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Final Report: Introduction | DIGITAL YOUTH RESEARCH about 3 hours ago
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While we have a picture of technology trends on one hand, and spotlights on specific youth populations and practices on the other, we need more work that brings these two pieces of the puzzle together. How are specific new media practices embedded in existing (and evolving) social structures and cultural categories?
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The first goal of this book is to document youth new media practice in rich, qualitative detail in order to provide a picture of how young people are mobilizing these media and technologies in their everyday lives.
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We believe that an initial broad-based ethnographic understanding, grounded in the actual contexts of behavior and local cultural understandings, is crucial in grasping the contours of a new set of cultural categories and practices.
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In other words, we describe media and technology as part of a broader set of social structures and cultural patterns
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youth as a social and cultural category.
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sociology-of-youth-and-childhood approach, which means that we take youth seriously as actors in their own social worlds and look at childhood as a socially constructed, historically variable, and contested category
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Our work has mostly focused on youth in their middle-school and high-school years, between the ages of 12 and 18.
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In fact, one of the important outcomes of youth participation in many online practices is that they have an opportunity to interact with adults who are outside of their usual circle of family and school-based adult relationships.
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media continue to play a central role in the contestations over the boundaries and definition of youth culture and sociability.
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current snapshot of youth new media engagement
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Bill Would Limit Needle Exchanges - NYTimes.com on 2009-12-04
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A bill working its way through Congress would lift a ban of more than 20 years on using federal money for needle exchange programs.
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also ban federally financed exchanges from being within 1,000 feet of a school, park, library, college, video arcade or any place children might gather
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“Clearly the intent of this rule is to nullify the lifting of the ban.”
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barred from receiving city money as well as federal money.
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Representative Jack Kingston
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lobbying Congress to kill the 1,000-foot provisions.
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run by organizations that provide broad-based health services
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Advocates worry that if needle exchanges disappear, drug users will lose access to those other services.
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The center runs a needle exchange and offers antidrug programs to high schools in the area. With donations plummeting, it has a $374,000 budget deficit for 2009. Mr. Poole said he worried that the center’s programs would be threatened if the bill passed.
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Lower East Side Harm Reduction Center in Manhattan.
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smaller, rural exchanges,
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smaller, rural exchanges,
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smaller, rural exchanges, which lack the fund-raising abilities and infrastructure of many larger, urban exchanges, will be affected by the 1,000-foot rule.
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The number of users enrolled in the needle exchange here has doubled in the past year, while funding fell by about 15 percent
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allow the exchange to grow with the number of clients,
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was “compelling evidence” that increasing needle exchanges reduced H.I.V. transmission. It cited studies showing that the rate of infection dropped up to 18 percent in cities with an exchange.
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its location made it discreet and few people knew what it was.
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Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name: Online Games as "Third Places" on 2009-11-19
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Our conclusion is that by providing spaces for social interaction and relationships beyond the workplace and home, MMOs have the capacity to function as one form of a new "third place" for informal sociability
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—social relationships that, while not usually providing deep emotional support, typically function to expose the individual to a diversity of worldviews
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"bowling alone" hypothesis (Putnam, 2000), which suggests that media are displacing crucial civic and social institutions
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According to Putnam, time spent with relatively passive and disengaging media has come at the expense of time spent on vital community-building activities.
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The evidence to date is mixed
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A core problem on both sides of the debate is an underlying assumption that all Internet use is more or less equivalent
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It would be more plausible and empirically rigorous, then, to consider how specific forms of Internet activity impact civic and social engagement as a result of their particular underlying social architectures
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combining conclusions from two different lines of MMO research conducted from two different perspectives—one from a media effects approach, the other from a sociocultural perspective on cognition and learning.
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By providing spaces for social interaction and relationships beyond the workplace and home, MMOs have the capacity to function as one form of a new "third place" for informal sociability much like the pubs, coffee shops, and other hangouts of old.
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loosely structured by open-ended narratives
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They are known for their peculiar combination of designed "escapist fantasy" and emergent "social realism"
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from two research projects: one an examination of the media effects of MMOs, the other an ethnographic study of cognition and culture in such contexts.
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the conclusions of both studies were remarkably aligned.
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the assumption that the most fruitful advances are sometimes made when congruent findings are discovered through disparate means
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first project was a traditional effects study
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demonstrate the "effects" of game play vs. no game play.
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second project, a qualitative study of cognition and learning in MMOs (
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sociocultural perspective
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as a way to tease out what happens in the virtual setting of the game and how the people involved consider their own activities, the activities of others, and the contexts in which those activities takes place
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a reasonable level of generalizability (random assignment to condition in the first study) and contextualization (ethnographic description of existing in-game social networks and practices in the second)
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brick-and-mortar "third places" in America where individuals can gather to socialize informally beyond the workplace and home
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the exaggerated self-consciousness of individuals.
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In what ways might MMOs function as new third places for informal sociability?
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virtual environments have the potential to function as new (albeit digitally mediated) third places similar to pubs, coffee shops, and other hangouts.
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in this section we analyze the structural form of MMOs that warrants this "third place" assertion.
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eight defining characteristics of third places
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there is no default obligation
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To oblige any one person to play requires that explicit agreements be entered into by parties
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the default assumption is that no one person is compelled to participate legally, financially, or otherwise.
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Unless one transforms the virtual world of the game into a workplace (e.g., by taking on gainful employment as a virtual currency "farmer" for example, Dibbell, 2006; Steinkuehler, 2006a) or enters into such agreement, no one person is obligated to log in
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Yee's (2006) interviews also reveal that individuals who game with romantic partners or family find that such joint engagement in the "other world" of MMOs allows them to redefine the nature and boundaries of their offline relationships, often in more equitable terms than what may be possible in day-to-day offline life
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the relationships that play-partners have with one another offline are often "leveled" within the online world
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an individual's rank and status in the home, workplace, or society are of no importance
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appeal to people in part because they represent meritocracies otherwise unavailable in a world often filled with unfairness
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conversation plays an analogous role
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"In all such systems, linguistic interactions have been primary: users exchange messages that cement the social bonds between them, messages that reflect shared history and understandings (or misunderstandings) about the always evolving local norms for these interactions" (p. 22).
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such that "one may go alone at almost any time of the day or evening with assurance that acquaintances will be there"
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third places must also be easy to access
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accessible directly from one's home, making them even more accommodating to individual schedules and preferences
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barriers to initial access.
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"What attracts a regular visitor to a third place is supplied not by management but by the fellow customer,"
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"It is the regulars who give the place its character and who assure that on any given visit some of the gang will be there"
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As one informant satirically commented in an interview, "You go for the experience [points], you stay for the enlightening conversation.
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engendering a sense of reliable mentorship and community stability.
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Oldenburg argues that third places are characteristically homely, their d�cor defying tidiness and pretension whenever possible. MMOs do not fit this criterion in any literal sense
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In neither of our investigations did the degree of formality exhibited by players within the game bear any relation to the degree of visual ornamentation of the players' immediate vicinity.
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Thus, while the visual form of MMO environments does not fit Oldenburg's (1999) criterion of "low profile," the social function of those environments does.
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Oldenburg (1999) argues that seriousness is anathema to a vibrant third place; instead, frivolity, verbal word play, and wit are essential.
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The playful nature of MMOs is perhaps most apparent in what happens when individuals do bring gravity to the game.
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the home-like quality of third places in rooting people
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Participation becomes a regular part of daily life for players and, among regular gamemates such as guild members, exceptional absences (i.e., prolonged or unforeseen ones) are queried within the game or outside i
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create an atmosphere of mutual caring that, while avoiding entangling obligations per se, creates a sense of rootedness to the extent that regularities exist, irregularities are duly noted, and, when concerning the welfare of any one regular, checked into
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Are virtual communities really communities, or is physical proximity necessary?
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Anderson (1991), who suggests that geographic proximity itself is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for the emergence and preservation of "community."
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Social capital (Coleman, 1988) works analogously to financial capital; it can be acquired and spent, but for social and personal gains rather than financial
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operates cyclically within social networks because of their associated norms of reciprocity
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bridging social capital is inclusive.
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This form of social capital is marked by tentative relationships, yet what they lack in depth, they make up for in breadth.
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On the one hand, bridging social capital provides little in the way of emotional support; on the other hand, such relationships can broaden social horizons or worldviews, providing access to information and new resources.
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bonding social capital is exclusive.
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it can also result in insularity.
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shows that bridging and bonding social capital are tied to different social contexts, given the network of relationships they enable.
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Virtual worlds appear to function best as bridging mechanisms rather than as bonding ones, although they do not entirely preclude social ties of the latter type.
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One could argue that, if the benchmark for bonding social capital is the ability to acquire emotional, practical, or substantive support, then MMOs are not well set up for the task:
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While deep affective relationships among players are possible, they are less likely to generate the same range of bonding benefits as real-world relationships because of players' geographic dispersion and the nature of third places themselves.
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Despite differences in theoretical grounding and methodologies, our conclusions were remarkably similar across complementary macro- and micro-levels.
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It is worth noting, however, that as gamers become more involved in long-term social networks such as guilds and their activities become more "hardcore" (e.g., marked by participation in large-scale collaborative problem-solving endeavors such as "raids" into difficult territories or castle sieges), the function of MMOs as "third places" begins to wane.
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It may be, then, that the structure and function of MMOs as third places is one part of the "life cycle" for some gamers in a given title.
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In such cases, MMOs appear to enable a different kind of sociability, one ostensibly recognizable as a "community" nonetheless.
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However, our research findings indicate that this conclusion is uninformed. To argue that MMO game play is isolated and passive media consumption in place of informal social engagement is to ignore the nature of what participants actually do behind the computer screen
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Perhaps it is not that contemporary media use has led to a decline in civic and social engagement, but rather that a decline in civic and social engagement has led to retribalization through contemporary media (McLuhan, 1964).
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Such a view, however, ignores important nuances of what "community" means by pronouncing a given social group/place as either wholly "good" or "bad" without first specifying which functions the online community ought to fulfill.
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Moreover, despite the semantics of the term, "weak" ties have been shown to be vital in communities, relationships, and opportunities.
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is to what extent such environments shift the existing balance between bridging and bonding
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In light of Putnam's evidence of the decline of crucial civic and social institutions, it may well be that the classification "lacking bridging social capital" best characterizes the everyday American citizen. T
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Without bridging relationships, individuals remain sheltered from alternative viewpoints and cultures and largely ignorant of opportunities and information beyond their own closely bound social network.
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it seems ironic that, now of all times, we would ignore one possible solution to our increasingly vexed relationship with diversity.
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EARCOS Admin Tech Cohort – Reflection | The Thinking Stick on 2009-11-06
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a fascinating look at how engagement and presentation of information leads to learning.
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hey found the information and presentation so engaging that it didn’t happen.
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Download of Synergeia on 2009-10-28
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Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age: Using Alternative Assessment Models to Empower Youth-directed Learning on 2009-10-28
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distributed learning network,
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understand their role as they traverse their learning nodes, and enhance their abilities to make connections amongst them.
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how she chose to group certain nodes
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I had to push her, however, to list all of her portable media devices, web sites and after school programs. She wasn't used to thinking about them all as sites of learning.
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the one ultimately responsible for learning how to best design and navigate her network, now and in the future.
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Digital Literacy Transcript.
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Global Kids developed and implemented a curriculum that used social media to sharpen their literacies while assisting youth to understand how to think about them.
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The Transcript turns each literacy into a triangle-shaped badge
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The Transcript served as both a feedback mechanism to motivate and guide learning and an alternative transcript to show colleges or prospective employers about abilities which would otherwise go unrecognized.
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personally curated by youth like Tashawna to offer an audio and visual tour of their social media productions that highlights the literacies developed through each social media project.
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apophenia: Some thoughts on Twitter vs. Facebook Status Updates on 2009-10-28
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Diver on 2009-10-26
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Get It Wrong Before You Google to Learn It Better - Learning - Lifehacker on 2009-10-22
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CAST: Center for Applied Special Technology on 2009-10-16
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