Studying Young People’s New Media Use: Methodological Shifts and Educational Innovations (original) (raw)

Where Our Youth Are in the New Media World: Measures of New Media Literacy

2015

The rapid penetration of tablet computers and smart phones has proliferated new media to mostly every aspects of our daily life. With the support of GPS and map applications, one can easily locate places and directions in a foreign country. People stay connected with their friends and families over instant message applications and social network platforms whenever they like, wherever they go. Distance is no longer a boundary of our social life, connectivity is. In these media-rich environments, youth, in particular, have the chances to participant in activities that are not passible in the face-to-face context. Recent studies showed that there is an increasing trend of school taking advantage of the new media affordances. This highlights the importance for educators and policy makers to understand where our youths are in terms of their capabilities to participate in the new media spaces. This capability can be conceptualized as new media literacy (NML). This paper presents informati...

Youth, identity, and digital media

In recent years, digital media and networks have become embedded in our everyday lives, and are part of broad-based changes to how we engage in knowledge production, communication, and creative expression. Unlike the early years in the development of computers and computer-based media, digital media are now commonplace and pervasive, having been taken up by a wide range of individuals and institutions in all walks of life. Digital media have escaped the boundaries of professional and formal practice, and the academic, governmental, and industry homes that initially fostered their development. Now they have been taken up by diverse populations and non-institutionalized practices, including the peer activities of youth. Although specific forms of technology uptake are highly diverse, a generation is growing up in an era where digital media are part of the taken-for-granted social and cultural fabric of learning, play, and social communication. In 2005, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation began a new grant-making initiative in the area of digital media and learning. An initial set of exploratory grants in the study of youth practices and the development of digital literacy programs has expanded into a major initiative spanning research, educational reform, and technology development. One component of this effort is the support of this book series. As part of the broader MacArthur Foundation initiative, this series is aimed at timely dissemination of new scholarship, fostering an interdisciplinary conversation, and archiving the best research in this emerging field. Through the course of producing the six initial volumes, the foundation convened a set of meetings to discuss the framing issues for this book series. As a result of these discussions we identified a set of shared commitments and areas of focus. Although we recognize that the terrain is being reshaped even as we seek to identify it, we see these as initial frames for the ongoing work to be put forward by this series. This book series is founded upon the working hypothesis that those immersed in new digital tools and networks are engaged in an unprecedented exploration of language, games, social interaction, problem solving, and self-directed activity that leads to diverse forms of learning. These diverse forms of learning are reflected in expressions of identity, how individuals express independence and creativity, and in their ability to learn, exercise judgment, and think systematically. The defining frame for this series is not a particular theoretical or disciplinary approach, nor is it a fixed set of topics. Rather, the series revolves around a constellation of topics investigated from multiple disciplinary and practical frames. The series as a whole looks at the relation between youth, learning, and digital media, but each book or essay might deal with only a subset of this constellation. Erecting strict topical boundaries can exclude

Teens and the new media environment: Challenges and opportunities

In this chapter, we provide an overview of our efforts to assess teens’ exposure to media content and the challenges we have encountered in developing our measures. Specifically, we present data from an exploratory study which illustrates that adolescents are growing up in a multiple-media environment, much of adolescent media use is idiosyncratic, and their media encounters are increasingly “interactive.” Content analysis methodology needs to adapt and adjust to these revolutionary changes in the media ecology. We propose an audience-centered, media-ecological approach to content analytical research in response to this emerging interactive new media scenario.

Young People, New Media and Education: Participation and Possibilities

The image of young people as tech-savvy 'digital natives' at ease in the digital world in sharp contrast to older generations has become almost something of a cliché, and characterises much public discourse around 'young people today'. However, in practice there is a wide diversity of interest, knowledge, access and opportunities amongst young people themselves, and amongst older generations. Yet it is also the case that technological innovation, globalisation and new media have profoundly changed the current social landscape, with implications at a number of levels. In education, there is a keen awareness of the need to respond to what Kress (2003: 9) describes as 'the revolution in the landscape of communication' of the present day, to young people's experiences of living in this world, and the ways in which their involvement in digital culture and technology may shape their approach to learning in school. While schools explore the potential of Web2 sites and technologies, and a range of digital cultural forms for formal teaching and learning, online commercial and public interest campaigns such as 'McCann's Dumb Ways to Die' (Australian Creative 2012) effectively capitalise on the potential of new media to promote powerful informal learning and appropriation in telling and effective ways.

Considering Young People's Motives for Interactive Media Use

Educational Research Review, 2010

Young people's increasing use of interactive media has led to assertions about possible consequences for education. Rather than following assertions, we argue for theory-driven empirical research as a basis for education renewal. First, we review the existing empirical research, concluding that there is almost no theory-driven research available. Subsequently we discuss sensitizing concepts as a perspective for research on the relation between interactive media and youth culture. These concepts, derived from the literature, include insecurity, reflexivity, affinity spaces and shape-shifting portfolio people. With this perspective we examine social and cultural functions of interactive media within contemporary Western youth culture. This examination leads to questions for education and a subsequent plan for future research, with a focus on diversity among students and the development of local cultures. This entails studying both the motives as well as the actual use of interactive media, which should be the concern of educational practices.

New Media’s Positive and Negative Impacts on Youth

2020

Contemporary living is marked by powerful presence and all present use of new technologies. We might boldly state that people might not function well without new media. We heedlessly witness large part of contemporary adolescent’s social and emotional development occurring while on the Internet and on cell phones. Many parents and caregivers today use technology incredibly well and feel comfortable and capable with the programs and online venues that their children and adolescents are using. Nevertheless, some parents and adults are concerned about adolescent’s overuse of new media due to their potential risks and negative impact on adolescent’s psycho-social development. Some parents and caregivers may find it difficult to relate to their digitally savvy youngsters online for valid reasons. Such people may lack some basic understanding of adolescents and the new forms of socialization which is happening online, which are integral to their children's lives. Adolescent’s limited ...

Against Technologization: Young People's New Media Discourse as Creative Cultural Practice

Journal of Computer-mediated Communication, 2009

In introducing the nine papers that make up this special issue on Young People, Mediated Discourse and Communication Technologies, we briefly characterize the cultural politics that shape (and misshape) public understanding of young people's new media discourse. Educators, business people and journalists -all of them adults -seem very preoccupied nowadays with young people's supposed lack of "good" communication, leading often to the evaluation of young people's communication "skills" against standards of appropriacy and usefulness shaped by the needs of the market rather than the everyday social and relational needs of communicators. This technologization of communication comes to a head in commentary (read: complaints) about young people's new media discourse, where concerns about "literacy,"