Futures of Learning

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.