Plumbing the mysterious practices of 'digital youth'
In first public report from a 'seminal' study, UC Berkeley scholars shed light on kids' use of Web 2.0 tools

By Cathy Cockrell, NewsCenter | 28 April 2008
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2008/04/28_digitalyouth.shtml

The elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time. What if he turned his back, now, and disappeared mysteriously? What if he went away — ever so far away, into unknown countries beyond the seas…?
— Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

 
Grabbing a photo with a cell-phone camera. (Photo shared by L-ines ["German," "female"], on Flickr website.)
Grabbing a photo with a cell-phone camera. (Photo by "L-ines" on Flickr website.)
 

BERKELEY — If Tom Sawyer were a kid today, he might "disappear mysteriously" not into a Missouri cave but behind the door of his bedroom — there to explore a virtual world with his avatar, write on a friend's Facebook wall, record the dance steps to his hip-hop track and upload them to YouTube, or create a Harry Potter podcast. A new generation of "Web 2.0" tools has transformed kids' ability to socialize, play, create, and widely disseminate their productions — and has left many of their elders in the dark.

What are kids doing online? How are they using digital media? And what does their use of digital media mean for schools, families, and civic life? More than 400 grown-ups, looking for answers to such questions, turned out April 23 for a public forum on "New Media in the Everyday Lives of Youth" held at Stanford University

The event marked the first public report on a national research program on "digital youth," as part of a $50 million John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation initiative. Researchers presented several case studies on "the first generation to truly grow up digital," in the words of Mimi Ito, a University of Southern California cultural anthropologist and a lead investigator on the Digital Youth Project. "This is perhaps the largest ethnographic study in this area," she said, "and what we believe is likely to be the seminal study of young people's participation in digital media."

Online socializing, media-rich homes, hiphop music makers

UC Berkeley researcher danah boyd (her spelling), like other forum participants, eschewed the hand wringing that often accompanies adult discussions of young people's use of new media. "Teens do not have as much access to physical space as they once did," she noted. Because they're overscheduled, or are dependent on adults to drive them places, or their parents are afraid for their safety, or their friends can't go out, "online is more easy and accessible, even when they're stuck at home."

Typical conversation on Facebook 'wall':

'yo, whaz up?'
'not much. how you?' 'good'

Translation:

'I'm thinking of you and want validation that we're still friends and you're still thinking of me.'

'Yes of course I am, silly, and I'll announce it publicly.'

— dana boyd
iSchool Ph.D. student

 

A doctoral candidate at the UC Berkeley School of Information (the iSchool) and a blogger on new media, boyd crisscrossed the nation to interview and observe teenagers regarding their participation in sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube. She also visited thousands of pages on these social-networking sites, where youth carry on conversations such as "yo, whaz up?" "not much. how you?" "good.'" Translation: "I'm thinking of you and want validation, that we're still friends and you're still thinking of me." "Yes of course I am, silly, and I'll announce it publicly.'"

Adults may read these interactions as pointless. For teens, boyd asserted, they're a way of affirming friendships. And while "hanging out" online gets a bad rap with some parents, boyd said this unstructured time has value for teens — as "social and emotional down time" and a place for them to "make sense of social norms and peer relations."

Sociocultural anthropologist Heather Horst reported on studies of how new media and technology impact the family — her own ethnographic study of professional families in Silicon Valley, and fellow researchers' work in the Sierra foothills, the East Bay suburbs, central Los Angeles, and other settings. By way of these wide-ranging ethnographic studies, she said, researchers were able to observe cultural shifts in the organization of domestic space — including a trend toward media-rich bedrooms — as well as the way in which families use and share media. "Families of all incomes and class levels live in media rich worlds," said Horst, a postdoc at UC Berkeley's Institute for the Study of Social Change and coauthor of a book on cell phone use in Jamaica.

Dilan Mahendran, an iSchool Ph.D. candidate interested in the intersection of race and technology, shared reflections — illustrated with video clips of the virtuoso female rapper "Mistreat" — on his two-year ethnographic research on hiphop music making in after-school programs in San Francisco. "Adults provide these spaces, but kids inhabit them," he said. New technologies make it easier for young people to sample, mix, record, and distribute hiphop music, using it to ask the questions "Who am I? What can I know? What should I do? What can I hope for?" said Mahendran.

Interest-driven networked communities

Grassroots hiphop artists often become part of what have been called "interest-driven" online communities — where, Ito said, "marginal" teens are able to find likeminded peers or to achieve proficiency or status without being labeled a "dork." Gay teens are among those who seek out such online communities, she noted. So do teens with serious passions, be they Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans or Japanese anime fan subbers, who translate and subtitle foreign films for fellow enthusiasts.

The forum showcased just a handful of the 22 case studies funded through the Digital Youth Project. Berkeley DYP researchers have also investigated, among other topics, pro-anorexia and pro-bulimia online discussion groups, collaborative storytelling among fifth graders, teaching and learning with multimedia tools, teenagers' use of video games in a cyber cafe setting, and digital photography diaries of kids entering middle school. The scholars plan to do shared analysis of their findings for a report to be released later this year.

"New Media in the Everyday Lives of Youth" was presented by the San Francisco-based non-profit Common Sense Media and the MacArthur Foundation. If you missed the live simulcast on Second Life, a webcast of the forum will be available in the near future on each organization's website.


 


Teens and the Web
Source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=19&entry_id=25992

Do the rigid schedules set by parents determined to send their children to an Ivy League school one of the reasons teens find the Web a comfortable place to relax and hang out?

That was just one of the many questions and observations raised at a digital media and youth panel this week at Stanford.

Researchers funded by a MacArthur Foundation grant have spent three years examining thousands of children and teens across the country and how they use digital media, from producing hip hop music to establishing their social status online.

The wide-ranging study, led by UC Berkeley and the University of Southern California, will be published in late summer.

Sometimes teenagers just need to hang out, but can't, said danah boyd of UC Berkeley. They're locked in tight, college-prep schedules, get kicked out of malls, live too far away from their friends. Connecting to their friends on the Internet is an easy way to solve that problem.

Contrary to concerns that teens go online to meet strangers, most stick with the people they know, she added, although some may not really be friends but frenemies and what not. Comments left on a person's social networking page -- even as basic and mundane as "Whazzup?" -- are a means of validating and cementing one's friendship in front of their peers.

And while some parents may worry about the effect technology could have on family life, UC Berkeley's Heather Horst said that it can also bring family members together, with fathers bonding with their sons over video games, or siblings helping each other write fan fiction on the Web.

UC Berkeley's Dilan Mahendran also saw teens adopting new technology to produce hip hop music, including one who used his cell phone to record sounds of the city and his friends' jam session to mix into his music.

Posted By: Ellen Lee (Email) | April 25 2008 at 09:41 AM
 

April 24, 2008 1:35 PM PDT

Are wired kids well served by schools?

Posted by Stefanie Olsen
Source: http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9928174-7.html?tag=nefd.top
 
PALO ALTO, Calif.--Among the generation of kids growing up wired, many teens are hyper-motivated to learn a special skill like how to create a podcast, direct a YouTube video, publish an anime site, or hack an iPhone.

Now if only teachers could inspire such ingenuity.

That was one of the basic questions that had academics scratching their heads here Wednesday at Stanford University, where a group of researchers from the University of Southern California and University of California at Berkeley presented their first findings from one of the largest ethnographic studies on kids in digital environments. (An enthnographic study draws on fieldwork to provide a descriptive picture of a group. The full research will be published later this year as part of a MacArthur Foundation grant.)

Sure, kids have long been attracted to extracurricular activities like dance or sports. But researchers say digital media is bringing up a new generation who are creators of media rather than just passive consumers of it. Within these digital environments among peers, kids who create and evaluate media are deriving a sense of competence, autonomy, self-determination and connectedness, researchers say.

"Kids associate one word with school--'boring,'" said Deborah Stipek, dean and professor of education at Stanford, who was part of a panel discussion with the group of researchers. But kids' levels of engagement with the Internet and games could give educators new ideas for upping school's status.

"The question becomes what is the role of school in this larger environment," Stipek said.

Are schools disconnected from real-world tech skills? Dale Dougherty, founding editor and publisher of Make and Craft magazines, said during the panel that his team asked an audience of programmers where they learned to write code. Only 15 percent said that they learned programming at school.

The Stanford event, which was sponsored by MacArthur and Common Sense Media, raised more questions than it answered. But one of the more interesting findings in the research showed that many kids are drawn to create media online because their work can be immediately recognized or judged among their peer group or a larger audience, according to Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist of technology use and a principal investigator on MacArthur's project. That, she said, can be immediately gratifying.

In contrast, it can take kids much longer to reap the rewards or build recognition from hard work in school.

"It's the context of publicity now (online) vs. delayed gratification of getting a job in 10 years," Ito said. "The assessment of what they do happens internal to their community (of peers). Kids get to be the evaluator as much as the producer in interest-driven groups. School is much more of a future trajectory."

"Schools are breeding these delayed-gratification animals," said Dilan Mahendran, a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, who worked on one study.

Part of this is happening because American families have shifted from a television culture in the living room to a bedroom culture, in which many kids have television or a computer in their room. Another reason is that teens go online to hang out with friends because they don't have a place to go offline, according to Danah Boyd, a doctoral candidate at the School of Information at UC Berkeley and one of the researchers.

The researchers' initial findings are part of a long-range effort by the MacArthur Foundation, which in 2006 promised to spend $50 million on research and programs surrounding kids, technology, and learning. The goal was to figure out whether young people are changing through the use of digital media and technology, and if so, how? What are the effects of this digital immersion on kids' communication styles, friendships, families, and so on.

Some of the results are already in. Studies like those from Pew already show that as many as 83 percent of all kids play video games, and 53 percent of kids create media online. The thought that a majority of kids online would have a home page a la MySpace would have been laughable just 10 years ago, Ito said.

As part of her fieldwork, Ito got to know an 18-year-old girl named Anesha, who has produced several animated music shorts for YouTube. Her work was first seen by only a handful of her peers, but now thousands of people have watched her videos on Youtube, much to Anesha's delight. Ito said that the teen wants to go into film directing or editing.

"We're not saying there's going to be a digital generation whose eyes will be square," said Ito, who has studied kids in a range of online environments. "We're experiencing what 'public participation' (among young people) means, but it doesn't mean everyone will get a fancy job."