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.

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.

• 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

Generational Shifts
When I talk about my research with various organizations and colleagues around the world I am often asked: how does the use of social media change over time? In other words, what would a longitudinal study of social media behaviors reveal about the complex ways we participate in digital media culture? Recently, The New York Times posted an interesting piece, The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20s that underscores the mini-generational gaps that make it difficult to talk in very broad terms about youth and digital media. Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, told the Times, “People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology.”

The article points out that the digital media behaviors of 22-year old college students are very different than eighteen year old college students. It speaks to how quickly engagement with digital media evolves. We’ve been tracking this in our own research. Three years ago when we started collecting survey data from college age persons about their use of social network sites we asked this question: “How often do you check social network sites?” When we launched a new national survey two months ago (November 2009) we realized that the question–just three years old–appears outdated.

The question assumes that there are times in the day when young collegians are not connected, not updating their status, or not looking out for new content posted, for example, in their Facebook news feed. Young people are “always on,” that is to say, always connected to a device and their peers no matter if they are at school, work, the gym, bar, or even while driving. They are always connecting, sharing, and communicating. Today, the more relevant question might very well be, “when are you not on a social media platform?”

The survey project that we recently launched is designed to probe how the use of social media changes in a relatively short window of time. We know from our previous research that teens use of social media varies significantly from the college students usage of social media. Our latest project is designed to produce an evidenced-based portrait that compares and contrasts the social media practices of current college students with recent college grads. One of our hypothesis is that the motivation for using social media is marked, in large measure, by the various stages of the life-cycle. We believe that the intensity and types of participation in the social media world are constantly evolving in relation to external factors like work, family, and geographical mobility.

So, are college grads more or less likely than current college students to share personal information about themselves in Facebook? Do college grads find themselves using social media more or less often than college students? And does the composition of their network change in the transition from college to the professional world? These are just some of the questions that our research is poised to address in an effort to further illuminate the mini-generational distinctions that are part of social media world.

We will be posting some preliminary results and data points from the survey in the next few weeks.

Diversity and the Digital Media Participation Gap

In February, the MacArthur Foundation and the Digital Media and Learning Hub at the University of California, Irvine are hosting The Digital Media and Learning Conference. The theme for the inaugural event to be held in La Jolla, California is, Diversifying Participation.

Fifteen years ago the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) released the now famous report Falling Through the Net: A Survey of the “Have Nots” in Rural and Urban America. That report along with additional research from scholars, community activists, and policy makers established the framework for what is now known as the digital divide, a reference to the rise of the technology rich and the technology poor. The original digital divide narrative focused primarily on who did and did not have access to computers and the Internet. The belief, of course, was that those on the digital margins, often the poor, the rural, and less educated would fall farther behind their more affluent, suburban, and educated counterparts.

It did not take long for researchers to expand the focus of digital media and diversity beyond the question of access. More recently researchers have explored what is typically referred to as the participation gap– a recognition that as a more diverse population engages the digital media world they bring different skills, competencies, and interests to their online experiences. As the organizers of the Diversifying Participation conference write in their announcement, “Young people have differential access to online experiences, practices, and tools and this has a consequence in their developing sense of their own identities and their place in the world.” Trying to identify, document, and comprehend these different experiences and practices and what they mean for achieving a more equitable digital world represents an exciting stage of research.

One of the assumptions that accompanied the original digital divide narrative is that black, Latino, and working class communities, for example, were not engaged with social and mobile media technologies. The data that we have been collecting demonstrates just how wrongheaded that assumption is. Still, even as black and Latino youth are using technology their participation in the digital media world produces notable perils and possibilities.

I’m giving one of the keynote addresses for the Digital Media and Learning and Learning Conference. My presentation considers how the social media practices of black and Latino youth compel us to rethink the participation gap and the emergent issues surrounding their immersion in the digital world. I’ll also be talking about these issues at conferences at Ohio St. University, a community organization in Washington DC, and another MacArthur funded event at Morehouse College in Atlanta.

As these and other events approach I will be sharing my observations and presentations on this website.

Omar was writing a piece on what he calls “Facebook activism.” If you are active on Facebook you likely know what he is referring to. There are a growing number of cases in which people are using social media tools like Facebook to express their interests in a variety of social and political causes. Maybe it’s signing up as a fan of an environmental or local community cause. In several other instances Facebook users are creating groups finding that it is an effective and efficient way to coordinate their efforts, share information, and generate momentum for their respective causes.

During our conversation Omar asked me if I saw any evidence of this type of activism in our research. “Absolutely,” I said. Not to surprisingly this is one of the ways in which the thirty and under set are coming into their own politically. In other words, social media will be more than a complement to how they express their political engagement; It will be a dominant aspect of their involvement in political life.

The final chapter in The Young and the Digital is about this very issue. Specifically, I focus on the use of social media by Barack Obama’s campaign. Much has been made of how effectively Obama used the universe of social media–Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn–to differentiate his campaign from his rivals. He even hired Chris Hughes, one of the co-founders of Facebook, to build his own social network site, MyBarackObama. It was no great secret that the Web would play a role in the 2008 presidential election. In truth, much of the attention of the press and Obama’s Democratic and Republican party rivals focused on the Web as a cash machine–a way to raise money.

Obama raised historic sums of money via the Internet. And yet his new media team understood better than anyone else’s that it was not simply the money making capacity of the Web that was important but the social and communal capacities of digital media, too. All of the candidates he faced in 2008 used social media, but Obama used it the way young people do–casually and socially. By enlisting young technology users to lead his new media strategy, Obama came to understand the things we are learning through our research with young technology users. Technology, first and foremost, is social and communal in their world. In regards to social media, Obama did not create a movement, he joined one.

I told Omar that in our research young people are, in fact, using social media as a way to stay informed and connected to the issues that they care about. A 2009 report from The Pew Internet & American Life Project titled, The Internet and Civic Engagement, finds that young Americans–thirty and under–represent a significant portion of what it calls the “online participatory class.” Pew writes, “Some 37% of internet users aged 18-29 use blogs or social networking sites as a venue for political or civic involvement, compared to 17% of online 30-49 year olds, 12% of 50-64 year olds and 10% of internet users over 65.”

The key question, as Omar and I discussed, is whether or not all of the online activity is replacing good-old fashioned political engagement–knocking on doors, signing petitions, attending political events and community meetings, and, of course, exercising the right to vote.

Omar invoked the term, “Click-through activism”, while we were talking. “How much real action do you think is coming out of this type of activism?”, he asked me. In other words, does social media make it easy to sign up for a group or send a friend an interesting news article without any further involvement? There is no denying that social media activism can represent what scholars Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter call “thin citizenship”, a reference to low time and energy investments in civic matters. But, as I told Omar, “we don’t really know the answer to this question.” The truth is, what it means to be an engaged citizen is changing in the digital age.

Since the 1980s political scientists and sociologists studying political participation trends in America have warned that civic life in America is dying. Fewer and fewer people are getting involved in the issues that determine the quality of our schools, health care, environment, and international relations. In particular, the data has suggested that across some of the most important measurements of civic engagement young Americans fare the worst. Young people do not read the newspapers or watch television news. They do not join civic or political organizations or take the time to write government officials. Most troubling, they do not vote. There is a growing body of evidence, however, that suggests some of these decades long trends may be reversing. And social media is, in all likelihood, playing a role. The size of that role is certainly up for debate.

Both the anecdotal and empirical evidence from 2008 suggests that voting, public expressions of engagement, and communal involvement in politics may be on the rebound. I told Omar that, “Young people are using Facebook, using YouTube, using a variety of online media tools - distributing photos, videos, news links and joining groups online.” I continued, “there are different ways people might express their political engagement.” Our challenge is to better understand how online political participation relates to offline political behavior.

One phase of the new research initiative we are about to launch investigates to what degree social media has emerged as a civic tool in the lives of the young and the digital by influencing the issues they talk about, share with each other, and invest in offline.

You can read Omar’s article here.

Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

What intrigues you about this area of research?
I’ve always been particularly interested in the way young people influence different aspects of our culture… It’s really become clear that young peoples’ media usage has changed. For example, television used to be the dominant technology in young people’s lives and I think that is becoming less and less so, and that is a really historic shift. What we’ve seen over the last 10 years or so is that young people are moving away from TV as the preferred media and more toward new technologies or social media, more broadly speaking. What I see happening is quite profound because it represents such a dramatic shift in our behavior, how we consume media, produce media, share media and communicate with each other. As a media sociologist, I am especially struck by how convincingly our adoption of new communication technologies is changing long established media industries like music, print and television.

You can read the full interview here.

To answer these and other questions we are jumping back into the “digital trenches” to see firsthand how engagement with social media is transforming what it means to be social, digital, and alive in today’s world.

As soon as we finalize our research initiative and get our team in place we will be back with the exciting details. So, stay tune for a fuller description of the projects as well as updates, reports, and even suggestions from you on how we can refine our research efforts.