Untitled and Undecided

I am off to London to attend the Fifth Anniversary Conference of Media@lse, which is the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics.

I’ll be presenting a paper that is part of ongoing dissertation research. It’s called Peer pedagogy in an interest-driven community: The practices and problems of online tutorials. I co-authored the paper with Becky Herr-Stephenson who has been a colleague of mine on the Digital Youth project for the past three years (and a current collaborator on the MacArthur Foundation’s efforts to create a Digital Media and Learning Networked Studio).

Here is the abstract of the paper:

While many have celebrated youth participation in online activities as an empowering opportunity for socialization, creative expression, and learning, how this participation plays out in practice is not well understood. In this paper, we consider the ways in which peers teach and learn through the creation and posting of tutorials within a self-described online community of artists and media producers. We describe the practices associated with the production of tutorials in terms of genres of participation, modes of engagement with new media. Within the genres of participation framework, creating tutorials can be seen as a way to earn reputation and demonstrate expertise within the alternative status economy of a specific interest-driven community. However, we also show that tutorials can be a source of tension between participants in such a community, as members may view tutorials and their relationships to learning and improving one’s craft in contradictory ways.

The talk that I am going to give on Monday will mainly cover the second half of the paper–the point about tensions over the value of tutorials. While it seems that tutorials on deviantART are generally fairly popular and valuable to members of the site, it was interesting to hear that not everyone feels that way. We are still trying to figure out what it all means. Therefore the paper is still a work-in-progress in many ways and we welcome any feedback.

Henry Jenkins recently came to speak to the School of Information (audio here). While much of the talk was on his take on the notion of new media literacies, the beginning of the talk was more focused on the problematic concepts of “Digital Native” and “Digital Immigrants.” He recently wrote about the these metaphors that both academics and the popular press often invoke to refer to a sense that that the consequences of “those kids today” being born into an internet-ed world make their brains fundamentally different from those of their parents and the rest of us adults.

So, even though I’ve been lucky to have had easy access to a computer since I was in elementary school, have had difficulty writing essays in long-hand for the past ten years, and my laptop and I are best of friends, I am still an immigrant to some digital world. Jenkins talks about the power this metaphor had for him at one point but also why he can no longer use it. Not only does it rely on “out of date assumptions about immigrants” (the not-digital kind), the implications, he says are dangerous:

Yet, I worry that the metaphor may be having the opposite effect now — implying that young people are better off without us and thus justifying decisions not to adjust educational practices to create a space where young and old might be able to learn from each other.

I agree with Jenkins here. Additionally, however, I would add that the metaphors also imply a universal notion of what “kids today” do. This to me is just as silly as trying to describe what the rest of us do in universal terms.

One of the themes that the researchers on the Digital Youth project have discussed for the past three years is how complex the world of young people looks when you start to compare across situations and forms of technology use. We have been delighted and surprised by both the differences and similarities between what participants in our studies say and do and things that we thought and did in our pre-Internet days. For example, Christo Sims found at that…surpise…kids in rural California still value all of the freedoms that come with getting a drivers license (even though they should be able to do everything through the internet…right?). Starting our research with the assumptions that go along with the rhetoric of a generation gap would have been costly.

Recently, a UK study made some empirical findings to help bolster this critique of the notion of digital natives and digital immigrants, of the obvious generation gap.

Besides having one of the greatest report covers I’ve seen for an academic publication, some of the findings were quite interesting. The researchers used data presented in other studies (surveys by other organizations, such as Ofcom) and did their own research on how the so-called “Google Generation” and older people used various library services (note that the term “Digital Native” predates the rise to prominence of Google so this “generation” may be even younger, but it’s hard to say how to relate the terms precisely…). Their conclusion: the idea of a generation gap is overblown and misunderstood. When there are differences amongst age groups, they note that they don’t know what can be attributed to generational issues or what can be attributed to moving through different life stages:

This is a powerful reminder that people have different information needs at different points in their lives. There are very very few controlled studies that account for age and information seeking behaviour systematically: as a result there is much mis-information and much speculation about how young people supposedly behave in cybersace.

Later, they point out that while it is “generally true” that younger users are “more competent with technology” (confidence level: medium), they also believe that “older users are catching up fast.” Note that they don’t present empirical results that justify this sense of “catching up,” but it seems no more far-fetched than the idea that young people “naturally” are more competent than their parents.

They have several pages addressing the usual claims made about younger generation vs. their elders and they shoot down most of them (see pages 18-20).

Here, their conclusions actually make a great deal of sense:

“In a real sense, we are all the Google generation now: the demographics of internet and media consumption are rapidly eroding this presumed generational difference. The evidence indicates that more people across all age groups are using the Internet and Web 2.0 technologies widely and for a variety of purposes…

In many ways the Google generation label is increasingly unhelpful: recent research finds that it is not even accurate within the cohort of young people that it seeks to stereotype.”

There’s a lot of other stuff worth checking out in the study, especially if you are a librarian or educator.

Read the full report (warning: large PDF).
Go to the “Google Generation” project page.

Back in May I attended the annual conference for the International Communications Association for the first time. It was held in San Francisco, which made it quite convenient. danah boyd and I presented a talk based on some of our research on looking at home kids put together their MySpace profiles. The context for the talk was a panel entitled “The Rise of Remix Culture: Identity, Power, and Imagination.” I wasn’t really a part of the panel organization process, and so going into the preparations for the talk, I found myself wondering what “remix culture” really meant. While I have used the term “remix” in the past as a way of describing some specific practices on MySpace, I wasn’t (and still am not) a big fan of it as an adjective a specific form of culture or as a new form of cultural expression. As it turned out, my co-panelists, Mark Latonero, Aram Sinnreich, and Marissa Gluck, also offered some of their own criticisms of the term, which made me feel a bit less like an outsider.

Here is the text from the talk. It’s not that long, but to make it even shorter here is the basic gist: With respect to the teenagers that danah and I have talked to on our separate efforts, we have noticed a few patterns in how teenagers describe how they first learned to make their profiles and how they put them together. A MySpace profile isn’t really “mine.” That’s not just a cynical way of saying it’s Rupert Murdoch’s, either. Rather, a profile is the product of collective effort and collective technical resources that is ongoing. When teenagers (and adults as well) copy and paste code to create their profiles, they are not really remixing media, at least not in the way many people use the term “remix.” Rather, they are mixing code. This is not a trivial difference.

The result is that they are mixing pointers to other people’s materials, or at least materials that are technical managed and perhaps even “owned” by others. And this leads to some interesting tensions when savvy, snarky, and irritated media hosters have to deal with those who are stealing their bandwidth (see this guy and this guy though both contain some not so pretty pictures including a quite disturbing one in the second). Presidential hopeful John McCain ran into some trouble on his MySpace page this past March.

Given the nature of the practices and the tensions that come as a result, I don’t feel that comfortable simply lumping what teenagers are up to on MySpace and the resulting network of media into some unknown concept of “Remix Culture.” Rather, I’d like to understand what is different about MySpace profile customization than other cultural practices, such as remixing music or video.

Text from the talk.

I have been (barely) using this blog to talk about things related to my academic interests. But, this bothered me so much this evening that I felt a need to do anything I can to get this story in front of more people.

This movie shows some footage of the LAPD breaking up what appears to be a rather peaceful protest two days ago. Please watch this movie in its entirety. It gets worse and worse as you go through it.

(Also can be viewed here.)

There is a police investigation underway. Apparently, some journalists from a public radio station and a Fox affiliate were among those injured.

As of this posting, there hasn’t been much media attention on this story. Hopefully, things will change as people’s videos get uploaded (where you at, Digg people??).