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.

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.

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.

Smart Phones, Dumb Ads: Men, Women, and Social Media

This past Sunday while watching pro football I could not help but notice two television ads introducing two new mobile phones, Verizon’s Wireless Blackberry Storm 2 and Motorola’s much hyped, Droid. Here are links to the spots if you have not seen them.

BlackBerry Storm2

Motorola Droid

What strikes me most is how overwhelmingly masculine both ads are.

The BlackBerry Storm 2 spot is loaded with testosterone. The dark and stormy setting, male voice-over, hard rock soundtrack, and masculine hand seen using the mobile device tilts decisively toward the male consumer. But many of the features boasted in the spot–the apps, texting, responsiveness–are exactly the kinds of things that women are more likely to do with their mobile phones.

Male iconography–ranchers, shots of the open prairie, and a squad of stealth fighter jets—defines the Droid spot, too. Between the two spots only one woman appears. I know it’s pro football and the presumed audience, rightly or wrongly, are millions of adrenaline-filled men rooting for their favorite teams and eagerly awaiting their fantasy football results. But as I thought about the multi-million dollar roll out for these campaigns I could not help but think: are these types of campaigns dated, culturally out of synch, and, ultimately, off-message?

A decade or so ago it was fairly common to associate all things tech with men, call it the “boy toy” syndrome. That was certainly the case with the early marketing and selling of video games, an industry that up until recently all but ignored the fact that girls and women play games, too. A 2006 Active Gamer Benchmark Study by Nielsen Entertainment found that 64% of online gamers are women. Women, according to the study, generally seek out gaming experiences that are casual, recreational, and social. These styles of play represent the next era of gaming.

When you look at the data on who uses social media technologies the BlackBerry and Droid spots are out of touch.

Some of the more interesting gender differences related to technology use begin to form just as teens use of mobile phones and social network sites intensifies. When the Pew Internet & American Life Project produced its first report on teens use of social network sites, Social Networking Websites and Teens, clear gender patterns emerged. Among both young and older teenagers, girls used social network sites more than boys. Seventy percent of older teenage girls, ages 15-17, had used a social network site compared to 54% of older boys. Similarly, older girls were more likely to have created a profile on a social site, 70% to 57%.

Teen girls use of the Web, generally speaking, tends to be more social than boys. In a report titled Teen Content Creators and Consumers, Pew found that a quarter (25%) of online girls age 15-17 blog, compared with 15% of online boys of the same age. Pew’s data suggests that while boys are consumers of online content girls are sharers of online content. In other words, when it comes to participation in the online world boys take, girls give. Pew writes, “just 29% of boys ages 15-17 share their own creative content online, compared with 38% of girls in that age group.” Pew characterizes girls as “power content creators.”

These trends persist as teens grow into young twenty-somethings—an age segment my research focuses on.

At a recent conference in Chicago I spoke about how young people are using social network sites to maintain different types of relationships. When we began surveying college students about their media behaviors three years ago women stood out as the most innovative and intense users of social network sites. With the exception of massively multiplayer online games women are more actively engaged with social media platforms than men. For example, in our survey women were much more likely to use two or more social network sites, suggesting that they were using social sites to manage a diverse sphere of friends, acquaintances, and social contacts. Also, women were significantly more likely in our survey to rank “managing my personal profile” as one of their top three SNS activities. In some other data that we have gained access to we know, for instance, that women are much more likely than men to post and share photos in their online networks. Photo management is a main source of activity and social expression among Facebook’s youngest users.

The idea that women are more social in their use of technology is actually consistent with what we know, more broadly, about men, women, and expressions of intimacy and engagement with others. In his book Bowling Alone political scientist Robert Putnam writes, “women make 10-20 percent more long-distance calls to family and friends than men, are responsible for nearly three times as many greeting cards and gifts, and write two to four times as many personal letters as men. “ Putnam adds that, “ even in adolescence, women are more likely to express a sense of concern and responsibility for the welfare of others.” Women’s engagement with friends, family, and acquaintances compels Putnam to claim that they are “more avid social capitalists than men.”

Of course, platforms like Facebook are ideal tools for practicing many of these expressions of sociability including communicating with friends, sending friendly greetings and personal notes, long distance communication, and expressions of intimacy and caring for others.

Sociologist Claude Fischer came to similar conclusions about men and women after analyzing American’s use of the telephone in the early twentieth century. Women, Fischer found, were much more likely than men to use the phone for casual communication and conversation. This particular use of the phone was actually discouraged by telephone industry executives. They thought it was silly, a waste of time, and an inefficient use of the technology. Needless to say, they were wrong! The use of the phone as a primarily social tool—think AT&T’s old ad campaign “reach out and touch someone”—is one of the most enduring features of the technology.

Though technological innovations are often accused of making us less social, less intimate, and less community-oriented they can have the opposite effect. Today’s social media platforms are being used to expand how we build and cultivate personal and professional connections as well as manage friendships that are close by and far away.

With all of this in mind I can only scratch my head when I see ads like the ones currently in rotation for the BlackBerry Storm 2 and Motorola’s Droid. Both spots overlook the fact that in an age where media use is increasingly social women are crucial in terms of both cultural and consumer trends. It is time to do away with ads and attitudes that assume that social and digital technologies are the primary domain of men. If anything, the data suggests that in terms of social use and innovation these technologies are increasingly the domain of women.

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.

The Fall of MySpace: Race, Class and Social Media

National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” did an interesting piece on the role that social divisions have played in the decline of MySpace, “Facebook, MySpace Divide Along Social Lines.” In 2005, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation purchased what was then largely regarded as the world’s biggest and most popular social network site, MySpace. The rise of MySpace, especially young people’s attraction to the site, was the wider public’s introduction to the world of social media. Soon, the parents of young teens were able to put a name on what they in all likelihood were witnessing in their own homes—their children’s increasing engagement with social media. Teens had been migrating to the digital world long before the press began reporting on the topic. Within a few months after its launch in 2004 MySpace emerged as the preferred destination among American teenagers. Almost over night MySpace began to grow into one of the world’s most talked about social media brands. How quickly did MySpace blow-up?

Here is one statistic that I came across while doing research for The Young and the Digital. In July 2004 MySpace represented about .01% of all traffic on the Web, according to comScore, a digital media measurement company. Two years later, July 2006, MySpace represented about 4.5% of all Internet traffic. That was an increase of about 4300%! As the metrics for assessing social media began to evolve research began to demonstrate that it was not only the number of hits that was impressive but the amount of time young people were spending on social network sites. A 2007 report by Nielsen//NetRatings found that teenagers, ages 12-17, were spending about 331 minutes a month on MySpace and about 74 minutes a month on Facebook. (Those numbers continue to grow across all age categories). The report states, “teens who enjoy social media are intensive users and highly engaged.”

But MySpace is no longer the “hot” brand. There are a number of reasons for that. Certainly, teens attention to brands and pop culture trends is always in flux. From the perspective of teens once adults discovered MySpace it was no longer a cool space. By 2006 adults were just as likely to create a MySpace profile as teens were. From the moment it began to grow, MySpace’s size and anarchic inclinations posed challenges for management, especially the maneuvers to monetize the site. As strange as it sounds, MySpace was too successful. The platform’s supersize led to a lack of quality control that began to steadily erode the user-experience and alienate key segments of young people, especially those bound for college.

Part of MySpace’s dilemma was the fact that, rightly or wrongly, it was marked as a hangout for teens. When we began surveying and interviewing young twenty-somethings it was clear that they wanted nothing to do with a site they associated with immature teenagers, a group they believe uses MySpace to openly display their bodies and emotions. But our research also points to another factor in the troubles MySpace has encountered since soaring to the top of the social media marketplace: the racial and class distinctions young people make in the online world.

In 2007, danah boyd, now a researcher at MicroSoft, distributed a blog piece titled, “Viewing Class Divisions through Facebook and MySpace.” In that piece boyd writes that, “Facebook kids come from families who emphasize education and going to college.” Users of Facebook, boyd asserts, tend to be white and come, more often than not, from a world of middle-class comfort. The MySpace kids, according to boyd, are “kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school.” Compared to Facebook, teen users of MySpace were more likely to be Latino, black, and children of immigrant and working class households.

Right around the time that boyd distributed her essay my research assistant and I were assessing the data from the surveys and interviews we were collecting. We noticed among the white college students in our study an overwhelming preference for Facebook. When we asked college students, for example, “Which social-network site do you visit MOST OFTEN?”—among white students, more than eight out of ten, or 84 percent, preferred Facebook. By contrast, 66 percent of those who identified as Latino preferred Facebook. In our survey Latino students were more likely to name MySpace as their preferred site. We collected this data almost three years ago. If you replicate that study today a higher percentage of Latino college students are likely to choose Facebook.

While our survey data revealed some interesting things about race and use of social network sites, it could not tell us why racial identification appears to influence which sites students prefer. Fortunately, we were complementing our surveys with in-depth conversations, going out into the digital trenches to talk directly with young people about their use of social-network sites.

I discuss the results of those interviews in detail in a chapter from The Young and the Digital titled, “Digital Gates: How Race and Class Distinctions Are Shaping the Digital World.” What did we find? Well, take a look at the table below. It is the results from one of the questions that we asked the hundreds of people that we interviewed. The questions went something like this? “What words or adjectives would you use to describe MySpace?” or “What words or adjectives would you use to describe Facebook?” The chart below is what we typically heard from white college students. These are also the words that “Morning Edition” quotes in their report.

Adjectives college students use to describe MySpace and Facebook

MySpace / Facebook

Crowded / Selective
Trashy / Clean
Creepy / Trustworthy
Busy / Simple
General Public / College
Uneducated / Educated
Fake / Authentic
Open / Private
Immature / Mature
Predator / Stalker-friendly
Crazy / Addictive

We drilled our analysis of racial and class distinctions in the use of social network sites down to two factors—aesthetics and demographics. Aesthetics refers to the look, style, and manner in which personal profiles are designed and presented. It turns out that all of those “blinged out” profiles on MySpace—the splashy graphics, colorful fonts, and hip-hop music—are a real source of cultural friction. Demographics refer to the types of individuals and communities associated with social network sites. The chart above tells you what some college students think of MySpace user.

A number of things strike me as interesting about the language college students use and the choices they make regarding social network sites. For example, the language college students use to describe their preference for Facebook—“safe,” “clean,” “private,” “neat,” “selective”—is amazingly similar to the language used by residents of gated communities. The personal networks on Facebook provide a much greater chance of socially homogeneous communities than the networks formed on MySpace. Facebook, frankly put, has become a way for young collegians to get away from users of social network sites they believe are unsophisticated, undeducated, and undesirable.

When we began our work about three to four years ago it was common to see college students switch from MySpace to Facebook. Among other things, the switch was also a bid for a social status upgrade, a move up the digital ladder. Today, middle class students in middle and high school are moving straight to Facebook. Social class distinctions like everything else in the digital age are trickling down to younger and younger users.

I’m a trained sociologists so I find it quite natural and instructive to look at wider sociological trends to understand what is happening in the online world. I simply can not separate what we do online from what we do offline. Social network sites do not cause racial divisions or the desire for homogenous online communities. Insofar as what we do online is intimately connected to the lives we lead offline the fact that a kind of digital sorting is happening is not that terribly surprising. Still, it is striking that among a generation that played a key role in electing America’s first Black president race plays a crucial role in their use of social network sites and who they bond with online.

Facebook Activism

I had a chance recently to talk with Omar Gallaga, the technology and culture reporter for The Austin-American Statesman. You may be familiar with Omar if you listen to All Things Considered on National Public Radio. He’s usually featured in their segment, “All Tech Considered.”

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.

Interview with OnCampus Magazine

I recently sat down with OnCampus, a bi-weekly magazine published by the University of Texas at Austin to talk about The Young and the Digital. In the interview we cover a variety of issues including surprising findings from our research to what it means to be a social media sociologist.

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.