms and standards are deeply situated in investments and identities of kids’ own cultural and social worlds. For example, authoring of online profiles is an important literacy skill on both the friendship- and interest-driven sides, but one mobilizes a genre of popularity and coolness, and the other a genre of geek cred. Similarly, the “elite” language of committed gamers involves literacies that are of little, and possibly negative, value for boys looking for a romantic partner in their school peer networks. Not only are literacy standards diverse and culturally specific, but they are constantly changing in tandem with technical changes and a rising bar of cultural sophistication. Following from this, it is problematic to develop a standardized or static set of benchmarks to measure kids’ levels of new media and technical literacy.
On the interest-driven side, we saw adult leadership in these groups as central to how standards for expertise and literacy are being defined. For example, the heroes of the gaming world include both teens and adults who define the identity and practice of an elite gamer. The same holds for all of the creative production groups that we examined. The leadership in this space, however, is largely cut off from the educators and policymakers who are defining standards for new media literacy in the adult-dominated world. Building more bridges among these different communities of practice could shape awareness on both the in-school and out-of-school sides, if we could respond in a coordinated and mutually respectful way to the quickly evolving norms and expertise of technically sophisticated experimental new media literacies.
Peer-based learning has unique properties that suggest alternatives to formal instruction.
We see peer-based learning in networked publics in the mainstream friendship-driven sites like MySpace and Facebook as well as in geeked out interest-driven groups. In these settings, the focus of learning and engagement is not defined by institutional accountabilities but rather emerges from kids’ interests and everyday social communication. Although learning in both of these contexts is driven primarily by the peer group, the structure and the focus of the peer group differ substantially, as does the content of the learning and communication. While Living and friendship-driven participation is largely in the mode of hanging out and negotiating issues of status and belonging in local, given peer networks, interest-driven participation happens in more distributed and intentional knowledge networks. In both the friendship-driven and interest-driven networks, however, peers are an important driver of learning. Peer-based learning is characterized by a context of reciprocity, where participants feel they can both produce and evaluate knowledge and culture. Whether it is comments on MySpace or on a fan fiction forum, participants both contribute their own content and comment on the content of others. More expert participants provide models and leadership but do not have authority over fellow participants. When these peer negotiations occur in a context of public scrutiny, youth are motivated to develop their identities and reputations through these peer-based networks, exchanging comments and links and jockeying for visibility. These efforts at gaining recognition are directed at a network of respected peers rather than formal evaluations of teachers or tests. In contrast to what they experience under the guidance of parents and teachers, with peer-based learning we see youth taking on more “grown-up” roles and ownership of their own self-presentation, learning, and evaluation of others.
In contexts of peer-based learning, adults can still have an important role to play, though it is not a conventionally authoritative one. In friendship-driven practices, direct adult participation is often unwelcome, but in interest-driven groups we found a much stronger role for more experienced participants to play. Unlike instructors in formal educational settings, however, these adults are passionate hobbyists and creators, and youth see them as experienced peers, not as people who have authority over them. These adults exert tremendous influence in setting communal norms and what educators might call “learning goals,” though they do not have direct authority over newcomers. The most successful examples we have seen of youth media programs are those based on kids’ own passionate interests and allowing plenty of unstructured time for kids to tinker and explore without being dominated by direct instruction. Unlike classroom teachers, these lab teachers and youth-program leaders are not authority figures responsible for assessing kids’ competence, but are rather what Dilan Mahendran has called “co-conspirators,” much like the adult participants in online interest-driven groups. In this, our research aligns with Chávez and Soep,liii who identified a “pedagogy of collegiality” that defines adult-youth collaboration in what they see as successful youth media programs.
Kids’ participation in networked publics suggests some new ways of thinking about the role of public education. Rather than thinking of public education as a burden that schools must shoulder on their own, what would it mean to think of public education as a responsibility of a more distributed network of people and institutions? And rather than assuming that education is primarily about preparing for jobs and careers, what would it mean to think of education as a process of guiding kids’ participation in public life more generally, a public life that includes social, recreational, and civic engagement? And finally, what would it mean to enlist help in this endeavor from an engaged and diverse set of publics that are broader than what we traditionally think of as educational and civic institutions? In addition to publics that are dominated by adult interests, these publics should include those that are relevant and accessible to kids now, where they can find role models, recognition, friends, and collaborators who are co-participants in the journey of growing up in a digital age. We hope that our research has stimulated discussion of these questions.
source: http://www.macfound.org/atf/cf/%7BB0386CE3-8B29-4162-8098-E466FB856794%7D/DML_ETHNOG_WHITEPAPER.PDF
