Untitled and Undecided

I just posted a short “Story from the Field” over on the Digital Youth site called “No, I don’t feel complimented: A young artist’s take on copyright.” It talks about the experience of 15 year-old Sharon, an aspiring photographer, and the tensions she experiences as she posts work to various online art websites and then grapples with the consequences of having her work available for people to repost, reuse, and “remix” on their own sites, blogs, or other places. The scenario I describe shows that the notion that all teenagers have radically different take on copyright than the rest of us is (as if the rest of us have a uniform take) is not necessarily the case. As I conclude in the article, I can’t claim that Sharon is representative of all teenagers or all artists, but that I suspect there are others dealing with the same conflicts.

I wrote up a “Stories from the Field” for the Digital Youth Research website regarding my recent interactions with two teenagers. One came from a couple of hours interviewing in his home. The other from participant observation, which involved many hours of interaction and discussion. Here’s the teaser:

Michael and James. Two teenage boys in the Bay Area, James from a poor area of San Francisco, Michael from a wealthier home in Oakland. Each uses the Interent and other digital technologies as a part of their social lives and their interest in art and technology. Like most of their friends, each has a MySpace profile, though their use of the site differs dramatically and can only be understood in light of their other hobbies. Their differing levels of access to social and technical resources is in line with what some call a “participation gap,” but as I describe in detail below, this might run the risk of, at best, an over-simplification of their digitally-enhanced creative interests, and at worst, a privileging of the value of one of the boy’s interests and activities over the other’s.

And, here’s the story.

As I’m not much of a blogger, I didn’t know if it was bad form to post the same thing in two places or to even point this post over to that one. Maybe it depends on the genre of the blog or even the subject matter?

Anyhow, if anyone is out there reading this and wants to comment, it would be great to hear your thoughts and would be even better to see them on the Digital Youth site rather than here. I am much more into the idea of contributing more regularly to a group blog than this one.

UPDATE: Turns out the comments are turned off on the Digital Youth site, so for now, if you do have any comments, post them here!