Futures of Learning

In Born Digital, authors John Palfrey and Urs Gasser take on a number of big questions related to young people and technology. Identity, privacy, safety, learning, and innovation, as well as several other topics, are addressed in this effort to invite and inform dialogue between young people and their parents, teachers, and other significant adults in their lives. Being a Digital Native can open up a world of possibilities for certain young people who enjoy unprecedented autonomy and access to information. However, this autonomy and access is often threatening to adults to whom the practices of Digital Natives are unfamiliar. As the subtitle indicates, Born Digital is a guide to understanding Digital Natives; it is a kind of travel guide for the grown-up and uncool to navigate unknown territory and an intervention intended to allay some of the fears fueling current moral panics.

I had the opportunity to work with both authors at the Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Program in 2007 when they were right in the middle of writing this book. I can remember chiming in during a seminar discussion about the Digital Natives Project (the research project out of which Born Digital is…well…born) with what is apparently a common question about defining Digital Natives—how to account for differential access to technology. With grace obviously developed through practice responding to graduate students’ obnoxious questions, they defined Digital Native for me. It is this same definition that underpins the investigation presented in Born Digital. A Digital Native is “a person born into the digital age (after 1980) who has access to networked digital technologies and strong computer skills and knowledge” (p. 346).

This definition takes an important step away from declaring all kids to be Digital Natives by stipulating the need for access to networked technologies and particular knowledge and skills. Palfrey and Gasser point out that birth date does not equal birth right in the world of Digital Natives; a number of economic and educational factors will influence whether a kid will have the access and knowledge necessary to operate within networked culture. While this acknowledgment of the larger sociocultural and economic factors that influence kids’ access and use of technology is an important step away from the heavy-handed technical determinism that characterizes much of the discourse about young people and technology, I would have liked to see a more sustained critical assessment of the complexities of access and the assumptions that position certain knowledge and skills as more important than others.

One place to start this assessment is with the term “digital native” and its counterpart, “digital immigrant,” which is used to describe people who have not been “born digital,” but rather come to technology with an outsider’s perspective. Both terms—native and immigrant—need to be better unpacked in terms of their political meanings and relationship to identity. Some of this work has happened already; however, the publication of Born Digital presents a ripe opportunity to reengage with these debates. 

The Digital Natives project is itself a good example of the mediated and networked world the book is about. The project, housed at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, has among its many outlets for communication a blog, a wiki, profiles on various social network sites, a Twitter feed, and a YouTube channel. The project also sponsors various “3D” events, such as forums, intended to bring interested parties together to discuss issues related to Digital Natives. Born Digital is, therefore, one of many ways of disseminating information from the project. Through its use of diverse multimedia outlets, the project models the on-and-offline hybridity that is associated with Digital Natives’ approach to life.

The book consists of twelve topical chapters and a final synthesis chapter. This organization allows readers to focus on topics of interest or exigency, making the book ideal for parents, teachers, and other practitioners who work with youth. In my reading, I saw three general themes emerge across chapters: individual changes, social changes, and potential changes. All three themes support the claim that at this particular moment, the way young people are interacting with media, technology, and information, as well as with other people and institutions is changing quickly. While I am not going to comment on each chapter in this post, I would like to take this opportunity to touch upon what I think are the key contributions within each theme, as well as to suggest alternative ways to approach and expand the ideas in the book. (After all, as Palfrey notes in the synthesis chapter, he likes to look at the book as “version 1.0,” just a start to a much larger and sustained conversation.)

Early chapters focus on what I’d classify as individual changes (although they certainly have important social components), including changes to the construction and articulation of identity and related concerns about preserving the integrity and privacy of personal information. Although the identity chapter has moments of problematic technical determinism in which core issues related to identity are overlooked—the influence and constraints of non-technical forces such as race, class, and gender, for example—it does provide a succinct overview of the many technological venues through which young people express identity, highlighting two features of such expressions, instability and insecurity.

Instability and insecurity of identity have been theorized as conditions of postmodernity; Palfrey and Gasser use the terms in more specific ways, focusing on the impact of articulating identity through digital media and the potential for losing control of one’s personal information (i.e. one’s identity) when putting information online. In subsequent chapters, the discussion turns to digital dossiers (the accumulation of one’s personal information in online databases) and concerns about privacy, elucidating the questionable (but often invisible) practices of corporations and marketing firms in acquiring and using information kids make available online. Moving beyond simple recommendations that young people stay “anonymous” online and refrain from making any personal information available, these chapters take a careful look at corporate practices that make disclosing personal information dangerous. Bringing this issue to consciousness will (hopefully) be one of the most important and enduring outcomes of Born Digital, as the threat posed by corporations is, for most young people, a much more immediate and realistic danger than that of sexual predators.

Toward the middle of the book, the focus shifts to what might be called “social changes,” or more accurately, changes in how young people socialize, communicate, and navigate in networked spaces. First tackling the issues of user-generated (or user-created) content and filesharing, the authors sketch the landscape of youth participation on sites such as Wikipedia, Second Life, and Napster with a focus on creativity, reputation, and the rights and responsibilities associated with participation in what have been called “Networked Publics.” The discussions move beyond the moral panic over copyright violation and filesharing, looking more closely at particular practices and include a Harry Potter example—always a bonus in my book.

As I see it, the key contribution within the category of social changes is the chapter on information quality. In this chapter, the authors capture the ambivalence felt by young people faced with the insurmountable (and barely organized) pile of information that is the internet. Rather than positing steps for information evaluation, as has been attempted by various information literacy initiatives, however, this chapter emphasizes the contextual nature of information and the various ways in which it can be used and raises questions about proposed solutions to the information overload problem.

Finally, the chapters on innovation, learning, and activism address the potential (and realities) of youth participation online. These are three of the current “hot topics” in the area of digital media, and certainly areas prime for continued conversation. Like the identity chapter, these three chapters occasionally swerve into technical determinist territory, skipping over important historical, contextual, and institutional forces that determine participation. While there are several brief mentions of participatory culture in these discussions, engagement with issues of access that extend beyond access to hardware to experiences and opportunities for participation—the participation gap—should be brought to the forefront. Discourse surrounding the role of technology in shaping the futures of young people—evident in these chapters in relation to employment, education, and citizenship—should always consider the ways in which unequal access and participation perpetuates inequalities in all aspects of life. The participation gap is just beginning to grab the attention of policymakers and (to some extent) technology developers. It also needs to be a primary concern of parents, educators, and young people themselves. Hopefully sustained attention to this issue will make it into Born Digital 2.0.

While based on extensive research with youth from various countries around the world, Born Digital is not a traditional academic book; this is one of its greatest strengths. There is a dire need for research that builds bridges between researchers, practitioners, parents, and young people. It is my hope that Born Digital will be the first of many successful efforts to initiate conversations and connections between these groups.

Lee, Dong-Hu, et al, Eds. (Paju, Korea: Hanul Academy, 2006)

The title is catchy, true to the point. It just grabs all the hot spots within current discussion of youth digital culture: mobile, girls, digital, and Asia, in a fashionable yet quite adequate form. As a cultural studies scholar who has been chasing newly emerging digital media culture in Asia, particularly, mobile screen culture in Korea, I am always hungry for this kind of scholarly works that deliver vivid pictures of everyday use of ICTs. In spite of recent academic and popular interest in the Asian innovation and uptake of ICTs, ethnography or cultural studies based research studies are still rare, though increasing, compared to the plethora of the in-depth analyses of technological innovation, macro policy and industry models of ICTs implemented in Asian techno-centers. Often, these attempts to unearth the secret of Asian success seem to consolidate its myth, the image of digitized Asia, leaving our urgent questions unanswered: what people actually do with these technologies? Meanwhile, the linguistic barrier delays the conversation between these sites and outside observers, limiting our access to local perspectives toward what is happening in their everyday lives. Personal, Portable, and Pedestrian (2005) is a nice exception that delivers rich textures of Japanese mobile culture captured by insiders’ eye to the global readers. Turning to Korea, I have to say unfortunately much of its stories still left veiled behind such renowned tags as ‘IT-powerhouse,’ ‘the most wired country,’ ‘online Gamers’ Heaven,’ and ‘digital Korea,’ though we recently see increasing numbers of English-written studies on Korean Social Network Sites (mostly, Cyworld), Game Industry (PC bang and online game), and mobile media.

Considering this situation, I am happy to introduce Mobile-Girls @ Digital.Asia, a timely and valuable work that well serves to fill the gap of knowledge. This anthology came out of the international symposium, “Mobile Practice: Girls’ Culture and Digital Mobile Media”(2005). Nine articles by fourteen Korean scholars from Women’s Association for Communication Studies (KWACS), the organizer of the symposium, and international scholars including Angel Lin, Larissa Hjorth, Abin Tong, and Laura Miller provide substantial ethnographical research findings of gendered mobile phone use (centered on SMS and MMS usage) in the Asia-Pacific region (Mostly Korea, but including Japan, Hong Kong and Australia). In terms of its theoretical orientation and methodology, this book resonates to what Personal, Portable, and Pedestrian achieved, the serious attention to locally specific yet globally resonant youth (particularly, girls) mobile phone practices. As the book is written in Korean and hence does not allow access to most non-Korean readers, the brief outline of contents might be useful to apprehend the range of works.

From the outset, the book acknowledges girls’ marginalized position in this region in terms of social/financial/political hierarchies and attempts to reassure that teenage girls’ mobile phone culture have played a significant role in diversifying and cultivating the mobile phone as a ‘personal medium.’ The book consists of three parts: Part 1: Korean Sonyeodeul (Korean word Sonyeo means girl), Gender, Culture and Digital Mobile Technology, Part 2: Digital Asia and Mobile Girls, and Part 3: Digital Sketchy of Girls’ Subculture: Networking and Dynamics. Three articles in the first part solicit out general theoretical issues of gender, technology and media use through the textual analysis of the commercial advertisement (Lee, Dong-Hu, “Gender Image in Mobile Phone Advertisement”), the assessment of the notion (and the discursive construction) of ‘Sonyeo’ as physical/social/cultural identity and its presence in the technological field (Kim, Ye-Ran, “ Sonyeoseong (Girl’s Identity) and Mediafication of Body: Mobile Communication Culture and Sonyeo Discourse”), and the empirical research of Korean women’s practice of mothering with the mobile phone (Kim Myeong-He, “The Reproduction of Mothering with the Mobile Phone”). While the first part attempts to map and address overarching theoretical issue of gendered mobile phone use in Korean context, the second part extends this discussion to the other Asia-Pacific experiences. In particular, Larissa Hjorth’s article is notable. In “Gendered Mobility: Customization and Gender in the Asia-Pacific Region,” she offers the comprehensive and detailed analysis of what she calls the “topography of personalization” drawn from her accumulated ethnographical researches of teenage girls’ practice of customization (from the decoration of mobile phone device to the use of favored features of the multimedia phone) in four different national contexts (Korea, Japan, HK and Australia).

The third part is particularly interesting as it delves into the micro-level details of everyday life of Korean ‘Thumbelinas.’ Authors argue that Handphone (a Korean word for mobile phone) is an “affective digital technology” that allows high school girls to create and micro-coordinate their intimate personal networks in and outside of the surveillance of elders’ eyes as well as functions as a ‘personal memory box,’ the object of emotional affection (Kim-Go Yeon-Joo & Lee Ji-Eun, “Handphone as Emotional Media: Focusing on the Teenage Girl’s Daily Use of Handphone”), a creative and expressive tool for girls play culture in their use of ‘emotext’ (emotion + Text)(Lim Sook-Hyun et al, “Sonyeo’s Handphone Play”), and the central space for ‘chatting’ among their peers that increases the sense of intimacy and belonging to their community (Kim Eun-Jin et al, “Mobile Sonyeo’s Suda (Chatting)”).

Overall, each article makes numbers of interesting points. One of overarching themes I find notable is the position of youth mobile culture in a broader cultural context, which is often constituted and represented in terms of ‘conflict’ or ‘difference’ in the public imagination. Especially, Part 1 nicely raises questions on the ambiguous status of Korean youth who are called ‘Digital Generation,’ ‘Cyber Sinillyu (new human species: new generation),’ ‘Thumb tribe,’ and ‘Netizen (Net + Citizen).’ Korean youth, as far as digital technologies concerned, remains a contested terrain where the tensions provoked by the digital divide, mainly according to generational gaps, is intermingled with the celebratory expectation of its prosperity. I agree with this point that ambivalent representation of Korean youth in public and even academic discourse, both elevated to the future hope in techno-nationalistic Korea and at the same time condemned as a threatening force to the existing social norms (accused for their cyber delinquencies and different lifestyles), let the real picture of young peoples’ lived experience slip through.

Yet as much as I agree it is vital to account for the contextual specificities in interpreting the actual practices, I sense the potential drawback of context-determinism, as in the case when the socially constructed girls’ role is taken for granted as a given condition without further consideration of other variables. This could lead to another quanundrum that I find from this volume: the implied assumption of biological determinism. I would not see it problematic to argue girls’ mobile phone culture significantly contributed to constructing mobile technology as it is, as a personal medium that consolidates the intimate relationship. However, the simplistic assumption that girls want to continue, or in other words, favor to build their intimate relationship with whatever available technologies somehow seems to easily collapse the gender identity with the specific form of social relationship building (in the same vein, selection of research themes such as ‘mothering’ and ‘chatting’ may be questionable as it tends to preset the boundary of practices.) Even though these are in fact prominent practices of girls/women that have been widely observed and definitely deserve serious attention, we could also learn more from self-reflexive questioning, before hastily moving into this direction.

Finally, just as this book draws on the geopolitical boundary of Asia-Pacific, it is an ongoing challenge to define the ‘regional’ characteristics of mobile phone use, if any. To begin with, generalizing Asia as one entity is certainly problematic considering the unequal dissemination of digital/mobile technologies across the region. It is truly a few technological centers such as Japan, Korea and maybe HK that have spurred this hype of Digital(and Mobile) Asia. More importantly, what implications can we draw from thinking about specific ‘regionality’ in relation to the global and local mobile phone culture? This book does not explicitly answer to these questions. Larissa Hjorth’s article may be a suggestive example that presents the value of cross-cultural research in finding answers, as she provides a comparative frame against which locally specific girls’ practices acquire additional meanings. In the end, this is one of those questions that keep haunting/stimulating our international literature review team along the way.

I visited the Musashi Institute of Technology Yokohama Campus on a blistering hot summer day. The draw for the day was a panel discussion on “Akiba-kei Culture.” The panelists included Arisa, a popular maid at the renowned maid café, Mai:lish, the three members of an Akiba-kei idol group “Mug Cup,” and a group of three geek boys who are well-known on Twitter Japan and Hatena bookmarks. This event was part of an open campus day, designed to showcase the different university research groups to prospective students and other interested parties. The organizer who put together this event, an unusual one for a university campus, is Naoki Ueno at the Environmental Media Department. Mimi Ito and I attended the group dinner following the panel discussion, and interviewed Naoki over seared bits of Korean barbeque and kim-chee.

Naoki has made a career out of introducing situated learning theory and activity theory to Japanese scholars, and has conducted his own research on the design of educational and workplace environments. He was one of my mentors during graduate school, and was Mimi’s sponsoring researcher during her postdoctoral work in Japan, and is part of an international network of scholars who work at the intersection of technology studies, ethnomethodology, and sociocultural learning theory.

In 2007, he began a new project, funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Titled, “A Base for City-Making Using ICT.” The project aims to create an educational environment tied to urban design and ICTs. The goal of the work is not simply to develop technology or physical infrastructure. Instead, Naoki’s team conducts fieldwork on people’s everyday practice and the information and symbols that flow through certain urban areas, and design ICTs based on this research.  By taking this bottom-up approach to ICT design, Naoki is developing a form of information system design education that is tied to the specifics of social practice.

Naoki’s choice of field sites is also unique. One of his colleague, Ishu Rakusai, developed a browser-based system, NOTA, where NPOs and schools can easily upload records of their activity, such as text and images. They have piloted this system with in the Kohoku New Town area near the university. In addition to this work with the local community, Naoki’s lab has also been engaged with the support of subcultural communities. For example, another student, Tsuyoshi Furusawa, conducted research on graffiti culture in Shibuya. This project is a collaboration with the NPO, Konposition, which is working to reduce illegal graffiti by creating a legal graffiti wall. Konposition was looking for a way of representing their practice of erasing illegal graffiti or painting over it with legal graffiti. Tsuyoshi developed a system where the participants could upload images and locational information about graffiti via mobile phones.

Another example is the work of Koji Sawada, who is developing a web site where fans and minor musicians who are part of the live house scene can connect with one another. By integrating the system design with existing social practice, the goal is to develop a learning environment that exceeds the existing framework of activity.  Naoki explains that the development effort is directed at creating social institutions, resources, and occasions that support access to new practices. In Japan, as elsewhere, Naoki feels that most education about information system design focuses on technology, rather than looking at the concrete contexts in which these systems will be used. By contrast, his team engages directly with end users such as NPO groups and live house participants in order to understand their everyday practice. The students walk the city with these community members and conduct interviews that get at the underlying issues they are grappling with. By experiencing this kind of social research and technology development, the students can integrate both technical and social perspectives on design.

Naoki describes how his biggest challenge has been the coordination between various community groups, local government, university labs, and students. Drawing relationships between these diverse groups, whether they are from the local community or subcultures of geeks, musicians, or otaku, Naoki seems to relish the juxtaposition of different social groups and cultures. This is one the talents that has served him well as a scholarly emissary between Japan and Euro-American intellectual communities that engage in socicultural learning theory. Now he has brought these interests to bear on the education of a new generation of information designers who are building hybrids that cross the boundaries of social and technical systems.