Writing Visually: YouTube, New Media Literacy, and the College Admissions Race

This week I’m addressing a big education planners group and I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to say. I plan to make a case for why more educators should begin taking the new media practices of young students more seriously.

In her closing keynote address at the Digital Media Learning conference in San Diego last weekend Sonia Livingstone, a professor from the London School of Economics, asked a provocative question that went something like this: “what is ‘learning’ in today’s digital media environment?” Sonia’s question evokes one of the core claims proposed by some of the researchers connected with the MacArthur Foundation’s initiative on youth, digital media, and learning: that we should expand our notions of learning to include the often informal modes of literacy that take place while young people are spending time online “hanging out,” “messing around,” and “geeking out.” In its three-year study of kids participation in digital media culture, Living and Learning With New Media, the research team carefully makes the point that while teachers and parents may believe that kids are wasting their time online that they are really developing important social and technical skills.

A recent story in the New York Times, “To Impress, Tufts Prospects Turn to YouTube,” provides anecdotal support for this claim. I plan to use the story to support my argument for why schools should be more flexible in the kinds of literacy skills that they acknowledge, support, and reward.

The Times piece refers to the growing number of students who are creating YouTube style videos as part of their college application. The article mentions schools like Tufts, Yale, University of Delaware, and Dartmouth. Getting into the top universities is more competitive than ever. So, it’s interesting to learn that social media is emerging as one of the tools young applicants are using to make a more compelling case for admission into their preferred college. The videos vary. Some may highlight a particular talent such as music, dancing, or athletics. In other cases, it may be a short documentary or day in the life of the applicant.

These productions represent new forms of literacy, in this case, using video, animation, and digital video editing technologies to tell a story and submit a college application. The new media ecologies that kids are immersed in today are often peer-directed. In other words, kids learning from other kids. This is an interesting example of how the skills they are learning from each other and the culture of user-generated content translates into viable skills and visible outcomes.

The dean of undergraduate admissions at Tufts, Lee Coffin, says that his office is not turning its back on the traditional personal essay. “We will never abandon writing,” Mr. Coffin told the Times. “No matter what, it’s important to be able to express yourself elegantly in writing.”

On a personal note, writing is central to my professional identity and my wife and I encourage our daughter, she’s nine, to write. But while writing is an important literacy skill the ability to tell stories, organize your ideas, and communicate lucidly through visual forms of communication in an age of proliferating media platforms is also a valuable expression of literacy.

Another interesting point: the videos submitted to Tufts appear to be fairly democratic. Sixty percent of the videos submitted are by women and two-thirds are from financial aid applicants. In today’s economy even middle class families need help paying for college so this last fact may not mean what a similar fact may have meant fifteen years ago. Nevertheless, kids from many different households are acquiring new forms of literacy in the peer-directed media ecologies that they participate in everyday day. Participation in the digital world, as so many researchers pointed out at the DML conference in San Diego last week, is expanding.

It’s also time to expand our notion of what it means to be a learner in the world today.

Changing the Conversation: Rethinking America’s Digital Divide

Over the last three weeks I’ve been involved in a series of events that address the changing digital media landscape. Flashback twelve years ago. In 1998 the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) released the third installment of its Falling Through the Net report. The graph below gives you a sense of the state of household internet access by race in 1998.

Whereas 30% of white households were accessing the internet only about 13% of Latino and 11% of black households had home internet access. That gap established the framework for what we know as the digital divide, the rise of the “technology rich” and the “technology poor.” Consequently, as we entered the new millennium the debate about technology and social inequality was focused squarely on the “access gap.”

Fast forward to today and profound shifts in the social and digital media landscape are apparent. Black and Latino kids are going online from a vast array of places–school, libraries, community tech centers, and home. Data from a variety of sources confirms that we have shifted from the “access gap” to what Henry Jenkins and others describe as the “participation gap.” What is the participation gap? Well, it’s a reference to the fact that as a more diverse population joins the digital world how do we begin to understand the different skills, interests, ethics, and cultures that produce different new media ecologies, literacies, and modes of participation in digital media culture?

Even though the access gap has closed in some corners of the digital world (though certainly not all; a huge age gap still persists) race, class, education, geography, and economics continue to matter in the digital world. In my presentations I have focused specifically on how African American and Latino youth, through sheer determination and innovation, are remaking the participation gap. Twelve years ago young blacks and Latinos hardly figured in the conversations about young technology users. The data today strongly suggests that they may in fact be leading the digital transition.

Here are a few of the points that I’ve been addressing in my public talks.

1. In 1999, when the Kaiser Family Foundation released its first national study investigating the media behaviors of 8-18-year-olds they found that black and Latinos were significantly less likely to go online from home than their white counterparts. Moreover, young whites spent more time online than black or Latino youth.

2. Ten years later the media environments of white, black, and Latino youth has changed significantly. In their 2010 report Kaiser finds that the amount of time young people spend using media throughout the day has risen sharply, especially among blacks and Latinos. When you combine all media used, multitasking and otherwise, Hispanic youth spend about 13.0 hours a day with media. Black youth spend just about as much, 12:59 hours whereas white youth spend 8.36 hours. Even more interesting: on a typical day young Latinos (1:49 hours) and blacks (1:24) are spending more time online than their white counterparts (1:17).

3. When it comes to mobile media the gap is even wider. According to Kaiser, black and Latino youth are the heaviest consumers of media content via the cell phone. Black youth spend the most time using their phones for music, games, and videos: almost an hour and a half (1:28), compared to 1:04 for Hispanics and 26 minutes among white youth.

4. Since 2004-05 we have learned from Amanda Lenhart, an analyst from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, that black and Latino youth are just as likely as young whites to create a social network profile. There is growing evidence that young blacks and Latinos are spending more time on social sites like MySpace and even Facebook and Twitter than young whites.

5. In our recent work with a group of black and Latino teens they talk passionately about the role of mobile phones in their lives. The mobile, quite simply, is the hub of their social and informational world. That’s true of a growing number of all young people. But African Americans, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, are more likely than their white or Latino counterparts to go online via a mobile phone than a desktop or laptop computer. They are emerging as early adopters of the mobile web.

When I spoke with Amanda at the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning conference this past weekend she said that Pew would soon be releasing results that further support my observations. We all know that mobile is the future. By 2020, according to one Future of the Net report, the majority of Americans will be accessing the internet via a mobile device. But the future is now for some internet users, especially for young African Americans.

Finally, in our research with black teenagers they offer a host of reasons for why they prefer going online from their mobile phones. Some believe it’s a more affordable on ramp to the online world. Some believe it is more reliable, that is, no need to worry about the old or broken down computers they encounter at school or at home. The main reason: their mobile device offers a more empowered online experience. Many schools have all but made going online a painful experience. Students can’t do the things they want to do–communicate with their peers, access Facebook, or “mess around” with technology. Libraries place time and content restrictions on what young people can do online. The mobile web, in short, limits the ability of adults to control what kids do online. This can be liberating and, at times, limiting.

Truth is, we do not know a lot about what young people are doing online with their mobile phones. What are the perils when young people’s participation in new media communities drifts further away from adults? Are teens sexting? What kinds of new literacies are they engaged in? Is the mobile web used principally to play games, listen to music, and watch videos? Or is it also used as an educational and informational resource? These are just some of the kinds of questions that need to be answered.

We will continue to update you from the field as we strive to learn more about how black and Latino youth are remaking the participation gap and, along the way, changing the conversations about technology and social inequality.

Follow The Young and the Digital on Twitter

You can follow The Young and the Digital on Twitter, @scraigwatkins. We will post:

• key data points from our brand new survey on social media use

• observations from our fieldwork with young technology users

• mentions of our work

• livestream from conferences and appearances

The Young and the Digital @ SXSW 2010

I am happy to announce that I have been invited by the organizers of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival to participate in their South by Bookstore event. I’m looking forward to sharing some of the research and insights generated from the work that led to the writing of The Young and the Digital and beyond. SXSW is always an interesting experience and a fun opportunity to see the future when it comes to new media technologies.