The Young and the Digital on NPR’s Tell Me More-With Michel Martin

This week the NPR program Tell Me More- with Michel Martin did a two-part segment titled, What Digital Divide? The stories were a response to the growing evidence that black and Latino youth are heavy users of the mobile web via mobile phones.

While this trend has been evolving for at least three to four years researchers are just beginning to contemplate the social and cultural implications. So, while it’s easy to conclude that “blacks and Latinos are heavy mobile users because they can’t afford desktop, laptops and other expensive devices” there is so much more to this story.

The first part in the series draws insights from Smokey Fontaine , Chief Content Officer at Interactive One and Mark Lopez, Chief Operating Officer of Terra Networks USA. These two companies have built their business model around supplying black and Latino mobile users with content. Fontaine explained that one of the reasons for the growth in mobile usage among African American and Latinos can be attributed to falling price points. “Cell phone fees,” he tells Michel, “have come down.” Adding, “that’s one of the things we’ve seen, especially cell phone fees regarding data usage.”

Lopez attributes the rise in mobile use among Latinos to realizing and enjoying the increased functionality of mobile. “We see the Latino audience really making a full utility of that mobile device, whether it’s to access the Internet, to talk or to share pictures and video,” Lopez says. For communities that may be far away from their home country or family, the mobile becomes a way of staying connected to people, places, and culture. Lopez adds, “Can that device get me closer to a family that’s far away in my home country? It definitely can. I can send video. I can send pictures through the device, some things that a few years ago, I couldn’t do with my mobile phone.”

Michel asked them if there were any downsides to the increasing mobile use? What impact, for example, is the proliferation of mobile having on youth literacy, educational achievement, etc.? (This is something that she and I talked about in more detail in the second part of the segment). Neither Fontaine nor Lopez addressed this question meaningfully. In truth, they approach mobile use from a different perspective, primarily a business one. And that makes sense if you understand that black and Latino youth are heavy users of mobile data. And it also makes sense when you consider that according to most demographic projections, America is steadily evolving into a racially and ethnically diverse nation.

Still, questions related to what mobile means and what kinds of social and behavioral shifts are in motion are important. On day two of the segment, Michel and I talked about the downsides to the rising use of mobile among young African Americans and Latinos. I suggested that for many black and Latino youth mobile provides a more autonomous internet experience. Compared to their white and Asian counterparts black and Latino youth are much more likely to be policed in the public spaces–schools and libraries—they use to access the internet. As a result, they turn to mobile as a way to gain more control over their engagement with the online world. (This is true of most young people around the world, but especially true of young people who find themselves on the social and economic margins). But this often pushes them further and further away from parents, guardians, and teachers. That is, adults who could help them navigate the digital world more effectively.

Many parents of black and Latino youth, as one young person indicates on Tell Me More, have no idea what their children are doing with their mobile phones. One of the things that we have learned is that while young people may be trendsetters when it comes to some digital media technologies when it comes to the social, ethical, and educational aspects of new media use adults are an indispensable resource. Our research has found that many poor and working class youth are growing up in homes, communities, and schools were there are few, if any, opportunities to talk about the challenges that come with being a citizen in the digital age. In many instances, these kids are left on their own to deal with issues like cyberbullying, sexting, and the privacy issues that are central parts of being young and digital today.

Some of my work is also trying to explore the creation of applications, platforms, and online experiences that empower young people to use their devices to enhance their heath, self-image, and social networks. In other words, to see their mobile not only as a source of entertainment but also as a tool for personal growth, life-style enrichment, and social engagement.

You can hear the first part of the Tell Me More segment on the digital divide here. You can listen to the second part here.

Follow The Young and the Digital on Twitter @scraigwatkins.

Understanding the Mobile Lives of Black and Latino Youth

Over the last few weeks I’ve been speaking with various researchers, journalists, and industry about some of the remarkable shifts that are happening in the mobile space. While much of the news regarding mobile media this year has been about the release of Apple’s iPad and iPhone 4, another story has gone largely unnoticed: the growing use of the mobile web by young African Americans and Latinos.

I addressed the shifting contours of the digital divide in an earlier post (see, Changing the Conversation: Rethinking America’s Digital Divide) but the data continues to suggest that young African Americans and Latinos have thoroughly embraced mobile phones and the mobile web. There are several reasons for this but let me note two in particular. First, we know that black and Latino youth are much more likely than their white and Asian counterparts to grow up in households without broadband internet.

A 2009 report by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) titled, “Digital Nation: 21st Century America’s Progress Toward Universal Broadband Internet Access,” found that broadband households tend to be younger, white or Asian, highly-educated, married, and with higher incomes. Conversely, households without broadband tend to be older, black or Latino, less educated, low incomes, and under employed. Here are reasons given by the latter households for not having broadband.

The primary reasons are “don’t need/not interested” and “too expensive.” In all likelihood black and Latino kids live in homes that can not afford the internet versus homes that are simply not interested. When you consider the fact that black and Latino households have been hit especially hard by the economic recession, broadband internet service may be viewed as a luxury rather than a necessity.

A second factor that explains the rush to mobile among black and Latino youth is that much of teen culture and social life, in general, has shifted to the mobile media space. According to Amanda Lenhart of the Pew Internet & American Life Project 75% of 12-17 year-olds own a mobile phone. In their report Teens and Mobile Phones Lenhart and her colleagues also report that girls (77%) and boys (74%) are relatively equal in terms of phone ownership. There is a small degree of disparity in terms of race and ethnicity with 78% of whites, 75% of blacks, and 68% of Latinos (that includes both English-and-Spanish speaking) owning mobile phones. To the extent that black and Latino youth live disproportionately in homes without broadband the opportunities to experience the kinds of social media activities they prefer from a home computer are not great. The mobile, in this environment, as I told Omar has become the “default gateway” to the online world for many black and Latino teens.

What do we know about the mobile lives of black and Latino youth? Much of the evidence suggests that in many instances they are not signing up for long-term contracts. Rather, they are opting to use pre-paid carriers. This reflects a number of factors including, for example, intermittent employment, a limited social network, and distinct circumstances and motivations for using mobile technology.

Whatever the reasons there is a growing effort to service tech users in low income households with affordable mobile devices, rate plans, and services, according to some of the industry people I have been speaking with. Recently, I shared an interesting conversation with Omar Gallaga, the technology reporter for the Austin American Statesman. Omar was working on a piece about the digital divide titled, Can Mobile Phones Narrow the Digital Divide? Omar reports that some of the more established carriers like At&T, Verizon, and Sprint are beginning to offer pre-paid packages or lower rate data plans. Why?

They have likely seen the reports that show the enormous amount of data black and Latino youth are using via their mobile. In a recent conversation with a VP from a mobile carrier the data generated by her company regarding the use of mobile by black and Latino youth was stunning. Another industry person acknowledged that his company was rethinking its entire mobile strategy based on the data use trends that they were viewing. Much of the data consistently acknowledges that black and Latino youth are extraordinarily active when it comes to using their mobile phones to social network with their peers, play games, listen to music, and watch video.

There is a lot to learn about the use of mobile media technologies by young people on the social and economic margins. We are beginning to get a portrait of the networked lives of black youth and Latino youth. The more interesting questions at this point are primarily sociological. How is their new media ecology evolving? How have they embraced the mobile phone as the hub of their social, informational, and cultural life? What kinds of mobile experiences are they afforded via the carriers who now see them as a viable market? What are the social, educational, and cultural implications of their engagement with mobile?

We will be offering our own observations and insights related to these questions in the forthcoming weeks and months.

Follow The Young and the Digital on Twitter @ scraigwatkins.

Homemade Hip Hop: How the Young and the Digital Are Remaking the Hip Hop Experience

Recently I came across an article from Billboard, the music industry trade publication, by Antony Bruno titled, “Late Registration” (this is not the full article). The article is about Boston-based rapper, Sam Adams. Never heard of him? Neither had I. But if you go to college in the Boston area there’s a good chance you have heard of him. It turns out that Adams and his manager, a high school pal, are using Facebook’s appeal with the young college set to build a fan base. When Adams debut album, “Boston’s Boy” appeared at the top of iTunes hip hop album charts Billboard reported on the rumor that the rapper purchased 7500 downloads to inflate his sales. The rumor has never been confirmed.

The use of Facebook to promote Adams got me to thinking about hip hop. Most of the conversation about rap music these days is about the steady decline in album sales. Hip hop, allegedly, is dead. Here’s some perspective on the state of hip hop in the digital age.

No entertainment industry has been hit harder by the rise of the young and the digital than the pop music business. Rarely a day goes by that some development, deal, or new application does not remind us of the woes the music industry has been experiencing lately. The steep decline in album sales is stunning. By 2002 album sales were falling from the historic highs achieved in 1999 and 2000. The music industry sold 649,500,000 albums in 2002. Seven years later, 2009, the industry sold just over half that amount, 373,900,000. Between 2008 and 2009 overall album sales declined by 12.7%. Amidst the haze of change one thing was clear by 2009: music buying behavior had shifted decisively to digital. The music industry sold more than one billion digital downloads in 2009, up 8.3% from the previous year. Digital album sales increased 16%. And in its end of the year summary of music sales Nielsen SoundScan reports that digital music accounted for 40% of all the music purchased in 2009. Among the young and the digital the percentage is certainly higher.

As the transition to digital continues rap music has been hit especially hard. Starting around the early 2000’s the sale of rap music albums began to drop precipitously. As recently as 2002, rap music was still the third leading genre in the music industry selling 84,553,000 albums that year. In 2009 rap album sales were less than a third of what they were seven years earlier and the genre placed sixth overall. Why the dramatic drop?

When the popular press began reporting on the declining fortunes of rap music album sales in 2006 many journalists attributed the fall to a lack of artistry. Rap, critics charged, had become formulaic, predictable, and creatively exhausted. The lure of money and celebrity had eroded hip-hop’s greatest qualities, creativity and authenticity. Others claim that the drive-by thrills that gangsta rap gave young whites in particular lost their shock value. Several of these charges can be leveled at most of the popular music genres including pop, rock, metal, and country.

Rap’s commercial demise is actually being driven by forces the hip hop industry simply can not control: the historic migration of young people to the digital media world.

Hip Hop’s commercial problems began when young white males abandoned CD’s for free online music and TV for video games. This was, as the music industry and its entertainment counterparts, regrettably realized, a true shift in power. Digital media platforms allow consumers to assert greater control over their media use and experiences. In some of the earliest survey data that we collected nearly four years ago it was clear that young people’s expectations regarding pop music entertainment were undergoing a dramatic shift. Our initial fieldwork showed that in addition to abandoning CD’s young people had a preference for music clips via YouTube, sites that streamed online music, and free downloads. Their preference for digital content and peer-to-peer media was undeniable. Among young men, the preference was palpable. Why, you ask, would young white males shifting media behaviors impact hip-hop?

One of the great cultural mysteries of the 1990s was the appeal of hard-core rap music among young whites living in America’s heartland and suburbs. Some described the mystery as a case of “cultural tourism.” Others believed it was simply the latest example of young whites using black expressive culture as a source of societal rebellion and sexual exploration.

In my book Hip Hop Matters I argue that after 1991, the year that the music biz began using sales data from SoundScan, there was a growing recognition within the industry that the market for rap music was much wider and whiter than previously thought. For the first time in rap music’s history young white consumers emerged as a primary market in the making and marketing of rap music. Corporate hip hop, though few of its producers would admit it, was manufactured first and foremost for teenage white boys. This, of course, was also the segment that abandoned CD’s for MP3’s and legacy media–radio, TV, and print–for new and interactive media platforms before most everybody else. In our research, for example, young men were far more likely than their female counterparts to report that they had no inhibitions about illegal downloads, preferred games over TV, and participated routinely in peer-to-peer media.

Hip-hop’s album woes can also be attributed to the changing media habits of black and Latino youth. As the contours of the digital divide shift (see my post Changing the Conversation: Rethinking America’s Digital Divide) black and Latino youth—armed with computers, iPods, and most notably mobile phones—are consuming most of their entertainment content through new media platforms. When I asked black and Latino youth in a recent focus group if they still paid for music downloads the look they gave me made me feel stupid for asking the question.

We hear a lot about the death of hip hop these days. Nas, a widely respected hip hop MC, claimed as much in his 2006 album, “Hip Hop is Dead.” But let’s not write hip-hop’s obituary too soon. What is dead is the hyper-commodification of rap music. And that is a good thing. What is emerging in its place is a hip hop culture that is closer to what hip hop use to be back in the day–creative, fun, insightful, experimental, and participatory. And that, too, is a good thing. I tend to think that young hip hop enthusiasts are recreating their own hip hop experience largely through social media.

For a few years now the most vibrant practices in hip hop have been happening in what I call the digital underground. You can see hip hop searching for new modes of expression and purpose in the form of the mixtapes, blogs, and the social media content that young hip hoppers create online through social network sites like MySpace and Facebook. Today, aspiring MC’s display their musical prowess and earn street cred through a savvy use of social and digital media. As NPR’s Andrew Noz writes in his piece, “The Decade In Rap Mixtapes”: “The future of the genre [rap music] lies not in the hands of the industry, but at your corner bootleggers or favorite blog.” Hip hop’s digital underground reminds me of what hip hop use to be–homemade, folksy, and wildly independent.

Hip hop may not dominate the charts like it did in the late 1990s but it still matters in the lives of young people all around the world. This point was made vividly clear to me after an interview I did with a high school student from a suburb a few miles outside St. Louis. She was interviewing me. Her questions about race, hip hop, youth, and commercialism were insightful. She had chosen the topic as part of a class project that required students to do research in preparation for a thirty-minute presentation they would make in front of their peers. I asked her what her friends thought about rap music. Her answer is intriguing.

“My friends seem to be split about their opinions of hip-hop,” she told me, adding, “they either like it, but only really listen to what can be heard on the radio, or seem to be turned-off by it, because of what is played on the radio.” In the interview we talked about how the lines between hip hop and other genres of pop music have been blurred. She believes that many of her friends listen to music that may not be classified as hip hop but, “actually has a lot of the same elements as hip-hop.”

She’s right. Today, hip hop pervades digital youth culture. You see it in the video games young people play. All over the world teenagers are creating with hip hop and using it to construct their online identities, computer-mediated bodies, and communities in MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and elsewhere. And while rap albums sales may not be what they once were digital downloads of hip hop are strong. Young hip hop heads helped build ringtones into a real revenue stream, mobile media, and expression of identity play. When the Nielsen Media Company began tracking ringtone sales in 2006 hip hop and R&B dominated Nielsen RingScan’s chart, making up 87% of scans generated by the top-ten sellers over the first six months of the chart. When I looked at a recent RingScan chart, rap and R&B songs represented twelve of the top fifteen sellers.

Album sales are not the only barometer of young people’s music taste. In fact, they may not even bee a good barometer. Young people are growing up with a very different orientation toward pop music. For them, music in not a commodity you must necessarily buy. Rather, music simply exists to be discovered, shared, listened to, remixed, and woven into their daily lives.

Hip hop is not dead. It’s alive, well, and homemade in the digital worlds young people are building.

Mobile Teens: The Microsoft Kin Makes a Bid For Young Mobiles

One of the most frequent questions I use to get from parents of teenagers about two or three years ago went something like this: “Should I get my child a cell phone?” Today, parents are asking this: “At what age should I get my child a cell phone?” In short, it’s no longer a matter of if but when. While I was in Portugal last year teaching at a summer Digital Media Institute I was surprised to learn that across parts of Europe it is not uncommon for kids as young as five and six to own a phone. When I asked, “what in the world does a five-year old do with a phone?” the most common reply was play games. Phones are beginning to trickle down to younger and younger American kids, too. According to Mediamark Research and Intelligence 11.9% of children 6-11 owned cellphones in 2005. In 2009, 20% owned cellphones.

Even among the young kids who do not own a phone they certainly know how to use them thanks to the growing presence of app-based mobile platforms like the iPhone. A game designer friend of mine recently referred to the iPhone as a “pass back toy.” Confused, I asked him “what do you mean?” He explained. “You know, driving in the car and the child in the back seat asks, ‘mom can you pass me your iPhone?’”

Yesterday Microsoft introduced its Kin phone, a device the software giant hopes will generate buzz and business for the company’s entertainment division. The Kin and Kin One are designed to make social networking applications like Facebook andTwitter the hub of the mobile phone experience. Instead of the standard interface that displays the various functions of the phone, the Kin devices display status updates from your friends. The Kin devices, “are aimed at 15-30-year-olds who are social networking enthusiasts,” says Robert Bach, president of Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division.

This is a bid for young mobiles. On the surface, the main idea driving the development of the Kin–that teens spend much of their time connecting to their social networks– makes a lot of sense. Teens are heavy users of social network sites. This is no longer a fad but an established fact of young life in the digital age. While the platforms and tools may change the desire to connect with their peers anytime and anywhere is likely permanent for the foreseeable future. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project 7 of 10 teens use social network sites. Among older teens, ages 16-18, more than 8 of 10 use social network sites. Computer-mediated social networks give today’s teens something that previous generations of teens coveted but could never truly claim–a space to congregate, call their own, and is separate from the adult world.

In our research with teens it is clear that the mobile phone is used primarily as a device to connect and communicate with peers through texting and social network sites. They also enjoy snapping and posting pictures online. From the moment they wake up to the time that they finally fall asleep at night (usually with their phone in bed with them) connecting, communicating, and sharing with their peers via their mobile phones is a non-stop activity. Just last year there was widespread speculation about why teens were not using Twitter. Today, teens are constantly checking their mobile for tweets from their friends and favorite celebrities. For a variety of reasons including costs, lifestyle, and what they value from their mobile, the vast majority of teens own what are called feature rather than smartphones. Though not nearly as powerful and capable of the multiple functions enabled by smartphones feature phones work quite well for young teens. This is especially evident among the 16-and 17 year-olds we have been doing research with this year.

By the time they enter high school, the mobile phone really functions as the hub of teens social and mobile media lives. The phone is inseparable from their bodies and is the main lifeline to their peers. In his post for the ReadWriteWeb, Microsoft’s New Phone Gets the Social/App Balance Wrong, Marshall Kilpatrick maintains that Microsoft’s new phone collides with the dominant trend in mobile–the rise of mobile apps. Kilpatrick argues that the Kin places too much of an emphasis on the social uses of the mobile and too little on the growing trend of phones as a mobile application delivery system. But is this true for teens?

I wonder if the use of apps for young people is primarily about casual and mobile gaming. In other words, at what point in the life-cycle do non-gaming and entertainment based apps matter? A phone that does not offer gaming as a part of the young user experience will likely have limited appeal. But what about a phone that does not offer apps? The Kin seems to get the significance of the social in young people’s engagement with mobile. The question Microsoft will soon need to answer is at what point do apps, especially non-gaming and entertainment based apps, matter to young social networking enthusiasts? I don’t think we know the answer to that question yet. There is even some evidence that despite their wide appeal most people tend to use only a handful of the apps that they download. And the apps that teens tend to care about–the ones that help them connect more easily to their social networks–are central to the Kin’s design and marketing campaign.

Something else that we are learning in our research with young mobiles is that they tend to switch phones frequently. In the past they upgraded their phones as much for aesthetics or the look of the phone as anything else. The phone after all is a main fashion accessory for teens, a cultural statement, and expression of identity. But upgrades today are just as likely to be about the functions or the capabilities of their mobile phone. The phone after all is a main tool for sharing their lives and the content they create with peers.

My take on the Kin? If it is easily affordable it has a chance to play a role in the life cycle of young technology users at a time when peers–what they are doing and who they are doing it with–is all consuming. That’s a brief period before other things become equally important like which college to attend and what’s happening in the world around them. Microsoft says the Kin targets 15-30 year-olds. I can see the 15-18-year-old market trying it out but beyond that the Kin will likely have to expand what users can do to appeal to their older target.

What is means to be social and connected today is constantly evolving throughout the life-cycle of the young and the digital. So to is their adoption of mobile phones.

Follow The Young and the Digital on Twitter @ scraigwatkins.

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.

The Young and the Digital in 2010: Studying the Mini-Generational and Participation Gaps

Our research team will be quite active in 2010. In addition to continuing our work with various organizations and digital media educational efforts our research agenda sets its sights on two interesting aspects of the digital world. The first area stakes out a space to explore the generational shifts that are constantly remaking the social media landscape. The second area seeks to document and analyze the increasingly diverse makeup of the digital media world.

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.

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 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.