The Young and the Digital Interview w/MacArthur Foundation Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning

In a follow-up to a recent set of events I did an interview with the MacArthur Foundation Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning. Here’s an excerpt.

As the digital divide closes, thanks in no small part to mobile media, the question is no longer who’s using digital media, but how. Are African American youth engaging with digital in dynamic ways that will help them develop useful skills and greater capabilities?

You can read the full feature story here.

Another story on the Spotlight blog related to my research and a collaboration between the UNCF and MacArthur is here

Also, a great summary of MacArthur’s successful Digital Media and Learning conference held in San Diego can be read here.

Follow The Young and the Digital on Twitter @ scraigwatkins.

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.

Teens, Technology, and Sexting: Criminal Acts or Teachable Moments?

The Pew Internet & American Life Project released a new report on teens and “sexting,” a reference to teens who use their mobile phones to send nude or partially nude photos to their boyfriends and girlfriends. NPR did a story on the report which you can see here. Teens and Sexting was written by Amanda Lenhart of Pew in conjunction with Richard Ling who teaches at the IT University of Copenhagen and Scott Campbell of the University of Michigan. I know Scott and recently had a chance to share a panel with him on social networks. Their report is timely for several reasons. Here are a few of the findings from the study:

• 4% of cell-owning teens ages 12-17 say they have sent sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images of themselves to someone else via text messaging.

• 15% of cell-owning teens ages 12-17 say they have received sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images of someone they know via text messaging on their cell phone.

• Older teens are much more likely to send and receive these images; 8% of 17-year-olds with cell phones have sent a sexually provocative image by text and 30% have received a nude or nearly nude image on their phone.

Sexting was just entering our societal vocabulary when I was finishing The Young and the Digital. When a small number of prosecutors around the nation began charging teens who engaged in sexting with disseminating and possessing child pornography the headlines grew. But does it make sense to treat sexting as a crime? Further, how do we make sense of teen sexuality in the digital age?

As I read the Pew report I recalled how some of my research for The Young and the Digital addressed issues of teens, technology, and sexuality. In one of my research interviews Mr. Walker, a high school teacher, discussed his students use of MySpace. He was clearly disturbed by some of the content they were posting and suggested that I see for myself the kinds of online identities his students were creating. So, we surveyed about twenty profiles. It was an eye-opening experience.

In nearly all of the profiles that we looked at, the online identities were incredibly theatrical and aspirational. Specifically, his students were living out many of their fantasies through the identities they created with social media. As we continued to scan the profiles Mr. Walker noted how many of his students were striving to appear older. One thirteen-year-old student, for example, listed his age as fifteen. Likewise, a fourteen-year-old pupil listed her age as sixteen. This, it turns out, is a typical tendency in young people’s online behavior. One study found that while most teens did not pretend to be someone else in the social sites they visit, 86% of teens did pretend to be older online.

In most instances the desire for a more mature persona took on a decidedly sexualized tone, an expression of online identity that worried Mr. Walker. But as we looked at the profiles much of what I noticed was pretty normal behavior. Both the young men and women flirted with the camera while playing to the gazes of the peers they presumed would be watching. The young men proudly displayed bare chests, meticulously places tattoos, and flexed muscles. Similarly, the young women performed in poses that were simultaneously provocative and submissive. I walked away from my conversation with Mr. Walker convinced that much of what I saw was playful and not profane; indeed, exploratory rather than explicit. Of course, sexting takes place in more private communication so we did not see anything even remotely similar to what has been reported.

Teens have long associated sexuality with greater independence, personal control, and a path to adulthood. Many adolescent researchers believe that teens’ exploration of sexuality occurs during a period of immense physical, hormonal, social, and emotional change. Today, teens are using social media to negotiate this period of great change.

Teens have been at the center of my research for more than ten years and one thing is clear. While they may not own much teens develop a very early and clever sense of the most important thing they will ever own: their bodies. In social network sites I noticed that teens take great pride in their rapidly changing bodies and use them quite literally to articulate what I call the “aspirational self.” The incessant desire to control and use their bodies as a source of pleasure and personal expression is a key theme in young people’s journey toward greater social, emotional, and physical maturity. In the universe of user-generated media this is realized in spectacular and sometimes troubling fashion.

Rather than prosecute young people for sexting, we need to use these as “teachable moments” about technology, sexuality, and intimacy. In the digital world teens are acting out many of the scripts and images they consume in popular culture. Unfortunately, the images of femininity and masculinity in pop culture provide narrow notions of gender identity for teens to experiment with. A 2005 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation titled Sex on TV4 found that between 1998 and 2005, the number of sexual scenes on television nearly doubled. In my 2006 book Hip Hop Matters I document the degree to which popular music and music videos marketed to young people incorporate increasingly sexualized content, bodies, and imagery.

It seems that among a minority of teens exchanging nude or semi-nude images with each other is acceptable. In some instances, according to Pew, sexual images “are shared between two romantic partners, in lieu of, as a prelude to, or as a part of sexual activity.” Some teens believe that their peers are pressured by a person they like to send a sexual image via text. One fourteen-year-old girl told Pew that she sent inappropriate images to boys that she liked. “I felt like if I didn’t do it, they wouldn’t continue to talk to me.”

In my research one parent noted how some of the teens in her son’s peer group were using mobile phones to control a romantic partner. Text messages were used as a surveillance tool, “where are you!” or “who are you with?” The Pew report suggests that teens are also using text messages to harass, embarrass, and even pressure each other into some kind of sexual activity.

In the age of social and mobile media, teens’ exploration with sexuality will likely become even more curious and adventurous but not necessarily dangerous. The ability to seek out more information and even exchange their thoughts about sexuality creates the possibilities for learning how to manage sexual situations in ways that are both safe and healthy.

In the case of sexting, technology is not the problem. Consequently, the solution is not to criminalize sexting but to help our kids grapple with the natural curiosities they develop regarding their sexuality. The use of social and mobile media in teen courtship rituals is yet another reason for us to engage our kids about technology, formally in places like schools and informally in homes and media.

Studies like the Pew report illustrate why educating young people about the social consequences of social media is one of the great challenges of life in the digital world.

Rick Perry Gets Personal and Political: Social Media Politics Texas Style

Last week I learned that Texas Governor Rick Perry was embracing social media in an interesting kind of way in the run-up to his 2010 re-election bid. Take a look at this Perry personalized video ad.

In the ad Perry can be seen talking directly to a supporter; someone named Dennis. Apparently, Perry has hired a company to craft about 100,000 of these personalized videos. It’s politics version of Amazon.com’s, “since you bought this book we thought you might be interested in this one.”

According to the Perry campaign the videos are designed to create a more personal connection between the politician and voters. Elise Hue was doing a story for the Texas Tribune, a new non-profit news organization devoted to covering all things politics in Texas. Elise and I talked about the use of social media in political campaigns, the handling of politicians as products, and whether or not any of this is good for democracy. (You can watch her report here).

“So what are the implications for politics?” Elise asked me. “It’s a mixed bag,” I replied. Here is what I meant. It is clear that social media is, to quote author Michael Lewis, “the new, new thing” in politics. In the aftermath of the 2008 presidential election politicians of all stripes will be using social media. But how they use it certainly varies. Some use social media to raise money. Some use it to broadcast their message with great precision. Others use it to create a sense of intimacy and community. Needless to say, some social media strategies benefit democracy better than others.

One thing that we have learned about the migration to digital is that traditional hierarchies are being challenged like never before. Along the way, new kinds of relationships and conversations are emerging. Evidence of this is happening all around us as voters talk directly to candidates, news audiences to reporters, and students to teachers just to name a few examples. It’s no longer a one-way discussion. Conversation via social media is something that future generations of voters and candidates will assume. In a 2008 report titled, “Post-Election Voter Engagement,” the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that more than half, 51%, of then President-Elect Barack Obama’s supporters expected some form of communication from the new administration through social media including email, text messaging, or social network sites. Many of these voters expect to share conversations with the administration, too.

Politicians who cut their teeth on a very different media model–broadcast–are trying to adapt to the social media landscape. Whereas broadcast is top-down, passive, and one-to-many the social media model, at its best, is bottom-up, participatory, and peer-to-peer.

A few months ago we went out into the field with a new study. Part of the project considers to what extent the use of social platforms like Facebook develops a civic dimension. Just from some of the early data results I can tell you that social media is infiltrating just about every aspect of young people’s lives including their consumption of news and their engagement in civic life. Still, nothing in our research suggests that these kinds of targeted ads will resonate with young technology users.

The personal ads by the Perry campaign appear to be using social media techniques to deliver a broadcast style message. In short, new tools, same tactics. It is unclear if these videos encourage some of the signature features of today’s digital media culture like conversation, community, and sharing.

Meanwhile, the Perry personalized video is emblematic of what has long been troubling about the marriage between politics and modern media: the triumph of style over substance. This is not unique to our time; it dates back more than a century as the press and later, electronic images emerged as, arguably, the most powerful factors in American political culture.

The use of media to sell candidates to the voter has a long history in American politics but it turned an important corner in the 1960s. In 1969 a twenty-five year-old writer named Joe McGinnis wrote The Selling of the President: 1968. It became an instant classic. On the front of the book Richard Nixon appears on the cover of a cigarette box.

In the 1960s there was a growing recognition that the techniques used by cigarette makers to sell their product to American consumers were dubious at best. McGinnis made a similar argument about how political candidates are packaged and sold. Nearly forty years after publishing “The Selling of the President” McGinnis writes, “In the summer of 1968…I learned something nobody wanted the American public to know: The two presidential candidates, Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, had hired advertising agencies to package them like products and sell them to the American people.” Style mattered more than substance. Politicians, increasingly, were handled like consumer products and politics have never been the same. Democracy suffers as we see the blurring of the lines between selling cigarettes and selling politicians, performing and governing. In the digital age shouldn’t we expect a different kind of ethics in politics?

America’s experiment with democracy is entering a new era in the age of social media. What we must demand from candidates is that they use social media to encourage engaged citizenship, community, and dialog rather than as the latest tool to sell tested sound bites and packaged candidates at a time when bold and visionary leadership is needed now more than ever.

The Young and the Digital on KUT/NPR

Here’s a short interview I did recently with KUT’s Jennifer Stayton. In the interview we talk about a host of issues including the appeal of being constantly connected, why young people are attracted to the online world, what they believe is negative about their own engagement with social media, and just how tiring it is to be “always on” in the digital world. You can listen to the interview here.

The Young and the Digital in The Austin Chronicle

When I sat down to talk with Belinda Acosta of The Austin Chronicle we chatted about a range of subjects including the importance of story in the digital world. I mentioned that in the digital age we are all story-tellers, archivists, and content producers. She was intrigued by a few things including the title of the book, how anyone would dare to write about what can only be described as rapid and constant social and technological changes, and the consequences of being digital. Her piece is the feature story in the Screens section of the Chronicle. You can read her reporting of a really fun conversation here.

The Young and the Digital on Ypulse

A number of organizations have made studying and understanding young people’s engagement with digital media a full time endeavor. One of the most innovative and interesting outfits studying young people’s use of digital media is Ypulse, a youth insights group operating in San Francisco and New York. In an interview with Ypulse I spoke with them about, among other things, how youth culture and lifestyles have changed since I began doing research for The Young and the Digital; the evolving role of games in our lives; a wired classroom for third graders; and kids, social media, and privacy.

You can read the interview here.