A paper co-authored by Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, titled Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, considers the proliferation of online content creation and networking activities by teens in the USA.
Jenkins’ paper explains that most of these teens are involved in participatory cultures:
A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).”
A growing body of scholarship suggests potential benefits of these forms of participatory culture, including opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, a changed attitude toward intellectual property, the diversification of cultural expression, the development of skills valued in the modern workplace, and a more empowered conception of citizenship. Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement. The new literacies almost all involve social skills developed through collaboration and networking. These skills build on the foundation of traditional literacy, research skills, technical skills, and critical analysis skills taught in the classroom.
The new skills include:
- Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving.
- Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery.
- Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes.
- Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content.
- Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.
- Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities.
- Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal.
- Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources.
- Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities.
- Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information.
- Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.
A central goal of this report is to shift the focus of the conversation about the digital divide from questions of technological access to those of opportunities to participate and to develop the cultural competencies and social skills needed for full involvement. Schools as institutions have been slow to react to the emergence of this new participatory culture; the greatest opportunity for change is currently found in afterschool programs and informal learning communities. Fostering such social skills and cultural competencies requires a more systemic approach to media education in the United States.
Question: is this relevant to youth and educators in developing countries? Can the same appropriation of technology be expected of youth in South Africa? Is there an equal need for cultural competencies and social skills needed there? And can these activities, which are clearly engaging for young people, be used as a vehicle for other forms of learning?
I believe the answers to be yes more than no. At the Shuttleworth Foundation, the focus area Education in an emerging participatory culture will frame all projects and research of the C&A theme.
While on the point of online social networks and teen safety, Pete Reilly, President of the New York Association of Computers and Technology in Education (NYSCATE), has written an article that uses various and contrasting statistics to help teachers (and parents) evaluate the risks. This quote is interesting:
The question is, “Are we going to take a “zero risk” approach to using technology and the tools of the Web?”
We don’t take a “zero risk” approach with our sports programs where the chance of injury, paralysis, and, in rare cases, death, is always present. We don’t take that approach with field trips where students travel to museums and historical sites in locations where they might be touched by crime. We don’t take that approach with recess on our playgrounds, or transporting our kids to and from school.
I like this. There is no perfectly safe place in the world for young people. Of course there are measures that teachers and parents can take to make the internet experience somewhat safer for learners, but in the end they are the ones who need to be savvy enough to recognise danger signals and respond appropriately.
Last year Megan Meier, a 13-year-old from Missouri, committed suicide after an online relationship went sour. Megan thought she was dating a likable 16-year-old boy named Josh who she met on MySpace. After a month, Josh turned on her by sending cruel and abusive emails. It turns out that “Josh” was actually the 47-year-old mother — Lori Drew — of one of Megan’s ex-friends. Lori was avenging her daughter, who Megan had apparently spurned in the past.
The press have predictably dined out on the story, which has provided ammunition for those opposed to the dangers, and even evils, of online social networking. danah boyd’s post about this tragic event is interesting and mitigates somewhat against the media hype: Overprotective parenting and bullying: Who is to blame for the suicide of Megan Meier?
It’s true that mediating technology reduces social consequences — e.g. being punched by someone who you insult — because it takes away the immediacy of physical, real-time interaction. (This is not new. Good old-fashioned letters do the same. They shift time and space. But today’s mediating technologies are different because of persistence, searchability, replicability and invisible audiences.) So, does this reduction in social consequence mean that it’s easier to be rude and cruel in cyberspace? Another one of danah boyd’s posts — Musing about online social norms — provides some insight into answering this question.
What happened to Megan was the result of a deceiving, abusive, bullying adult. We should not blame the technology. Further, online activities usually mirror offline ones, e.g. if you are a vulnerable teenager offline, you’ll probably be one online. This looks like the case with Megan. While education about online activities and how to navigate this brave new world might not have saved Megan, it cannot be a bad thing and we should continue to educate young people about life in mediated publics. In this space certain social consequences are limited, but others are exaggerated due to the fact that what you say sticks around, it is searchable, it is replicable and it can be read by unintended audiences. Lori Drew was found out, after all.
A new study from Nokia and The Future Laboratory predicts that by 2012, a quarter of all entertainment will be “circular”, that is created, edited, and shared within peer groups rather than being generated by traditional media. The bulk of the study was based on interviews with trend-setting consumers from 17 countries about their digital behaviors and lifestyles.
Mark Selby, Vice President, Multimedia, Nokia, said: “The trends we are seeing show us that people will have a genuine desire not only to create and share their own content, but also to remix it, mash it up and pass it on within their peer groups – a form of collaborative social media.” The term circular is based on the movement of content: it is created, shared with friends/family, gets edited/remixed and then shared on or returned again.
As Tim Leberecht of CNet says, one has to take these vendor-funded studies with a pinch of salt. He makes an interesting point about the study: that the distinction between traditional and “circular” entertainment is becoming increasingly difficult to define. But still, for what it is worth, the tech early adopters in these countries are living in and establishing a participatory culture.
I wonder, since the data is based on the actions of early-adopters, how much of this applies to South Africa (SA)? If the prediction is five years out, is it any more for SA? And if yes, how many more years? Only two of the 17 countries are traditionally comparable to SA: Brazil and India. Reading about the survey findings there didn’t help to answer these questions, but it does make for interesting reading.
