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Study on Youth Living and Learning with New Media and Implications for Social Change Makers
Posted by Hsing Wei on 11-20-08The results of a three-year ethnographic study, the largest study ever conducted of participation in the new media ecology by U.S. youth, was released today. Stemming from research beginning in 2005 and spanning 23 case studies by 28 researchers and collaborators, the white paper brings a youth-centered perspective into the debates about the merits, influence, and intersection of games (and other new media) on youth development.
From interviewing and observing young people on social networks, video-sharing sites, gaming sites, cell phones, and ipod-like gadgets, the researchers unpacked behaviors and learning in every day activities that run contrary to common adult perceptions about what is a waste of time.
Some highlights that I found idea-provoking:
-- Drivers of self-motivated learning coming not from institutionalized “authorities” but from peer networks—youth observing and communicating with people engaged in the same interests and struggles they are.
-- Different sets of hierarchies and politics in the online world creating opportunities for youth to exercise adult-like agency and leadership. There is ownership of their self-presentation, learning, and evaluation of others. Feedback is from peers and audiences who have personal interests in their work and opinions, but do not hold evaluative authority over one another. And recognition, reputation, and sense of appreciative community become motivating forces for participants.
-- The networked and public nature of these new media making “lessons” about social life more consequential and persistent. Friendship, social status, and informal forms of social evaluation are more explicit and visible in new ways.
-- Emergence of interest driven passions that require more far-flung networks of affiliation and expertise. At the same time, new media being integrated within everyday hangout practices that provide ways for young people to extend and enhance those networks across space and time.
-- New media use enhancing existing friends & family network bonds -- coming together to share media and knowledge, play together, and stay involved in each other’s lives. The vast majority of teens studied used new media to reach out to their friends, not strangers. Similarly, 80% of gamer parents played video games with their children and 66% said playing games has brought their families closer together.
-- Taking a serious look at Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out as degrees of commitment to media engagement. Viewing “Messing Around” as acts of exploration and experimentation—whether it is creating a blog, avatar, or online profile, tinkering with and exploring new spaces of possibilities with few consequences to failure. Understanding “Geeking Out” as learning to navigate esoteric knowledge domains and participating in communities that traffic specific expertise.
-- Underlying everything, there is a social context for sharing knowledge/interests and a mode of learning that is peer-driven. When asked, most youth said that a sibling, cousin, or friend showed them how to share and create online profiles. “Young people can begin modeling more accessible and amateur forms of creative production within groups of like minded and expert peers. Gaining recognition in these niche groups means validation of creative work in the here and now without having to wait for rewards in a far-flung and uncertain future in creative production.”
For policy makers and educators, the findings should also provoke some healthy discussion about:
How to narrow the widening gap between everyday life worlds and the emphasis of many educational systems? Rather than seeing socializing and play as hostile to learning, social and recreational new media could be used as sites of learning. Education could be positioned to support moments of motivated movement from friendship driven to more interest driven forms of new media use.
How to capitalize on peer-based learning? Peer based learning has unique properties that suggest alternatives to formal instruction – context of public scrutiny, identities, peer-based reputation/recognition, and comment/link/media exchange.
Where do adults fit into youth culture and literacy? In friendship driven groups, adult are viewed with skepticism, but within interest driven groups there is a stronger role for more experienced participants to play. Unlike classroom teachers, these adults are not authority figures responsible for assessing competence but rather “co-conspirators” creating a “pedagogy of collegiality.”
Those in the field of games for change seeking to impact youth development should also find these observations useful while thinking about how games create impact and how games can be designed to be better played, shared, discussed, and perhaps even tinkered with.
There are detailed descriptions and anecdotes on the shift taking place that lend more color than my summative bullet point. For the full picture, read the white paper sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation.