Futures of Learning

One of the foci of our literature reviews involves gaming and gaming practices in international contexts. While attention to the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of gaming is emerging in the United States, Europe and Asia (see Larissa Hjorth’s recent edited issue in Games and Culture), it is often difficult to find documented accounts and analyses of gaming practices in other regional and national contexts. There are a number of reasons why this may be the case. In the first instance, gaming (at least mediated forms of gaming) requires basic infrastructure, such as gaming systems, availability of games, sources of power and, in the case of networked gaming, connectivity. Although infrastructure and availability partially account for the lack of information on gaming in contexts (particularly in the “developing” world), academic interests also play a role in the relative dearth of research on everyday gaming around the world. For many of us who conduct ethnographic research, the emphasis on text and narratives (rather than context) that dominated early studies of video games may have contributed to the lack of attention to gaming. For many anthropologists, I also suspect that the relatively lowly status of video games and mediated gaming as a legitimate object of academic inquiry may also contribute to the inattention to gaming (although see Boellsdorf 2008).

Yet, despite the empirical gaps in the research on gaming, I am not convinced that mediated gaming is not an everyday part of life, even in the most economically disenfranchised countries and regions. Indeed, in my own research on ICTs and development in Jamaica, gaming was present, but it always rested in our footnotes, fieldnotes and contributions to the “gray” policy literature. For example, when I was in Jamaica in 2004 carrying out fieldwork I often had to go to one of the local internet cafes to send attachments or lengthier fieldnotes to Danny (Miller) who was in London during portions of our fieldwork. Looking back on one of my notebooks, I recently noted that I managed to scribble on the back of the page a sketch of the inside of an internet café in one of the malls in Portmore, Jamaica. At the time what stood out was the large numbers (over 20) of television screens and monitors that were solely dedicated to gaming; the few computers dedicated to email and the internet were located at the back of the café. Depending upon the time of day, it was almost a fight to make your way through the groups of boys in their khaki uniforms gathering around the gaming computers. The popularity of the games which, in turn, spurred the congregation of boisterous boys was part of the reason that a UNICEF-sponsored internet café in Portmore restricted playing games (as well as downloading pornography and music), and the community internet café, Zinc Link), located in one of the most dangerous areas of Kingston, restricted game playing to “educational games” (see Miller and Horst 2005).

Games were also present outside of the internet cafes, in the homes, schemes and districts of rural and urban Jamaica. Even in 2004, one of the local video stores that sold original and bootlegged copies of videocassettes and DVDs also kept a small collection of desktop games behind the counter. A number of the more middle class families (ones who managed to purchase computers) had copies of games such as “Need for Speed”.  In one of the poorest areas in Portmore where I carried out research, a family received a second-hand Nintendo console in a barrel (literally a barrel drum typically filled with basic staples like rice, food, clothing and other items shipped to Jamaica) from one of their cousins living in New York. Like the footballs, food and other resources in the neighborhood, many of the members of the local “crew” gathered together in the afternoons and evenings to play games. In this particular community video games superseded dominoes, the game that is prevalent throughout the Caribbean among men. Playing games, and gaining access to new games, also was an incentive to trade and borrow other people’s cell phones. Teenagers in rural and urban Jamaica often possessed a wealth of knowledge about the particular games offered on different phone models and tried to borrow their parents’, siblings’, other family members’, neighbors’ and friends’ cell phones while they were bored, or “killing time” (see Ito and Bittanti, Forthcoming) at home. With almost one-third of Jamaica’s population being under the age of 15, and 26% unemployment rate among youth of working age, 15-24, in 2004, games on mobile phones and (in most cases) second-hand devices like gameboys or consoles were a welcome addition to their everyday ecology.

Even a quick review of my notes from our research on mobile phones in Jamaica suggests that gaming is not only present in a place like Jamaica, but that it may be being integrated into Jamaican culture in a number of fascinating ways. For example, and like many contexts in the United States, gender dynamics emerged around gaming. In the relative privacy of their home, many girls talked about how they enjoyed playing the basic games that came on their mobile phones when they were “bored”, but girls were relatively absent when the members of the local “crews” played games on the neighborhood console in more public settings. In addition, the only girls at the internet café were the girlfriends who lingered near their boyfriend while he played a game, and the (quite popular) girl who took payments at the shop. At the time I remember thinking these practices were interesting but, for a variety of reasons (time constraints, funding sources, and other research agendas), I never felt followed it up with further research. Given that so many of us carrying out ethnographic work in contexts outside of the United States may find ourselves making similar choices, I wonder what lies in the margins and footnotes of other researcher’s fieldnotes which we can and should start paying attention to in order to develop a deeper understanding of new media in everyday. Perhaps more importantly, how we can begin to bring these footnotes and partial accounts into the foreground to enable us to map the gaming landscape in a range of countries and regions throughout the world?

References:
Horst, Heather A. and Daniel Miller. 2006. The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication. Oxford: Berg.

Ito, Mizuko and Matteo Bittanti. Forthcoming. Gaming. In Ito, et. al’s Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press

Miller, Daniel and Heather A. Horst. 2005. The Jamaican Internet: Supply, Demand and Education. Information Society Research Group
Working Paper Series No. 5 (June 2005).

Dan Perkel reviews some of the work on social network sites presented at a recent conference at the London School of Economics.

Last week, I spent two days attending the Media at LSE - Fifth Anniversary Conference of the Media Studies program at the London School of Economics. The conference had five tracks packed into two days. One of these was titled “Media and New Media Literacies” and there were a number of talks and papers that are relevant to our research efforts. This post is going to go into some depth about the very first session, which was a fascinating set of talks coming from people outside of the United States researching social network sites. (But scroll down to the bottom to see a few other presentations I really enjoyed.)

The first of these talks about social network sites in an global context concerned the use of mobile phones and social network sites in Japan [1]. Toshie Takahashi, from Tokyo’s Rikkyo University, presented the results of two studies . The first were video interviews of Japanese youth on the streets of Tokyo. These interviews showed some of the passion that interviewees had for their mobile phones and how essential they felt they were to their day to day life. But most of the time in the talk and in the paper concerns the second study a comparison of Japanese young people’s take up of Japanese SNS Mixi with their use of MySpace. According to Takahashi, Mixi launched in Japan in 2004 and now has 15 million members. MySpace Japan launched only two years later, in 2006, and currently has 1.2 million users. Takahashi argued that the use of Mixi and MySpace reflected the tension in Japanese culture between the notion of Uchi and Soto. As she puts it in the paper, “Uchi (inside, us)...exists in the belonging of people to social groups linked by close interpersonal relationships.” This social intimacy is linked to strong social obligations. Soto corresponds to “outside, them” and is about an outward-facing presentation.

The details of her study are fascinating and I cannot cover many here (though the paper is online ). Takahashi shows how people’s use of their MySpace accounts and their Mixi accounts are quite different in how they connect (or opt not to) with their friends and how they present themselves. There seems to be a different emotional valence in their use of each site, strongly connected with this tension between Uchi and Soto. Mixi opens up opportunities to be members of multiple Uchis (previously not thought possible), but this comes with significant social obligations to others. Use of MySpace, on the other hand, corresponds with the notion of Soto and people sometimes refuse connections to people they already know and rather present a radically different image of themselves as they connect to outside-Japan popular culture.

Takahashi concludes that contrary to the way a Senior Vice President at Viacom International Japan argued that Mixi is about “us” while MySpace Japan is really about “me, me, me,” both are about “me” and “them.” But Mixi is about “me and them” in Japan and involves a process of “re-Japanisation” while MySpace is about “me and them” in the global world and involves a romanticized process of self-creation and “de-Japanisation.”

Following Takahshi, Fiona Lennox of the UK’s Office of Communication, or Ofcom [2], presented a synthesis of various studies the organization conducted which social networking data was gathered:

• Media literacy audits on both children and adults
• A mixed methods study on social networking
• Related to the above, material from a recent review that covers harm and offense in media content
• A compilation of video interviews from three year project called Media Lives

One of the more interesting things about the studies, however, is the fact that they have data from both kids and adults and find that there are similarities as well as differences. Both groups primarily use these sites as their communication hubs. Issues of safety and security were not major concerns. Finally, there was a gap between what parents knew about what their kids were up to when they went online.

Another aspect of the studies I found interesting had to do with the way Ofcom created profiles of social network site users, dividing them into “alpha socializers,” “attention seekers,” “followers,” “faithfuls,” and “functional users.” I had trouble understanding the differences at times (and was surprised to hear that “Alpha Socializers” were more male than female in the UK...does this term mean what I assumed it to mean? Perhaps not!).  I also wondered how these user-types may contrast with the way that those of us associated with the Digital Youth research here in the United States tried to purposely move away from grouping people in this way and rather groups practices into various categories. I think one of the things we’ll have to consider going forward are the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.

The final talk of the session was a presentation by Naeema Farooqi of Dar Al-Hekma College in Saudi Arabia of her ongoing research on Facebook practices in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. She and colleagues gathered the results of questionnaires of college students at their respective institutions and followed some of them up with more in-depth interviews. She also mentioned that a number of Pakistani youth are on Orkut, an older social network site. Unfortunately, Farooqi’s paper is not yet online and my notes on the talk are unintelligible. I would love to hear more from her (and am making an attempt to do so). Despite my lack of details here, I still felt that pointing people towards her work and research would be a great starting point for building connections and the possibilities of comparative work.

I just wanted to conclude this review of these three talks with one meta-comment. Had I not been an attendee at the conference, I don’t know if I ever would have heard of the work of Takashi and Farooqi. More importantly I don’t think I would have gone looking under “media literacy” to find them, though I understand why they were there if one thinks of any literacies as highly contextual, embedded in practices that aren’t easy to abstract from their socio-cultural contexts. I think it shows how tricky it can be to connect researchers who are interested in common phenomena, but are in different fields and disciplines. I wonder if moving between global fields or disciplines is trickier than moving between global regions?

More from the conference

A few other things to check out from the conference:

• Sara Thornton’s fascinating account of nineteenth century advertising , which raises interesting implications and questions about the nature of advertising on the web today
• Panagiota Alevizou’s comparison of the ideologies and discourses on Wikipedia and Citizendium
• Hans Martens’ comparative work on the evaluation of different media education programs in Belgium
• Helen Manchester’s investigation into some of the contradictions in several different community media projects in the UK

Finally, you may want to see the final conference program , abstracts , and full papers, all on the conference website.

[1] Actually, the first talk was YouTube, Digital Literacy, and the Growth of Knowledge by John Hartley.  It was more of a theoretical piece on the nature of certain kinds of storytelling and the structuring of this storytelling that go on on YouTube. I am not going to give a recap here though the paper is online and is worth a read for those interested in the development of sites that open up opportunities for media sharing and distribution. Also, the paper mentions a pre-YouTube action research project from Hartley’s research group at the Queensland University of Technology (in Australia) called the Youth Internet Radio Network that is an interesting bit of history.

[2] According the their website, Ofcom is the “the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries, with responsibilities across television, radio, telecommunications and wireless communications services.” Ofcom was established by the Communications Act of 2003 and has been charged with the promotion of media literacy in the UK, where media literacy is defined by as “the ability to access, understand and create communications in a variety of contexts.” See their publications and research page for reports.

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.