Creative Practices and Activity Theory: Working alongside virtual youth (original) (raw)
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Journal of Community, Citizen's and …, 2005
Online networks can support broad communicative participation and interaction and new media technologies have the potential to allow individuals and groups to reflect, create, maintain, establish, challenge and subvert the media and political representations that affect them. For 'peripheral' youth -those living outside of national and global cultural and economic core centres -new media technologies can enable access to multiple and diverse audiences, that may otherwise have not been reachable. This paper will explore the meaning of 'peripheral youth' and will consider how, using the Internet as a medium for distribution and communication, these young people can represent their local lives and explore different issues, identities and representations through participation in an online youth network.
Young people’s creative online practices in the context of school community
Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, 2013
This article concentrates on young people’s creative online practices, such as making videos, writing lifestyle blogs, and engaging in online role-playing games. It also looks at their relations to different audiences, privacy, and the school community as a central social environment in young people’s everyday life.The research was conducted as an ethnographic study in one public secondary school in Finland during the academic year 2009–2010. The ethnography is preceded by a quantitative survey on media use among school students (N = 305). EU Kids Online research data (N = 1012) regarding Finland was used in the analysis of young people’s internet use as well.The internet offers different possibilities for young people to publish, share, and participate online. Although the study shows that the majority of young people are not especially eager to share their creative productions on the internet, some of the teens studied had a strong interest in creative media production and online ...
Journal of Youth Studies, 2013
Young people's use and understanding of the Internet is still under-researched. We argue that researching alongside young people in technological settings (a virtual world on the Internet in this paper) is a complicated nexus of conceptual, methodological and theoretical challenges. We argue that these are in dialectical, and sometimes incoherent, relationships with the realities of research processes and young people's lived experiences with Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). The Economic and Social Research Council/Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (ESRC/EPSRC)-funded Inter-Life Project developed a 'Virtual Research Community' in Second Life™ to investigate how young people can work creatively to develop their own agency and subjectivities. We reflect on these challenges as they articulated with the 'Inter-Life' Project's aims. They include the need for more empirical evidence of the realities of young people's lives with ICTs, and for re-theorisation of their subjectivities in ICT settings. We interrogate the challenges of participatory research in such settings and the role of creative practices and virtual spaces in finding a voice and being a participatory researcher. In the second part, we illustrate the realities of researching in a virtual world through the lived experience of young people who worked with us. We also explore how activity theory (AT) might assist in the methodological and analytical work of researching young people's creativity in a virtual world.
Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected
Information, Communication & Society, 2009
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
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
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,"
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.