Futures of Learning

We are very pleased to introduce our new blog series, New Media Practices in International Contexts. Our blog series looks at the intersection of youth, new media and learning in a range of countries outside of North America and Western Europe.  Inspired by the ways in which Scribner and Cole’s (1981) work among the Vai of Liberia transformed activity theory, Brian Street’s (1984, 1993) fieldwork in Iran contributed to the development of New Literacy Studies and Paulo Freire’s (1970) work in Brazil influenced critical pedagogy, we believe that examining new media practices from an international (and, in some cases, transnational) perspective will enhance our current efforts to theorize youth, new media and learning.

Over the next three to four months we will be introducing six case studies – Brazil, China, Ghana, India, Korea and Japan – which challenge us to think about the intersection of youth, new media and learning in new ways. Beginning with Cara Wallis’ analysis of China today, each country review will begin a discussion of the telecommunications landscape. Subsequent posts by HyeRyoung Ok (Korea), Anke Schwittay (India), Heather Horst (Brazil), Mimi Ito and Daisuke Okabe (Japan) and Araba Sey (Ghana) will focus upon internet and mobile phone practices, gaming as well as new media production. As we have discovered in reading and writing up the material, each case study provides a unique perspective on the ways in which infrastructure, institutions and culture (among other factors) shape contemporary new media practices. If you know of books or articles that we have missed, or have feedback on any of the case studies, we would really welcome a comment or an email.

Before I conclude, I want to add one final note. In the exploratory phase of this project we sent out requests for articles, books and information to various individuals and news lists. We were all amazed at the generosity of fellow researchers in providing summaries of the fascinating work being carried out in this space and, in some cases, extensive bibliographies. We would like to thank the following individuals for their valuable suggestions and assistance:

Julie Soleil Archimbault, Francois Bar, Paul Braund, Larissa Hjorth, Răzvan Nicolescu, John Postill and Mikko Villi.

In addition, many of us have also found discussions on the Media Anthropology and Association of Internet Researchers extremely valuable. We are very grateful to these two communities of scholars.

References:

Freire, P. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury Press.

Scribner, S and M. Cole. 1981. The Psychology of Literacy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Street, B. 1984. Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Street, B. 1993. Cross-cultural Approaches to Literacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Yesterday, the Internet Safety Technical Task Force released the final report of the results of their work reviewing the risks that children and youth experience online, and evaluating different technical solutions for addressing these risks. The task force was led by John Palfrey at Harvard’s Berkman Center, working with Dena T. Sacco, danah boyd, Laura DeBonis, Jessica Tatlock, and a network of technology companies who have a stake in these issues.

The executive summary of the report provides a good high level summary of the findings of the task force, so I won’t recap that here, but I wanted to note just a few things that I found notable about the effort as a whole and the outcomes of the effort.

The task force began with an effort to survey the state of what we know about child safety online in order to inform the policy and technology development conversations. Though this may not seem particularly notable, this kind of careful review of research, particularly research on on-the-ground behaviors, is not done frequently enough in policy debates at least in the domain of online participation. They state, “Although numerous studies are currently underway and much research is available to address online safety concerns, very few of the findings enter public or political discourse. This is unfortunate, because the actual threats that youth may face appear to be different than the threats most people imagine.” Too often, public discourse centers on high-profile but marginal examples. These might be positive examples of kids doing unusually creative things online, or negative examples of online bullying, but rarely do we see nuanced and balanced portraits of what life online is like for the majority of kids who do not fit these exceptional categories. The task force was clearly trying to work from an established evidence base of actual behavior rather than our hopes and fears of what kids might get into online.

What the task force found in their research review is very much in line with the findings that my group recently released based on our three-year study of youth new media practice, that included many case studies of online participation. The task force focused on quantitative studies that looked at the distribution of risky practices across different populations, so it was not a review of qualitative cases. But I do think it is important to say that this review of a dimension of the quantitative work is in line with qualitative work in the field as well. In their review of the literature, the task force found that bullying and harrasment among peers is the most frequent threat that kids face online, and that sexual solicitation largely occurs between young people, not as a predatory relation between a much older adult and a teen. In our work, we found that teen online participation fell into two broad clusters - friendship-driven and interest-driven. While interest-driven sites such as fan sites and gaming and hobby sites were places that youth might connect with unknown others and adults, they did not connect to these sites as spaces to look for sex or romantic partners. By contrast, social network sites were places where kids flirt with one another, but they see these sites as spaces to connect with others their age, or perhaps slightly older or younger, but not as a place to connect with undefined others. They also thought that adult strangers who tried to connect with them on these sites were creepy and deviant. By contrast, many of them described how these peer groups in social network sites often replicated the kind of “drama” (or bullying) that they experience among peers at school. These social norms that kids described to us are clearly reflected in the task force findings.

The way in which the research review of the task force is corroborated by our qualitative work is one indicator of how bodies of research can productively inform policy debates. I think it important to look broadly at the patterns in research, human behavior, and technology trends over time, rather than to fixate on an individual study or a case. In the case of research on new technology, people often mistakenly feel that the most current study, on the most current technology is the most relevant for the policy decision of the day. I think this is a dangerous assumption in all fields, but particularly in an area that is undergoing rapid technological flux. Policy needs to be informed by the more resilient patterns in society, technology, and culture, rather than on the online site or application that happens to be popular at the moment. Youth behavior has been remarkably consistent across the past few decades, though the communication platforms young people use have changed tremendously. For example, many kids have moved from sites like Xanga to MySpace, and on to Facebook, or they have moved from IM to text messaging. While the platforms have changed, their social behavior and norms have remained consistent. Any legislation that is targeted at the current “MySpace problem” without looking more broadly at how kids socialize with their peers is going to miss the mark.

An example from a different domain might help illuminate this dynamic. It recently became illegal to “text message” while driving in California. This is an add-on to the existing prohibition against voice calls without the use of a headset. But what does this mean exactly? Is it okay to send an email, Twitter, or check my Facebook profile on my iPhone. “No officer, I wasn’t text messaging, I was tweeting!” The intent of the legislation should have been to limit the use of technologies that require text input or text access while driving. Even some rudimentary research on mobile device use and behavior could have informed policy makers of the importance of legislating not around a specific application, but around a set of core problematic behaviors that jeopardize safety.

I think this task force report is definitely one step in the right direction of providing smart and grounded input into policies that are informed by a grounded look at underlying social, technical, and cultural dynamics rather than isolated cases or specific technology platforms and fixes.