youth

The talk I gave at the Franklin Center on Wednesday October 1 is available on Duke's iTune's Channel. It is called "Digital Youth and the Paradox of Digital Labor: Do-It-Yourself or Do-It-For-Them." Here's the url: http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/new.duke.edu.1483972...

I spent the first part of my career as a social historian of technology whose original research was on the Constitutional-era and the role of mass printing, mass education, circulating libraries, and the new popular form of the novel in the creation of American democracy and American publics and especially unhappy counter-publics, many of which were despised and feared by the Founding Fathers. The novel was the blog and the video game and the social network—all of those in different ways—of the post-Revolutionary era in America. As with the Internet today, youth—especially late adolescents—were the single greatest demography of consumers then and were also the typical heroes and heroines of popular novels. This isn’t surprising; the contemporary entertainment, fashion, and many other consumer industries are specifically targeted at the 18-25 demographic. Youth, then and now, lead the way!

Help get out the word! A special part of the 2008 Digital Media and Learning Competition is for young innovators, age 18-25: www.dmlcompetition.net .Young Innovator Awards range from $5000 to $30,000. Focus: PARTICIPATORY LEARNING Deadline October 15, 2008. Here's the url again: www.dmlcompetition.net.

“Participatory learning” is broadly defined as using new digital media and virtual environments for sharing ideas or for planning, designing, or implementing goals together.

Among the great papers at Digital Youth East Asia was one by Sophia Tsuey-Jen Wu, Director of the Center for Media Literacy and Education at National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan. Using her thirteen year old daughter and her daughter's friends as her subjects, and their social circle in Taiwan as her field site, Wu discussed creative ways youth use cell phones for subjectivity and intersubjectivity and also for creating shared memories----even in circumstances where they might not actually all be at the same event.

This is my first attempt at answering a prompt from NetSquared, which provides a monthly question called the NetSquared ThinkTank. You can find more questions and their corresponding answers aggregated on their website. Read on ...

I have declared there to be too much internets to keep up with. As I inevitably abandon some of the websites I used to visit frequently, I am calling the information they hold about me "online personality residue."

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We took photographs today in the DiV virtual reality space and then in the FCIEMAS atrium outside of it. It was . . . real!

danah boyd has a great post today ("let the stalking begin" ) on a subject that really scares me too--stalking devices sold to parents so they can basically "stalk" their kids, keep them under surveillance all the time, protect them against internet predators. Protecting our kids is important . . . but as Pete Reilly shows, it's not the internet you need to be worrying about but the family members and family friends and trusted advisors close by.