Futures of Learning

We are very pleased to announce the public release of the findings from the Digital Youth project. The three-year project, funded by the John T. and Catherine T. Macarthur Foundation as part of the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning initiative Digital Media and Learning initiative., involved over 28 researchers and collaborators based at the University of Southern California and University of California, Berkeley.

As an ethnographic investigation of informal learning with digital media, the project represented a unique opportunity to conduct baseline research on youths’ everyday engagements with new media, and the implications of these practices for learning. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the research team – which ranged from anthropology, information studies, media studies, psychology and sociology – the very negotiation of conducting ‘ethnography’ challenged disciplinary assumptions about the nature of knowledge production and dissemination. Rather than an edited book of 22 individual projects or case studies, we shared our research materials to facilitate the process of collaborative analysis. The White Paper and forthcoming book with MIT Press represents the culmination of this process of interdisciplinary collaboration.

You can find links to a summary of our report as well as a draft of our book which will be published with MIT Press next fall. 

We will be celebrating the release of our report at a reception at the American Anthropological Association meetings in San Francisco. Please join us on Saturday November 22, at 6:30-8:00pm, San Francisco Hilton & Towers, Golden Gate Ballroom.

Click here to download a two-page summary of the report.

Click here to download the summary white paper.

Click here to access the full report.

Click here for the press release and video being hosted by the MacArthur Foundation.

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RESEARCH SUMMARY

Over three years, University of California, Irvine researcher and her research team interviewed over 800 youth and young adults and conducted over 5000 hours of online observations as part of the most extensive U.S. study of youth digital media use to date. They found that social network sites, online games, video-sharing sites, and gadgets such as iPods and mobile phones are now fixtures of youth culture.  The research finds today’s youth may be coming of age and struggling for autonomy and identity amid new worlds for communication, friendship, play, and self-expression. Many adults worry that children are wasting time online, texting, or playing video games.  The researchers explain why youth find these activities compelling and important.  The digital world is creating new opportunities for youth to grapple with social norms, explore interests, develop technical skills, and experiment with new forms of self-expression.  These activities have captured teens’ attention because they provide avenues for extending social worlds, self- directed learning, and independence.

MAJOR FINDINGS

- Youth use online media to extend friendships and interests. -

Most youth use online networks to extend the friendships that they navigate in the familiar contexts of school, religious organizations,sports, and other local activities. They can be always “on,” in constant contact with their friends through private communications like instant messaging or mobile phones, as well as in public ways through social network sites such as MySpace and Facebook.  With these “friendship-driven” practices, youth are almost always associating with people they already know in their offline lives. The majority of youth use new media to “hang out” and extend existing friendships in these ways. A smaller number of youth also use the online world to explore interests and find information that goes beyond what they have access to at school or in their local community. Online groups enable youth to connect to peers who share specialized and niche interests of various kinds, whether that is online gaming, creative writing, video editing, or other artistic endeavors. In these interest-driven networks, youth may find new peers outside the boundaries of their local community. They can also find opportunities to publicize and distribute their work to online audiences, and to gain new forms of visibility and reputation.

- Youth engage in peer-based, self-directed learning online. -

In both friendship-driven and interest-driven online activity, youth create and navigate new forms of expression and rules for social behavior. By exploring new interests, tinkering, and “messing around” with new forms of media, they acquire various forms of technical and media literacy. Through trial and error, youth add new media skills to their repertoire, such as how to create a video or game, or customize their MySpace page. Teens then share their creations and receive feedback from others online. By its immediacy and breadth of information, the digital world lowers barriers to self-directed learning. Some youth “geek out” and dive into a topic or talent. Contrary to popular images, geeking out is highly social and engaged, although usually not driven primarily by local friendships. Youth turn instead to specialized knowledge groups of both teens and adults from around the country or world, with the goal of improving their craft and gaining reputation among expert peers. While adults participate, they are not automatically the resident experts by virtue of their age.Geeking out in many respects erases the traditional markers of status and authority. New media allow for a degree of freedom and autonomy for youth that is less apparent in a classroom setting. Youth respect one another’s authority online, and they are often more motivated to learn from peers than from adults. Their efforts are also largely self-directed, and the outcome emerges through exploration, in contrast to classroom learning that is oriented by set, predefined goals.

IMPLICATIONS

New media forms have altered how youth socialize and learn, and raise a new set of issues that educators, parents, and policymakers should consider.

-Adults should facilitate young people’s engagement with digital media. Contrary to adult perceptions, while hanging out online, youth are picking up basic social and technical skills they need to fully participate in contemporary society.  Erecting barriers to participation deprives teens of access to these forms of learning.Participation in the digital age means more than being able to access serious online information and culture. Youth could benefit from educators being more open to forms of experimentation and social exploration that are generally not characteristic of educational institutions. Because of the diversity of digital media, it is problematic to develop a standardized set of benchmarks against which to measure young people’s technical and new media literacy. Friendship-driven and interest-driven online participation have very different kinds of social connotations.  For example, whereas friendship-driven activities centers upon peer culture, adult participation is more welcomed in the latter more “geeky” forms of learning.  In addition,the content, behavior, and skills that youth value are highly variable depending on what kinds of social groups they associate with. In interest-driven participation, adults have an important role to play. Youth using new media often learn from their peers, not teachers or adults. Yet adults can still have tremendous influence in setting learning goals, particularly on the interest-driven side where adult hobbyists function as role models and more experienced peers. To stay relevant in the 21st century, education institutions need to keep pace with the rapid changes introduced by digital media. Youths’ participation in this networked world suggests new ways of thinking about the role of education. What, the authors ask, would it mean to really exploit the potential of the learning opportunities available through online resources and networks? What would it mean to reach beyond traditional education and civic institutions and enlist the help of others in young people’s learning?  Rather than assuming that education is primarily about preparing for jobs and careers, they question what it would mean to think of it as a process guiding youths’ participation in public life more generally. 

From 2001 to 2006, The University of Tokyo Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies has been the home to the Media Expression, Learning, and Literacy Project (MELL). This project is one of the largest projects in Japan dealing with media literacy.This past summer, we spoke to Hisamatsu Mizushima from Tokai University about the project.

Mizushima had left a career in advertising and a job at Infoseek Japan to start graduate school in Information Studies at Tokyo University. There he met Shin Mizukoshi, a sociologist and one of the founders of the MELL project. In addition to Mizukoshi, the early participants in the MELL project included educational researcher Yuhei Yamauchi, public television producer Katsumi Ichikawa, journalist Akiko Sugaya, and high school educator Naoya Hayashi. The project was led by these five, bur also included 80 members comprised of researchers, graduate students, media professionals, teachers, NPOs and community organizations across the country, as well as 4-500 supporters who subscribed to the MELL email list. The project was funded by The University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, the National Association of Commercial Broadcasters in Japan, Benesse Corporation, http://www.moba-ken.jp/english”>NTT DoCoMo Mobile Society Research Institute.

Mizushima describes the situation in Japan at the time that Mizukoshi began the MELL project in 2000. It was a period still dominated by traditional mass media such as mainstream newspapers and television stations. Mizukoshi used to describe this as an context where government policy has populated the hills and valleys of Japan completely with cypress. The native species in each region had been cut down to make way for forests of large cypress.  In the shadows of these huge trees, grasses struggle to grow, and small animals and insects have difficulty surviving. The ecology of Japanese media had become like these cypress forests, where cable television, community radio, and other smaller-scale community media forms could not survive in the shadow of mainstream mass media.

In the nineties, Mizushima was beginning to see this situation start to change. Digital media was spreading, and the mass media were under suspicion because of various cases of false reports and faked forms of media reporting. With the adoption of digital media, there was the potential for citizens to actively participate in media rather than simply consuming mass media. The MELL project was developed based on the idea of having people make their own media while simultaneously building new networks and organizations for media making.

Mizukoshi used the ecological term “media biotope” (link to Japanese page) to describe his effort to support participatory community media. A biotope is sphere optimized for certain organisms to inhabit. His idea was to create a fertile ground for a variety of different trees to grow, and to challenge the media environment that had become blanketed exclusively by cypress. Mizukoshi writes, “Just as it is critical for humans as organisms to have access to diverse ecologies, it is critical for humans as social beings to have access to diverse media ecologies.”

Here I’d like to introduce two of the diverse projects that were part of MELL.

“Understand TV by Making TV: Let’s Make a News Program!” is a project that links schools and local television through a class on television program production. The goal of the project is to shift the students’ identity from that of a media consumer to a media producer. High school students are placed in groups of four and do research, shooting, and editing for a 3-minute news program that is broadcast over local TV. Of course, the students have questions about what kinds of themes they should take up and how they should represent them. They also frequently encounter difficulties execiting their shoot, or have to change their plans after conducting research. The staff of the TV station step in to offer advice. Through this process of trial and error, the students learn that even in the case of news that aims to portray the facts, the information that gets represented on TV is a simplified version of what has happened. By breaking down the boundaries between broadcast stations and the school, this project helps develop both a critical and expressive eye towards the media.
Another MELL project is “Let’s Make a Magazine of New Living.” In contrast to the prior project, which focuses on high school students, this project supports mothers in designing a community-oriented email magazine oriented to issues in their everyday life. Although young mothers are generally put in the position of media consumers, they share a strong interest in child rearing. This project does not simply support the acquisition of the technical skills needed to create an email magazine. In addition, it creates a cultural foundation for pushing forward a project with their own effort. The resulting email magazine, a conversation space for young mothers in one Tokyo district, continued after the MELL project members left the effort. The MELL project members did not take the role of controlling the project, but rather helped incubate it in the initial start-up phase. The outcomes of the project are very much in the hands of the participating mothers.

The MELL project conceives of media literacy in a way that is quite different from media literacy programs that look purely at the reception of mass media. Instead, the project aims to develop critical literacy as well as expressive literacy that can open up new kinds of communicative action. It pays attention to previously ignored media biotopes that correspond to small social spaces. The project’s media literacy practice involves having members consider the history and specific media contexts of the localities they work in, and to proactively build a media biotope based on this environment. This approach goes beyond media literacy approaches the focus only on how to critically interpret media texts. By mobilizing digital media, the MELL project seeks to build independent and diverse media ecologies.

Mizushima describes how over a five-year period, project members planted the seeds of the MELL project in a diverse range of practices. Although the MELL project ended in 2006, the work continues in a new project, MELL Platz (Plaza) (link to Japanese page), that brings together former members of the project. Although each individual field project under the MELL umbrella may have been small in scope, the graduate students and other project members who become involved have become organizers in a wide range of local media biotopes. Mizushima sees this as the biggest achievement of the MELL project. As the members of the project have scattered to different parts of the country, they have built local networks in different regions, and spread the seeds of the project further. MELL Platz has become the community that links these different efforts. We can expect to see small but important changes to the Japanese media landscape emerging from these distributed local efforts.

You can read the “Tokyo Declaration” from MELL Project here

As China has become an increasingly central actor on the world stage, and with the 2008 Olympics recently held in Beijing, there is a great deal of interest in this vast and diverse nation. China is undergoing numerous changes, not least of which is its rapid growth in telecommunications: it currently leads the world in both number of mobile phone subscriptions and Internet users, with roughly 616 million and 253 million, respectively, according to Chinese government statistics. In this post I will discuss one aspect of digital media use in China: how young rural-to-urban migrants in Beijing are using mobile phones as a crucial tool for building and enriching their social networks. My discussion here is based on a portion of my recently completed research in Beijing (Wallis, 2008), in which I was concerned with how young migrants, especially young women, engaged with mobile phones to create meaning in their lives in the city, and what economic, social, cultural, and structural forces enabled and constrained such usage within the dislocations and contradictions that characterize contemporary China. I was primarily concerned with what I call “socio-techno practices,” or the ways in which new communication technologies are integrated into existing social practices and at the same time open up new spaces or possibilities for their enactment.

To briefly provide some context, while rural-to-urban migration is common throughout the world, the role of the state in China makes migration there an interesting phenomenon. Prior to the government’s policy of “reform and opening” (gaige kaifang) in the late seventies, China’s household registration system (hukou) severely restricted people’s mobility and with few exceptions kept the rural and the urban populations separated geographically and culturally. Though substantially weakened, the hukou still serves as an institutional barrier that prevents those from rural areas from gaining full urban citizenship, and it works as a cultural barrier, helping to perpetuate myriad forms of exploitation and discrimination against rural “peasants” who migrate from the countryside to seek work in China’s cities. Deemed a “floating population” (liudong renkou), migrant workers are largely responsible for building the incredible infrastructure that has gone up in China’s cities in recent years, including Beijing’s National Aquatics Center (the Water Cube) and the National Stadium (the Bird’s Nest) that were on display during the Olympics. And though migrants also staff the shops, restaurants, and marketplaces that are now everywhere, for the most part they cannot participate in such modes of consumption and leisure enjoyed by China’s rising middle class (and elites). Young migrant women are often called dagongmei, meaning “working little sister” or “maiden worker,” a term that connotes a young, unmarried woman with low status and few rights. In the media and official documents, they are frequently portrayed as weak and vulnerable, even though they might not see themselves that way.

My study involved about 70 women and 20 men who were young (aged 16 to 25), single, and had journeyed to Beijing after finishing some or all of middle school. They were employed in restaurants, marketplaces, and hair salons, where they hoped to earn some income, learn some skills, and “see the world,” as they put it. They tended to earn rather low wages, and many worked 10 or 12 hours a day, some with one or two days off per month and others with no days off except during Chinese New Year. The women in particular occupied a very limited social space; usually their lives revolved around their jobs and their dorm or tiny apartment, which was often supplied by their employer. Their circumscribed place was further enforced by spatial and discursive power relations that construct the city as unsafe and unwelcoming due to their position as women and outsiders, marked by their accent, their build, and their mannerisms. Several women told me that though they might have a relative in Beijing, such as an aunt, uncle, or sibling, their friends (as opposed to co-workers) did not live in Beijing, and even when they had friends in Beijing, it was often hard for them to meet due to work schedules and distances (Beijing is a very large city and traveling by bus, as migrants do, is often quite time consuming).

So how does a mobile phone make a difference for them? Many of the men and women I interviewed had grown up without a landline in their family home. They also did not have one in their residence in Beijing, and their access to fixed-line phones at work was either non-existent or very limited. While there are pay phones and “call bars” all over Beijing, these are inconvenient and lack privacy. Perhaps it is not surprising then that the first “big” item bought by all the migrants I knew was a cell phone. Buying their first phone was such a significant event that nearly every participant in my study could tell me the date, time, and place of the purchase, who had accompanied them, the price, and how long it had taken them to save up enough money (usually several months). Often sacrifices were involved in buying a mobile phone and tough choices had to be made: a phone was bought instead of new clothes, a television, a bike, or even a precious train ticket home after months of being away.

As the first major item purchased with one’s urban wages, and one on which an inordinate amount of money is spent – often one or two month’s salary even when cheaper models are available, as also noted in prior research among migrant workers in China’s southern factories (Law & Peng, 2006; Yang & Chu, 2006) – clearly a cell phone has symbolic meaning. But more importantly, such telephonic “leapfrogging” makes a profound difference in migrants’ ability both to increase and enhance their social networks. In other words, it allows them to build up contacts in a manner previously unavailable and provides an important means for expanding their personal networks (guanxiwang), something extremely vital in a culture where personal relationships and bonds of reciprocity are often crucial for facilitating numerous types of social functions. Perhaps even more important than the expanded social networks enabled by the mobile phone, however, is the way the cell phone is used to enrich social relationships. Given the constraints on migrants’ time, the circumscribed social world they occupy in the city, and the far distances that often separate them from those with whom they are emotionally close, the ability to surpass these spatial, temporal, and structural barriers is extremely important. What I noted on many occasions was that many close friendships were maintained strictly through a mobile phone; that is, it is not mostly a “supportive communication technology” (Yoon, 2003) for relationships that are primarily sustained through face-to-face contact. It was instead what I call an “expansive communication tool,” used not only for maintaining ties with friends who are now spread all over China but also with those who although in the same city are nonetheless geographically unreachable. 

For this reason, the connectivity provided through the mobile phone should not be underestimated. Connectivity means communication, which lies at the heart of the social world, and such connectivity allows migrants – often isolated, often discriminated against – an anchoring and inclusion in networks of sociality that are crucial to their well-being in the city. In this regard, the sheer convenience of the cell phone is also not a trivial matter (and it is interesting to note that not one of my informants ever mentioned safety as a reason for buying a phone). For most migrants, especially young women, the mobile phone is not just one more communication device added to a fixed-line phone and/or a computer with Internet access. It is their primary, if not only, means of keeping in touch with others. Certainly prior to the arrival of the mobile phone, migrant workers remained in contact with family and very close friends, through using public phones, writing letters, with pagers, and so forth. However, the transformation in ease and frequency of access facilitated via the mobile phone is hard to fathom for those of us who have been surrounded by ubiquitous telephony our entire lives. For China’s young rural-to-urban migrants, and most likely for other populations with similarly constrained material circumstances, inclusion in social networks via the mobile phone thus serves as a counter-domination tactic against such limiting and limited life conditions. Often studies of how marginalized populations use new communication technologies such as cell phones understandably put heavy emphasis on economic outcomes, yet the affective/emotional benefits for such groups are also extremely significant and a rich area for further exploration.

References
China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) (http://www.cnnic.cn).

China Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (http://www.miit.gov.cn).

Law, Pui-lam, and Yinni Peng. “The Use of Mobile Phones among Migrant Workers in Southern China.” In New Technologies in Global Societies, edited by Pui-lam Law, Leopoldina Fortunati, and Shanhua Yang, 245-258. Singapore: World Scientific, 2006.

Yang, Shanhua, and Wai-chi Chu. ”Shouji: Quanqiuhua Beijingxia de ‘Zhudong’ Xuanze—Zhusanjiao Diqu Nongmingong Shouji Xiaofei de Wenhua he Xintai de Jiedu (“Mobile Phone: ‘Selecting Their Own Initiative’ under the Background of Globalization”).” In Jincheng Nongmingong: Xianzhuang, Qushi, Women Neng Zuo Xie Shenme (Rural-Urban Migrants: Situations, Trends and What we can do), 301-308. Beijing, China: People’s University Institute for Agriculture and Rural Development, 2006.

Yoon, Kyongwon. “Retraditionalizing the Mobile: Young People’s Sociality and Mobile Phone Use in Seoul, Korea,” European Journal of Cultural Studies, 6.33 (2003): 327-343.

Wallis, Cara. “Technomobility in the Margins: Mobile Phones and Young Rural Women in Beijing.” Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. University of Southern California, 2008.