What Media Literacy Educators Need to Know About Fair Use...

Some time ago, this blog ran an interview with Pat Aufderheide (Center for Social Media) and Peter Jaszi (The Program on Informational Justice and Intellectual Property) about the work they have been doing developing Codes of Best Practices for Fair Use for a variety of different communities, including documentary producers and the DIY media world.

Last week, the team, working with long time media literacy veteran upstart Renee Hobbes Renee Hobbs (The Media Education Lab), released a new report, The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education. It is a follow up to an earlier report which described "The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy." The report comes with the endorsement of many key Media Literacy organizations including Action Coalition for Media Education, Media Education Foundation, National Association for Media Literacy Education, National Council for Teachers of English, and the Visual Communications Studies Division of the International Communications Association.

I've been watching this initiative develop over time, sharing the team's belief that copyright law (and confusion about fair use) represents one of the biggest obstacles for the development of meaningful resources for supporting media literacy education. We hosted a brainstorm with media educators at the last Media in Transition conference. I am particularly pleased to see that the report moves beyond the issue of what individual teachers do in their own classroom to address how and when we might share curricular materials with each other, an issue I've been pushing hard in my conversations with the authors.

In our own work, we regularly encounter teachers who are anxious about introducing any copyrighted works in their classroom and I've had at least one project shut down by university attorneys who were convinced we were exceeding our Fair Use rights in quoting from films and other existing media texts. We have been struggling through the work we are doing on New Media Literacies to get enough room to be able to show short segments from the media we are discussing. To date, we've been developing our materials using the best practices statement for documentary filmmakers and we are excited to see further clarification of what these principles mean in the specific context of media literacy education. As you will see if you look at the materials we are producing, we rely on Creative Commons content where-ever possible and where it is not possible, we are creating very strong markers of attribution. I know that many media educators read this blog, so I wanted to flag this new report for you.

Thanks to the work of Hobbes, Aufderheide, and Jaszi, many of us can walk into our classrooms with greater confidence that what we are doing falls squarely within current understandings of intellectual property law.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

"Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out": A Conversation with the Digital Youth Project (Part Two)

Many writers talk about "digital natives" or describe these young people as "born digital." What do you see as the strength and limitations of these terms given what you found in your research?

Becky Herr: One potential strength of the term "digital generation" for describing young people and their relationship to technology is its acknowledgement that youth are using media and technology in interesting and important ways. Talking about kids as "digital natives" can be seen as a counterargument to pervasive discourses about kids as deviant users of technology--hackers, cheaters, wasters-of-time--or kids as victims of technology--the "prey" of online predators, for example. This is not to say that the term is used exclusively to describe positive interactions with technology; it also emphasizes the gap between the ways "digital natives" use technology and the ways non-natives (like adults) use technology.

What is worrying about the discourse of digital natives is that talking about young people as a "digital generation" risks romanticizing certain types of youth participation and ignoring important differences in access to media and technology, including barriers to access that are not tied to a lack of hardware--barriers like not reading and writing in English, being a girl and having to compete with boys in a classroom with limited resources, or parental rules borne out of moral panic. Further, the idea of a digital generation marked by shared characteristics (other than the dates of their birth) that outweigh other aspects of identity/subjectivity--race, class, gender, ability, (etc.) is problematic. What we have found in the Digital Youth project is that there is a huge amount of variation in the ways kids are using media and technology in their everyday lives. Yes, the ways in which these practices are enacted vary, often by peer group or by individual kid. We've also found that things like class, race, and gender continue to have significant influence in kids' lives.

In my own research, for example, I worked with kids at the middle school level who were using media production software (iMovie and PowerPoint) for the first time. At home, most of the students I observed and interviewed did not have a computer, Internet access, or any video equipment. However, they had other media and technology that was incredibly important to them and that they used in creative and sophisticated ways to find information, to express themselves, to communicate with friends, and to mess around in order to figure out things like game cheat codes or how to substitute a borrowed digital camera for an mp3 player. Some had vast music or DVD collections, others spent hours each day playing games on a video game console. Were they "digital natives"?

Christo Sims: There are also plenty of folks who weren't "born digital" who have developed incredible fluency in various forms of online participation. We also met numerous youth who weren't technically adept or comfortable participating online. By emphasizing a generational break we risk mystifying the factors that structure online participation, and equating competency automatically with age.

danah boyd: Many of those who use these terms often do so with the best of intentions, valorizing youth engagement with digital media to highlight the ways in which youth are not dumb, dependent, or incapable. Yet, by reinforcing distinctions between generations, we reinforce the endemic age segregation that is plaguing our society. Many social and civic ills stem from the ways that we separate people based on age. If we want to curtail bullying and increase political participation, we need to stop segmenting and segregating.

Mimi Ito: In a lot of our case studies, we saw examples of kids picking up media and technical literacy through social and recreational activity online. When they were given time and space to experiment, they often were able to pick up knowledge and skills through messing around, whether that was learning how to make a MySpace profile, experimenting with video, or figuring out how to use cheat codes in a game. Some kids used this kind of messing around as a jumping off point towards much more sophisticated forms of creative production or engagement with specialized knowledge communities.

Christo Sims: One story that comes to mind is a youth named Zelan who we feature in one of the sidebars in the Work chapter. Zelan comes from a very rural area where most of his peers will end up in working class jobs, doing construction, building roads, working as mechanics. Zelan, who identifies himself as a computer geek, leveraged his technical know-how for economic gain starting in junior high school: fixing electronics, buying and selling gaming and computer gear, and servicing the computers of neighbors and teachers. His passion, though, has been video games. He started as a player but soon became an enthusiast, subscribing to game magazines, following the latest releases, looking for tips online. In addition to becoming a fan he started messing around with broken consoles, taking them apart to see how they worked, trying to fix them so he could play a better console or sell it for a profit. He did all this without seeing it as leading towards a career or success in school. It was only once he started seeing that he his gaming interest was actually valuable to others at school and in the community that he began to imagine how these interests could lead to a life after high school. When I first met him he was a Junior and was thinking of starting a computer service business when he graduated. When I saw him again last summer he was headed to a technical college on scholarship.

Dan Perkel: Another person featured in one of the sidebars is Jacob. Jacob was an African American senior who had moved from the East Bay to Georgia and back again. Jacob, like others we talked to in our studies, joined MySpace when someone else made an account for him. For a while, Jacob didn't understand how to customize his page--again like other new members to the site--and had other people do it for him. On the friendship-driven side he used MySpace as a way to communicate with people he met and friends he left behind after various moves. However, at some point he made the connection between changing MySpace profiles and the web design classes that he had gotten into at school. He then took the time to better understand how to customize his own profile and consider making and distributing MySpace layouts, something he had seen others do on the site. When I last talked to him, he was considering a career in web design and said he had been offered a job already.

danah boyd: It is important to note that "productive" engagement doesn't necessarily mean only traditional learning or media and technical literacy. As a society, we've never spent much time considering how youth learn to be competent social beings, how they learn to make sense of cultural norms and develop social contracts, or how they learn to read others' reactions and act accordingly. We expect youth to be polite and tolerant, respect others' feelings, and behave appropriately in different situations. This is all learned. And it is not simply learned by telling kids to behave. They need to experiment socially, interact with peers, make mistakes and adjust. Stripping social interactions from youth's lives does not benefit them in any manner. I would argue that even the oft-demeaned social practices that take place online are extremely productive.

Mimi Ito: We use the concept of genre as a way of describing certain social and cultural patterns that are available and recognizable. Friendship-driven and interest-driven practices are based on genres that youth recognize, have particular practices associated with them, as well as certain kinds of identities. For example, interest-driven genres of participation tend to have a more geeky identity associated with them, involve congregating on specialized and often esoteric interests, and reaching beyond given, local school networks of friends. This is a whole package of things that goes together, a recognizable genre for how youth participate in online culture and social life. We also think of hanging out, messing around, and geeking out as genres of participation.

When and how might the borders between friendship-driven and interest-driven forms of engagement start to blur?

Mimi Ito: As with all genres, there are a lot of things that don't totally fit, and a lot of blurring between genres. When kids engage in friendship-driven practices, they often get involved in messing around with technology, and that can become a jumping off point for more interest driven activities. For example, some kids will begin messing around with video or photos that they take with their friends, and then they get more interested in the creative side of things. Conversely, we find that kids who connect to others around interests will often see these groups become really important friendship networks, and an alternative source of status and identity that is different from the mainstream of what happens in the school lunchroom.

Mimi Ito: Now that digital media and online networking has become so embedded in kids' everyday social and recreational lives, there is a certain baseline of technical engagement that is taken for granted. Only certain kids, though, decide to go from there to what we consider more geeked out kinds of practices. Predictably, it tends to be boys who geek out more than girls. Even though girls are often engaging in highly sophisticated forms of technology use and media creation, often they don't identify with it in a geeky way. What does seem to be changing though, is the overall accessibility that kids have to more geeked out practices because of the growing accessibility of digital media production tools as well as the ability to reach out to interest groups on the Internet. Although our study didn't really measure this, this may be particularly significant for less advantaged youth who would not otherwise have had access to specialized creative communities or media creation opportunities.

Patricia Lange: Being able to connect with dispersed networked publics enables kids to explore skills and receive mentoring that may be difficult to gain from co-located peers or teachers who do not have the same interests or experiences. For example, in my study of the video-making culture of YouTube, accessing mentors or assistance in a "just-in-time" fashion is inspiring and encouraging, especially given kids' decreasing ability to connect with other adults and potential mentors in neighborhoods and local communities. One of the things we heard very often was that friends, family, and kids at school often did not understand why young YouTubers wanted to "geek out" making videos. YouTube participants' school peers did not always have the same familiarity and expertise with how media is put together in ways that kids on YouTube did. Many of the kids we interviewed have already had extensive experiences making media. They often have very sophisticated visual literacies and complex ideologies about what makes a good or bad video, what constitutes appropriate participation in technical groups, and how they think about online safety. Failing to engage with these sites in school means there is no hands-on dialogue between teachers and students that might help shed light on why some kids thrive by geeking out and why others have difficulty.

CJ Pascoe: In general we tried to take a Sociology of Youth approach to our findings in this book. In line with this approach we try to let the categories of analysis as well as the descriptive terms arise from the youth themselves, rather than imposing our adult categories on our findings. What this means is that we tried, for the most part to describe a social world from the point of view of its participants, rather than as (more powerful) outsiders. I think foregrounding our participants' terms, categories and experiences allowed us to challenge some of the common assumptions adults have about youth participation of new media.

Heather Horst: As is common in most ethnographic research, we integrate terms like 'hanging out', 'messing around' and 'geeking out' into our analysis in order to highlight the categories and perspectives that are meaningful to young people themselves. Throughout this project, we felt quite strongly that part of our role and responsibility as researchers as working to navigate the gaps between youth and adult-centered perspectives. While we recognize that this may involve some degree of translation work when talking to different audiences (e.g. educators, policy makers, etc.), if we really want to see changes in discussions about learning and education, youth voices and perspectives need to be brought to the table.

danah boyd is a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley and a Fellow at the Harvard University Law School Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Her research focuses on how American youth engage in networked publics such as MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Xanga, etc. She is interested in how teens formulate a presentation of self and negotiate socialization in mediated contexts with invisible audiences. In addition to her research, danah works with a wide variety of companies and is an active blogger.

Becky Herr-Stephenson is an Associate Specialist at the University of California Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine. Becky's research interests include media literacy, teaching and learning with popular culture, and youth media production. Her dissertation, "Kids as Cultural Producers: Consumption, Literacy, and Participation," investigates issues of access and media literacy through an ethnographic study of media production projects in two mixed-grade (sixth, seventh, and eighth) special education classes. Previously, she was a member of the research team for the Digital Youth Project and a graduate fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication. Before beginning her graduate studies, Becky worked as a production manager for companies producing original content for the web and multimedia museum exhibits. Her current work with the DMLstudio involves a literature review of institutional efforts related to youth digital media production. Becky recently completed her PhD in Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.

Heather Horst is an Associate Project Scientist at the University of California, Irvine (UCHRI) who conducted research during the Digital Youth Project as a Postdoctoral Scholar at University of California, Berkeley. Heather is a sociocultural anthropologist by training who is interested in the materiality of place, space, and new information and communication technologies. Before joining the Digital Youth Project in 2005, she carried out research on conceptions of home among Jamaican transnational migrants, as well as issues of digital inequality, as part of a large-scale DFID-funded project titled "Information Society: Emergent Technologies and Development in the South," which compared the relationship between ICTs and development in Ghana, India, Jamaica, and South Africa. Her coauthored book with Daniel Miller, The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (Oxford, UK, and New York: Berg, 2006), was the first ethnography of mobile phones in the developing world. Heather's research in the Digital Youth Project integrates her interest in media and technology in domestic spaces, families in Silicon Valley, and the economic lives of kids on sites such as Neopets.

Patricia G. Lange is a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at the University of Southern California. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan. Her areas of interest for the Digital Youth Project are centered around using theories from anthropology and linguistics to understand the cultural dynamics of video creation, reception, and exchange among kids and youth. She is studying YouTube as well as video blogging groups to gain insight into the cultural aspects of video sharing and how these practices change ideas about the public and private. Lange is exploring how the content and form of videos as well as material video sharing and response practices serve as sites of identity negotiation, emotional expression, and promotion of public discourse in increasingly video-mediated, online milieu. She has recently published articles in a variety of journals including: Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Discourse Studies, Anthropology of Work Review, First Monday, and The Scholar and Feminist Online.

Mizuko (Mimi) Ito is a cultural anthropologist specializing in media technology use by children and youth. She holds an MA in Anthropology, a PhD in Education and a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University. Ito has studied a wide range of digitally augmented social practices, including online gaming and social communities, the production and consumption of children's software, play with children's new media, mobile phone use in Japan, and an undergraduate multimedia-based curriculum. Her current work focuses on Japanese technoculture, and for the Digital Youth Project she is researching English-language fandoms surrounding Japanese popular culture.

C.J. Pascoe is a sociologist who is interested in sexuality, gender, youth, and new media. Her book on gender in high school, Dude, You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School, recently received the 2008 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association. As a researcher with the Digital Youth Project she researched the role of new media in teens' dating and romance practices. Her project "Living Digital" examines how teenagers navigate digital technology and how new media have become a central part of contemporary teen culture with a particular focus on teens' courtship, romance, and intimacy practices. Along with Dr. Natalie Boero she conducted a study titled "No Wannarexics Allowed," looking at the formation of online pro-anorexia communities and focusing on gender, sexuality, and embodiment online. C.J. is currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The Colorado College.

Dan Perkel is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley's School of Information. His research explores how young people use the web and other technologies as a part of their everyday media production activities. Dan's ongoing dissertation research investigates the mutual shaping of young people's creative practices and the social and technical infrastructure that support them. Prior projects include explorations into the design of a collaborative storytelling environment for fifth-graders, ethnographic inquiry into an after-school media and technology program, and investigations using diary studies to capture everyday technology use. With UC Berkeley artist Greg Niemeyer and colleague Ryan Shaw, Dan helped create an art installation called Organum, which looks at collaborative game play using the human voice (and which was followed up by "Good Morning Flowers"). In a past life, Dan worked as an interface designer, product manager, and implementations director for Hive Group, whose Honeycomb software helps people make decisions through data visualization. He received his BA (2000) in Science, Technology, and Society from Stanford University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and his Master's in Information Management and Systems from UC Berkeley's School of Information in 2005.

Christo Sims is a PhD student at UC Berkeley's School of Information. He was a member of the Digital Youth research team from 2005 until 2008. His fieldwork focused on the ways youth use new media in everyday social practices involving friends, family, and intimates. He conducted research at two sites, one in rural Northern California, the other in Brooklyn, New York. His contributions can mostly be found in the report's chapters on Intimacy, Friendship, and Families. Christo received his Master's degree from UC Berkeley's School of Information in the spring of 2007, and his Bachelor's degree from Bowdoin College in the spring of 2000.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out": A Conversation with the Digital Youth Project (Part One)

On Thursday, the Digital Youth Project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, released "Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out," a report on a massive ethnographic investigation into the place of new communications and media technologies in the lives of American young people. I have had the distinct honor to watch this research take shape over the past few years, to get to know the core researchers on the team, and to attend meetings where they struggled over how to process the sheer volume of data and insights they have gathered. The team is a model for collaborative research with senior faculty and graduate students working side by side across disciplines and universities to make sense of problems which none of them could fully understand on their own. You will get a sense of the dialogic nature of this research in the interview which follows, a conversation which involves nine members of the research team, sharing insights from their own specific research projects as well as expressing the rich synthesis that emerged from their collaboration. The report represents one key outgrowth of the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Learning and Youth initiative, which also funds our own Project New Media Literacies initiative, along with providing support for such key educational researchers as Sasha Barab, James Paul Gee, Kurt Squire, Howard Gardner, Howard Rheingold, David Buckingham, and Katie Salens, among many others.

"Hanging Out..." is staggering in its scope and in its implications. The researchers take seriously young people, their lives online, their subcultural practices, their identity play, their nascent civic engagement, their dating and social interactions, their involvement with fan production practices, and much much more. What emerges is a complex picture of how they are living through and around emerging technologies, how they are innovative in their use of new tools and platforms, and how they are struggling with the contradictions of their lives. This report is in no simple way a celebration of the digital generation, though it respects the meaningfulness of their involvement with digital and mobile technologies: it raises questions about inequality of access and participation; it points to conflicts between adults and youth around the deployment of new media; it identifies risks and opportunities which sites such as MySpace and YouTube pose for their young participants. Those of us who care about young people and education will be struggling with some of the implications of their research for a long time to come. I am proud to have a chance to offer this interview with some of the key members of the Digital Youth Project team over the next three installments of my blog.

By way of background, here's how the Digital Youth Project is described on their homepage:

Since the early 1980s, digital media have held out the promise of more engaged, child-centered learning opportunities. The advent of Internet-enabled personal computers and mobile devices has added a new layer of communication and social networking to the interactive digital mix. While this evolving palette of technologies has demonstrated the ability to capture the attention of young people, the innovative learning outcomes that educators had hoped for are more elusive. Although computers are now fixtures in most schools and many homes, there is a growing recognition that kids' passion for digital media has been ignited more by peer group sociability and play than academic learning. This gap between in-school and out-of-school experience represents a gap in children's engagement in learning, a gap in our research and understandings, and a missed opportunity to reenergize public education. This project works to address this gap with a targeted set of ethnographic investigations into three emergent modes of informal learning that young people are practicing using new media technologies: communication, learning, and play.

The Principal Investigators on this project are Peter Lyman at the University of California, Berkeley, Mizuko (Mimi) Ito at the University of Southern California, Michael Carter of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education, and Barrie Thorne of the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, the project is administered by the Institute for the Study of Social Change. With the help of a large number of graduate students and postdocs, a variety of projects are under way in both the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas.

The project has three general objectives. The first objective is to describe kids as active innovators using digital media rather than as passive consumers of popular culture or academic knowledge. The second objective is to think about the implications of kids' innovative cultures for schools and higher education and to engage in a dialogue with educational planners. The third objective is to advise software designers about how to use kids' innovative approaches to knowledge and learning in building better software. This project will address these objectives through ethnographic research in both local neighborhoods in Northern and Southern California, and in virtual places and networks such as online games, blogs, messaging, and online interest groups. Our research sites focus on learning and cultural production outside of schools: in homes, neighborhoods, after-school, and in recreational settings.

This project is sponsored by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

To learn more about the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Initiative.

Can you give us some sense of the scope and scale of the project?

Mimi Ito: This was a study that was conducted over three years, with 28 researchers and research collaborators. We interviewed over 800 youth and young adults, and conducted over 5000 hours of online observations. This was done in the form of 22 different case studies of youth new media practices. Some of the studies looked at particular online sites, such as YouTube and social network sites. Other studies looked at interest groups, such as gaming groups and fans of anime and Harry Potter. Other groups also recruited youth from local institutions such as afterschool programs, parent networks, and schools. We believe that this is the most extensive qualitative study of contemporary youth new media practice in the U.S.

Mimi Ito: Our goal was really to capture youth perspectives and voices to understand what is happening in the online world today. We wanted to look at how young people are incorporating new media into their everyday social and recreational lives, in contexts that they found meaningful and motivating. Our thought was that it was only by looking at these kind of youth-driven contexts that we could get a grasp of what youth were learning through their online participation, and how that activity was changing the shape of our media and communications landscape.

Mimi Ito: One of the strengths of the ethnographic process is that it involves listening and learning from people with different perspectives, and having that inform our research frameworks. One of the big things that we learned from doing this with such a large research team, was how it was that different kinds of youth practices and social groups were related to one another, either in a synergistic way or a more antagonistic way. We learned that the main thing that distinguishes different kinds of youth new media practices was the difference between what we call "friendship-driven" and "interest-driven" participation. Friendship-driven participation is what most youth are doing online, and involve the familiar practices of hanging out, flirting, and working out status issues on sites like MySpace and Facebook. Interest-driven participation has to do with more of the geeks and creative types of practices, where youth will connect with others online around specializes interests, such as media fandom, gaming, or creative production. It wasn't the just usual things like gender and socioeconomic status that necessarily determined the big differences, but it also had a lot to do with categories in youth culture, like is considered "cool," "popular" or "dorky."

Heather Horst: In addition to friendship-driven and interest-driven genres of participation, we also identified three genres of participation and learning - hanging out, messing around and geeking out. Hanging out is when kids are using technologies like IM, Facebook or MySpace to hang out socially with their friends. Messing around is when they are looking around online for information, or tinkering with media in relatively casual and experimental ways. Geeking out is when they really dive deep into a specialized area of knowledge or interest.

What is important about this framework is that it's not about categorizing kids as having a single identity or set of activities. What we are doing is identifying different ways that kids can participate in media culture, and this can be quite fluid. For example, we talk in our chapter on Media Ecologies about a teen named Derrick who participated in Christo Sims' study of Rural and Urban Youth. He uses Instant Messaging and his mobile phone to coordinate hanging out with his friends. Yet, and like many other teens, Derrick has also earned a reputation for geeking out through his interest in locating and downloading movies through BitTorrent. He also uses the Internet to 'mess around', such as the time he did a search on Google until he found tutorials and other information to help him build a computer. The diversity of practices reflect differing motivations, levels of commitment and intensity of use which frame Derrick's (and other youths') engagement with new media.

Mimi Ito: These genres of participation were things that we found across the different case studies that we looked at. In addition, each individual case study discovered a wealth of interesting details and findings that were specific to each case. What was unique about this project was that we discovered things that were grounded in the specifics of deep case studies, which is typical of ethnographic work, as well as identifying these broader cross-cutting patterns.

danah boyd: While there are indeed examples of teens meeting others through these sites, it is critical for adults to realize that these sites are primarily about reinforcing pre-existing connections using mediated technologies. Youth's mobility is heavily curtailed and they desperately want to hang out with their friends from school. These sites have become that gathering space. Just because they can be used by youth to connect to strangers does not mean that they are. By focusing on the possibilities of risk, adults have lost touch with the benefits that these sites afford to youth.

Christo Sims: As danah says, most of our participants used social network sites to complement their offline social relationships rather than to experiment with identity or to make a bunch of new "friends" from around the country or world. With that said, there were instances where youth developed online relationships that extended beyond school, neighborhoods, and local activity groups. Youth that were more marginalized in their local social worlds would often go online for friendship and intimacy. We heard several stories of gay and lesbian youth using internet-based tools in these ways. Similarly, we heard stories of immigrants and ethnic minorities connecting online despite being widely distributed geographically. Then, there's youth who engaged in interest-driven online participation who often interacted with folks far beyond their local region. When friendships did develop they grew over sustained participation in those interest-driven activities, not out of more friendship or intimacy seeking behavior as you'd find in an online dating site. Finally, we did hear several stories of youth developing pen-pal like relationships with other teens. These interactions tended to be conversational, sharing accounts of what life was like in their respective towns or cities, discussing the challenges and confusions of being a teenager. These sorts of interactions more closely resemble the self-exploration and identity-play that earlier accounts of online participation tended to emphasize - a sense of anonymity, a degree of freedom from the trappings of one's identity in the family or at school - yet they weren't anywhere close to the dominant day-to-day uses of these tools.

Dan Perkel: Just to follow up on a point that Christo alludes to, there are in-between categories of people that might be overlooked in the split between "people you do already know" and "strangers." For example, there are people who are friends of friends, or friends of cousins, who you may not know, but go to neighboring schools, or live in the same area of town. We heard from participants in San Francisco, the East Bay, and I believe in Brooklyn as well, stories of people meeting up and getting to know people who they knew through others but only "met" using MySpace or another site. We also heard stories or in some cases watched people play out situations where they had met someone offline, and gotten their MySpace username so that they could contact them later. This was one way of facilitating dating (like asking someone for a phone number). In this case, this is someone that they have met, but is not necessarily someone they "know" or at least have any other contact with before back and forth conversations using social network sites. The point is that we learned how confusing it can be to even categorize who is a stranger versus a known person. How some of the participants use online media happens in the space inbetween.

danah boyd is a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley and a Fellow at the Harvard University Law School Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Her research focuses on how American youth engage in networked publics such as MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Xanga, etc. She is interested in how teens formulate a presentation of self and negotiate socialization in mediated contexts with invisible audiences. In addition to her research, danah works with a wide variety of companies and is an active blogger.

Heather Horst is an Associate Project Scientist at the University of California, Irvine (UCHRI) who conducted research during the Digital Youth Project as a Postdoctoral Scholar at University of California, Berkeley. Heather is a sociocultural anthropologist by training who is interested in the materiality of place, space, and new information and communication technologies. Before joining the Digital Youth Project in 2005, she carried out research on conceptions of home among Jamaican transnational migrants, as well as issues of digital inequality, as part of a large-scale DFID-funded project titled "Information Society: Emergent Technologies and Development in the South," which compared the relationship between ICTs and development in Ghana, India, Jamaica, and South Africa. Her coauthored book with Daniel Miller, The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (Oxford, UK, and New York: Berg, 2006), was the first ethnography of mobile phones in the developing world. Heather's research in the Digital Youth Project integrates her interest in media and technology in domestic spaces, families in Silicon Valley, and the economic lives of kids on sites such as Neopets.

Mizuko (Mimi) Ito is a cultural anthropologist specializing in media technology use by children and youth. She holds an MA in Anthropology, a PhD in Education and a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University. Ito has studied a wide range of digitally augmented social practices, including online gaming and social communities, the production and consumption of children's software, play with children's new media, mobile phone use in Japan, and an undergraduate multimedia-based curriculum. Her current work focuses on Japanese technoculture, and for the Digital Youth Project she is researching English-language fandoms surrounding Japanese popular culture.

Dan Perkel is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley's School of Information. His research explores how young people use the web and other technologies as a part of their everyday media production activities. Dan's ongoing dissertation research investigates the mutual shaping of young people's creative practices and the social and technical infrastructure that support them. Prior projects include explorations into the design of a collaborative storytelling environment for fifth-graders, ethnographic inquiry into an after-school media and technology program, and investigations using diary studies to capture everyday technology use. With UC Berkeley artist Greg Niemeyer and colleague Ryan Shaw, Dan helped create an art installation called Organum, which looks at collaborative game play using the human voice (and which was followed up by "Good Morning Flowers"). In a past life, Dan worked as an interface designer, product manager, and implementations director for Hive Group, whose Honeycomb software helps people make decisions through data visualization. He received his BA (2000) in Science, Technology, and Society from Stanford University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and his Master's in Information Management and Systems from UC Berkeley's School of Information in 2005.

Christo Sims is a PhD student at UC Berkeley's School of Information. He was a member of the Digital Youth research team from 2005 until 2008. His fieldwork focused on the ways youth use new media in everyday social practices involving friends, family, and intimates. He conducted research at two sites, one in rural Northern California, the other in Brooklyn, New York. His contributions can mostly be found in the report's chapters on Intimacy, Friendship, and Families. Christo received his Master's degree from UC Berkeley's School of Information in the spring of 2007, and his Bachelor's degree from Bowdoin College in the spring of 2000.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 5:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Why Universities Shouldn't Create "Something like YouTube" (Part Two)

Universite de Montreal is developing a new web strategy, they intend to
integrate web 2.0 features. They are thinking about letting students become
publishers, but they fear a teacher backlash. Is this fear reasonable? What
would be the worst case scenario?

When we create more open platforms, we destroy old monopolies of information. That can be a brutal blow for those who gain their self worth from their role as the dispersers of that information. So, yes, when you open it up to students to submit materials, teachers feel threatened. There are some legitimate concerns here, having to do with the credentializing of information and the liabilities of the university. For most of us, credibility on the web is situational: we are not so much assessing content as we are assessing the reputations of the sources of that content. We tend to put our greatest trusts in the institutions we would trust for information in the physical world. So, many people who sought information from Universite de Montreal or MIT will make a general judgment about the reputation of the institution and then apply it to all content which gets circulated.

For me, a lot of this has to do with how we frame the materials -- as a reference work (which meets certain criteria of reliability, which many faculty members would be hard pressed to meet) or as a space for investigation, deliberation, and discussion (where there are ongoing conversations about the value of different content being circulated). Most academic web resources represent the former; Wikipedia and YouTube would be better understood as the latter. The need is to be clear about who is contributing the content and then you need to create a context where the community has the literacy practices and collective intelligence processes to take ownership over critically engaging with the materials being shared.

Everyone in the university would need to have a stake in insuring the integrity of the process and that means being highly critical and skeptical of anything that gets submitted, whether by a student or a teacher.

A platform certainly can upstage the learning process if by a platform you mean a technology. It is not at all unusual for faculty members to become enchanted with one or another kind of hardware and not think through its pedagogical implications. We can see some of the ways universities have embraced Second Life as an example of this process. Second Life has some remarkable affordances which can support powerful new kinds of learning, but it's also a challenging technology to learn how to use. There's no point in using it for things that can be done just as easily through more traditional learning platforms and there's no point in using it if it takes much longer to learn how to use the program than it is going to be possible to use the program for instruction. In other words, we have to do a cost/benefit analysis and know why we are using this platform, why it is better than traditional means, what it allows us to do that we couldn't do otherwise, what challenges it poses to learners, and so forth.

On the other hand, I would argue that a process or a community is less likely to upstage learning because for the most part, it comes with its own pedagogical logic and if you work within that logic, everything you do will ultimately contribute to learning. Again, the choice of the community needs to be aligned to the pedagogical goals, because the community will impose its own goals which will often be more deeply motivating.

For me, they are two parts of the same process. When I hand you a printed book, which couldn't be more fixed in its content and couldn't be harder to reconfigure, you are still going to pay attention to only those parts that are of interest to you; I can't determine whether you read the whole thing; I can't determine what parts you cite in other works you write; and indeed, the book only becomes valuable when you can take out your yellow pen, mark up the passages that are meaningful to you, compare them with other books on your shelf, and use them as resources for your own explorations and ruminations.

So, why should we imagine that digital resources are any different? Once you share them, they are going to be sampled and remixed, if they are of any value to the person who receives them. That's at the heart of the learning and research processes. So, the question isn't whether to allow remixing; you can't stop it and you really wouldn't want to if you could. The question is whether to facilitate it or for that matter, whether to increase the visibility of what readers do with the content you provide. In the end, that boils down to the question of whether you want to be part of a conversation or whether you simply
want to publish.

In our participatory culture, though, keep in mind that publishing as an end unto itself is having diminishing return and people are much more likely to be drawn towards spaces which enable and support meaningful dialog. You can try to block it, if you wish, but you are also cutting yourself out from the marketplace of ideas, so what's the point?

The point is that I don't draw the line; the community draws the line. A society where there is lots of bad work out there is ultimately more generative than one which supports only excellent work. It provides points of entry for more people who are encouraged to try things, be bad, get feedback, and do better. A society which circulates only excellent work creates too strong a barrier to access and thus discourages most people from producing anything. The result is that we lack the diversity we need for collective decision making or shared cultural experiences.

So, the goal should never be to get rid of bad work; the goal should be to develop mechanisms which helps us to identify what we see as valuable or meaningful work according to our own criteria. There are a number of different mechanisms which allow us to do so: we can have gatekeepers who curate the materials and use their personal reputation to bestow recognition on work they consider valuable; we can have some kind of system of aggregation, such as Digg, where many people vote on what's valuable and the "best" stuff rises to the top; we can have some system of collective deliberation in which we have ongoing debates about what constitutes good work and what works are
good. All of those mechanisms can be found at work in one or another site online.

We still don't fully understand how these mechanisms work and what kinds of areas each works best. And universities would have a lot to contribute into research in these areas if they would free themselves from the burden of feeling like they can only support excellence.

It depends on what the university is trying to sanctify: is it seeking to guarantee the integrity of the product (in which case, every bit of content needs to be vetted) or the integrity of the process (in which case, the university is creating a space where people learn through vetting each other's content.) Is the reputation of a university based on the fact that they gather together lots of people who know things or is it based on the fact that they create a context where the ongoing questioning of information takes place?

Universities have gathered together many forms of expertise into one institution and they have provided the time and space for those expertise to be exercised around compelling questions. They have developed processes by which questions can be asked and answers can be debated, where information can be produced, exchanged, and evaluated, and where expertise can be exchanged between many different minds. So, how do universities expand those functions and processes beyond their brick and mortar campuses? How do they open up these conversations to include a larger public who wish to continue learning beyond their undergraduate years or who wish to learn things that are not available to them at their local level? Universities can potentially play an enormous role here but it requires them to rethink their interface with their public and indeed, requires them to expand their understanding of what constitutes the constituency for higher learning.

Note: In response to the first installment of this interview, reader Chris Lott asks why the Creative Commons license for MIT's Open Courseware initiative constitutes a "conservative" approach to Fair Use. I am not, in this case, concerned about reader's making Fair Use of my materials. They are welcome to use them with attribution as far as I am concerned. But my problem is that as a media scholar, I need to be able to provide excerpts from other people's media -- especially corporate media -- if my teaching materials and approaches are going to be accessible to people around the world who may not have ready access to American media. MIT's position is that we have to clear rights for every piece of material that we include in our course materials, rather than asserting a broader understanding of Fair Use which would define such materials as being circulated for the purpose of critical commentary. I apply such a broader notion in my own blog but so far, the Open Courseware people will not accept this perspective and as a result, I've been locked out of contributing to this program. People often ask why not use materials under Creative Commons license and the problem is that the kinds of materials currently circulating under Creative Commons tends to be indie media, which is great, but in teaching media studies, I also have to deal with material by mainstream media and universities feel themselves vulnerable to the exagerated assertions of copy right by many corporate rights holders. I hope this further clarifies my position.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Why Universities Shouldn't Create "Something like YouTube" (Part One)

I was recently interviewed by a Canadian journalist, Alexandre Cayla-Irigoyen
Chef de pupitre - Societe Monde, about OpenCourseWare, Collective Intelligence, and the modern university. Somehow, the interview questions sparked me to dig deep on some ideas that I hadn't really formulated before and I figured the answers might prove interesting to blog readers. So I asked the reporter if I could run the transcript here, once he had gotten what he needed from it for his story.

I read your book (Convergence Culture) and also a couple of other of your publications. You argue that, right now, the school system is failing its children because they are learning more experimenting outside class than in it. Do you think that Internet and the tools that are being developed will help change this situation ?

The internet is improving opportunities for learning for at least some portion of our youth, but most of what is most valuable about it is locked outside of schools. For example, many American schools block all access to YouTube, to social network sites, even to blogging tools, all of which are key sites for learning. Schools are discouraging young people from using Wikipedia rather than engaging with it as an opportunity to learn about the research process and to engage with critical discussions around issues of credibility. The schools are often frightened of anything that looks like a game to the point that they lock out many powerful tools which simulate real world processes, encourage a 'what if' engagement with history, or otherwise foster critical understanding of the world.

As long as they react to these developments as risks rather than resources, then those kids who have access to this online world are going to be de-skilled as they enter the schoolhouse gates and those kids who don't have access are going to be left further behind because they have been abandoned by the institutions which are otherwise best situated to address the digital divide in terms of technical access and the participation gap in terms of access to skills and experiences. So, yes, informal learning is taking place outside of school for those who are able to access it but the refusal of schools to engage with it further amplifies the inequalities between information haves and have nots.

Whatever their limitations in terms of bureaucratic structure, most university instructors have much greater flexibility to respond to these challenges than the average public high school. Unfortunately, by the time we get to college, these gaps in experiences, skills, and resources will have already had a near lethal impact on those kids who are being left behind. It isn't just that we will need to have a head start program to get them the technical skills they need to deploy these technologies. It is going to be much harder to give them the sense of empowerment and entitlement needed to allow them to feel fully part of the online world. They are going to be much less likely to play and experiment with the new technologies because they will be afraid of failing and looking dumb in front of classmates who will have been using these tools for more than a decade.

That said, we certainly do want to integrate these skills into college classes, because they are key to higher order thinking an research in most of our disciplines, because doing so is the best way of reaching a generation that expects to be able to participate in social networks and manipulate data through simulations. But we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking we can fix a decade's worth of neglect through the public schooling system.

The kinds of communities I discussed in the book are what Cory Doctorow calls "ad-hoc-cracies." They emerge quickly in response to shared interests and concerns. They last as long as people need the community to work through a common problems or query. They vanish when they are no longer useful to their members. They are radically interdisciplinary or I'd prefer, "undisciplined," in that they draw together people with many different expertises and they deploy social networks which observe few of the barriers to interaction we experience in the physical world to bring people together who should be working together. They develop informal yet very powerful systems for vetting information and for carrying out deliberation.

Almost none of this holds with the average college class which has a fixed duration, a prearranged sequence of materials and problems, a disciplined border, a geographically narrowed location, etc. So, if we want to integrate these into our classes, they require
much greater flexibility in imagining what constitutes an educational context. They certainly involve developing projects which span disciplines, which link several classes together and requires students to build on each other's work, and which may straddle multiple universities dispersed in space. All of this is easier said than done, of course, but we should be experimenting with how to achieve this goals since at this point it is even hard to point to many real world examples of what this would look like.

The Open Courseware Initiative has very worthy goals -- indeed, the vision behind it is deeply inspiring to me. Universities like MIT should be opening up their resources to the planet. We should being supporting independent learners and providing materials to support education in parts of the world which do not have what major research institutions have to offer. The scale on which Open Courseware is operating now is astonishing and a real tribute to the people who developed it.

That said, I do not myself participate in Open Courseware. I freely give away my own content through our various blogs, podcasts, and online materials. But MIT has failed to assert a strong Fair Use defense which allows instructors to meaningfully quote from and repurpose existing materials as part of their instructional process. As a media scholar, my teaching centers on helping students understand other people's media content and if I can't quote from and share that content with the users of the Open Courseware, I can not meaningfully reproduce my instructional practices online. MIT had an opportunity to be a leader in the arguments about Fair Use, especially given the good will they have gotten through Open Courseware, yet they have chosen to take a very timid and conservative legal approach to these matters and as a consequence, I feel like it severely compromises the goals and ideals of the Open Courseware initiative.

I am thus a conscientious objector in my relation to this project. I am going into this here not to slam the Open Courseware people but to suggest that the ideals of free distribution of content by educational institutions are compromised by the current intellectual property regime and that we are not going to be able to meaningfully achieve the full ambitions of such a project until we develop stronger defenses around Fair Use.

Many universities are trying to figure out how they can build "something like YouTube" to support their educational activities. Most of them end up building things that are very little like YouTube in that they tend to lock down the content and make it hard to move into other spaces and mobilize in other conversations. In a sense, these university based sites are about disciplining the flow of knowledge rather than facilitating it. As I think about what makes YouTube YouTube, I see a number of factors:

• Anyone can submit content at anytime and thus doesn't have to operate from a base of academic and institutional authority. It respects multiple kinds of expertise, understands people are differently motivated, and appreciates that information can be posted for many different reasons.
• YouTube content can be embedded on any website, blog, or social network page. It is spreadable and it gets value as it gets inserted into these various contexts, because they represent different social communities which are having ongoing conversations. YouTube sees information as something that can be used, not something that is simply stored.
• YouTube provokes responses. Indeed, the most valuable content on YouTube is content which inspires other users to talk back, reframing and repurposing materials, coming at them from many different angles.
• The content on YouTube can be reconfigured many different ways. It is not part of a structured curriculum; rather, it is modular, nonliner, unstructured. And as such, we are encouraged to play with it rather than being disciplined to approach it in set ways.

  So, I don't know for sure what the next stage of an academic content system looks like but my own sense is that it should look MORE like YouTube and less like what university lawyers and department heads think will be "something like YouTube".
  

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Some of My Best Friends Are Pirates

In mid-September, I went to Singapore to meet with some of our collaborators on the MIT-Singapore GAMBIT games lab and to speak to the Games Convention Asia about "Games as Transmedia Entertainment." In the course of the weekend, I gave an interview to a very thoughtful young reporter from the Philippines Daily Inquirer in which I was asked about the implications of the concept of convergence culture for the developing world. To be honest, I didn't think much more about the interview until some of my comments about "piracy" began to surface in western blogs within the gamer realm. The story spread through news portals focused on Asia to the gamer world, which is often keeping a close eye on developments in the Asian games sector and often gains prestige by being early importers of Asian-produced games before they are legally on offer here in the west.

One American blogger even "pirated" one of my portraits, which was doctored to depict me as a pirate. I figured that "pirating" it back is only fair game.

Indeed, the time lag between the interview appearing in a Manila-based newspaper and its surfacing on western blogs could be counted in a matter of hours, rather than days. At no other time in human history would such a flow of information have been imaginable. In the past, an American academic giving an interview in Singapore would in all likelihood have been locked down in a very localized context. And so in many ways, the circulation of this story demonstrates in pretty powerful ways what I saw as the central thrust of my comments -- that media companies can no longer realistically lock down their content into predictable zones and roll it out on their own time table. The moment content emerges anywhere in the world, it creates a hunger around the planet among potential consumers which will be met illegally if it is not met legally.

When I was in Shanghai last January, I learned a good deal about how fans of popular western programs such as Prison Break operate: within a day of an episode appearing on American television, it has been digitized, translated into various Chinese languages by an army of dedicated fans, and begins circulating throughout the Chinese hinterland and across the Chinese diaspora. In many cases, this is content which would never have been commercially available in China as a result of nationalistic and protectionist policies limiting the amount of American media that can be marketed to their country. And if this content was made available commercially, then few Chinese locals outside of the most wealthy and cosmopolitan cities would be able to afford it. So, in what sense can Hollywood be said to have lost markets that it could not have reached and could not have sold to in the first place?

Yet, it is clear that exposure to American media in the developing world often awakens desires and fantasies that can only be satisfied by more such content; it is part of the process of westernization and modernization which is impacting many sectors in Asia at the present time. A growing number of researchers are finding that these same tendencies are operating in reverse across America and Europe, exposing western consumers to Asian-produced media (Bollywood films, Anime, K-Drama, and the like), and gradually creating viable commercial markets where they didn't exist before. In many cases, those fans who have taken these materials without permission, done the hard work of translating them into English from their original language, taken on responsibility for educating consumers about the contexts from which they came and the conventions under which they operate, have gone a long way to open up markets which would previously have been closed to Asian media producers. Here, "piracy" becomes "promotion."

Does it make sense to refer to such practices as "piracy"? It's a debatable proposition but for the moment, many in the media industries are inclined to think of such consumer practices through a language of copyright theft and piracy. If we adopt that framework, then yes, I think there's a solid case to be made that "pirates" actually expand markets, over time, even if they cause short term "losses" for the initial rights holders. That said: I recognize that not all "piracy" follows such a pattern. There are a significant number of people out there who are exploiting the intellectual properties of others for their own financial gain and there are some who buy these materials because they don't want to pay the price being asked for this content. Nothing we say is going to change this basic dynamic, but the media industries could reduce some forms of "piracy" by better understanding what motivates it and reading it as symptomatic of the marketplace reasserting demand in the face of failures in supply.

For example, should we be surprised that protectionist policies surrounding media imports no longer work effectively in a global networked culture? Whatever gets stopped by customs the border will spread easily online and reach geographically dispersed consumers. Should we be surprised that consumers no longer want to wait to view content that they know is already available in other markets and is being actively discussed by others in their online communities?

For example, relatively few hardcore American fans of Doctor Who or Torchwood are willing to wait the six to nine months it is taking these episodes to cross the Atlantic and get aired on the Sci-Fi Channel. Many of them are seeking online channels, mostly illegal, to gain access to this material in something close to the same time frame as British fans are consuming it. This has not necessarily reduced sales of the DVDS or viewership of the cable airings of this content here, but it has pushed many hardcore fans to step outside of the law in order to access content they would most likely willingly pay to access if it was made available to them in a timely, accessible, and legal manner.

In my heart of hearts, I think most people would prefer to work within legal structures if they are available to them and I'd suggest that the relative success of iTunes in the face of readily available "free" sources for much of this content points to a deep desire to behave "honestly" when media companies do not create strong incentives to behave otherwise.

We can also understand this piracy as part of a breakdown of the moral economy between producers and consumers. Here's what I mean by a moral economy: Underlying all economic transactions are certain social understandings between buyers and sellers that reflect their sense that exchanges are just and fair to both sides. We can call this a moral economy.

When the rules of exchange shift, they are accompanied by certain social disruptions as both sides seek to legitimate their new practices and thus secure a higher ground in the emerging moral economy. We can see the deployment of terms like "piracy" or "sharing" as different bids to legitimate these evolving practices. It's a kind of rhetorical war for moral legitimation, which reflects the fact that both sides want to see themselves as behaving fairly. When there is a perception of unfairness, then there is a much higher likelihood that parties will step outside of established mechanisms and adopt practices which the other side sees as illegitimate. And clearly over the past few years, technological and cultural shifts, not to mention the legal battles that have emerged around them, have gone a long way to undermine the existing moral economy and thus create a crisis of trust between producers and consumers. Until media companies find a way to restore the balance, they are going to find themselves increasingly subject to behaviors which undercut their perceived economic interests and such behaviors are likely to be increasingly labeled as "piracy."

Such "piracy" is a global phenomenon, but it occurs in particularly overt ways in much of the developed world, which has historically been used as a final dumping ground for media goods that have played out in the rest of the world. As more and more young people in the developing world go online, have access to information about such content, and desire stronger connections with their counterparts elsewhere, these inequalities of access to media content becomes more and more frustrating. And "piracy" is emerging as the "great equalizer" to insure they have a chance to participate more fully in our emerging media landscape. Such young people, long term, represent the most likely market for western produced media, and this early, often illegal exposure is part of what will make them a desiring market for such materials over time. Framed in these terms, the debate about "piracy" becomes about short term losses versus long term gains for the media industries.

"Piracy" enters the developing world in another way as well: the production of local knock-offs of western media properties. Consider, for example, almost twenty years of the production and circulation of "Black Bart" T-shirts in intercity and impoverished neighborhoods around the world. These appropriations of The Simpsons have been a source of revenue for the small scale entrepreneurs who produce and sell them and they have been another way of connecting to the larger media franchise. Throughout much of the developing world, the images of western media are being translated into local folk art practices and then sold back to visiting tourists from the West. When I visited Shanghai, for example, I came back with hand-woven Chinese New Year decorations which deployed Mickey Mouse to signify the "year of the rat." Such goods were clearly not authorized or licensed by the Disney corporation. Yet, they represent another way that those in the developing world were attaching themselves to Western media franchises and do represent a form of grassroots convergence.

I am not making a moral argument here. I certainly understand why many media companies would feel that all of this represents a serious threat to their livelihood and that it constitutes another example of how they are "losing control" over their content in a networked culture. All I am arguing is that current inequalities of access to media content and the fraying of the moral economy between producers and consumers work together to create a context where more and more consumers, not only in the developing world but here in the west, are stepping outside of legal mechanisms to acquire access to content. We can call this "piracy" or not. But it will continue to be a reality until the media companies develop a more sophisticated understanding of what factors motivate such behavior and the ways that such practices reflect breakdowns in the market mechanisms surrounding the creative economy.

So, in conclusion, I just want to say "Aargh!"

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 2:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Video Games Myths Revisited: New Pew Study Tells Us About Games and Youth

Some years ago, I published an essay, "Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked" in conjuncton with the PBS Documentary, The Video Game Revolution. At least once a month, I see the article has been discovered by another blogger who is bringing it to the attention of his or her community, so I know that there continues to be interest and uncertainty about many of the issues that it sought to address. A recent report released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project offers some valuable new data about the place video games play in the lives of American young people. T

At the most basic level, game playing has become more or less universal. Fully 97% of teens ages 12-17 play computer, web, portable, or console games. 50% of teens played games "yesterday." I'm thinking about all of the moral reformers who note, whenever there is a school shooting, that they knew the suspects would turn out to be a gamer. I'd say the current statistics suggest that the odds are very much in favor of them being right but the claim is now meaningless. Indeed, many are suggesting that in such a context, the term, "gamer," may be obsolete -- at least as a description seperating those who play games from those who don't. It may, however, still work much like the term, "reader," to distinguish those who gain some kind of social identity through their relations with games from those for whom game playing is simply one activity among many.

The Pew research may also force us to rethink once again the assumption that there is a gender gap in terms of who plays games: "99% of boys and 94% of girls report playing video games. Younger teen boys are the most likely to play games, followed by younger girls and older boys. Older girls are the least "enthusiastic" players of video games, though more than half of them play. Some 65% of daily gamers are male; 35% are female. Girls play an average of 6 different game genres; boys average 8 different types."

A decade ago, when Justine Cassell and I edited From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games the picture was dramatically different: many were worrying that girls were being left out of this particular version of the digital revolution and that there would be social and educational consequences of this "gender gap." The new statistics show that this gap has significantly closed and that even other patterns people have observed (that boys play games more often, that boys play more different kinds of games, and that boys play games over a longer period of their lives) are starting to shift, though we can still see traces of these earlier patterns in their data. If you are interested in the gender-specific nature of game playing, you should check out Beyond Barbie® and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming (Edited by Yasmin B. Kafai, Carrie Heeter, Jill Denner and Jennifer Y. Sun) and due out from MIT Press any day now. This book updates our earlier collection with cutting edge perspectives from a new generation of games scholars who grew up with this medium. Justine and I wrote a new piece for the book reflecting back on the context of gender and games in the mid-1990s and looking forward to new challenges confronting the industry today.

The Pew Data complicates easy generalizations about the place of violent entertainment in the lives of American teens. For example, the five most popular among young Americans are Guitar Hero, Halo 3, Madden NFL, Solitaire, and Dance Dance Revolution. Of these, only Halo 3 would qualify as a violent game. Over all, non-violent genres were the most popular. But, 50% of boys name a game with an M or A/O rating as one of their current top three favorites, compared with 14% of girls. (0ne of those places where gender really does make a difference in how people relate to games.) 32% of gaming teens report that at least one of their three favorite games is rated Mature or Adults Only. 12- to 14-year-olds are equally as likely to play M- or AO-rated games as their 15- to 17-year-old counterparts.

The Pew Data further challenges the idea that game playing is a socially isolating activity. The researchers found "65% of game-playing teens play with other people who are in the room with them. 27% play games with people who they connect with through the internet. 82% play games alone, although 71% of this group also plays with others. And nearly 3 in 5 teens (59%) play games in multiple ways -- with others in the same room, with others online, or alone." As someone who has watched games over the past two decades, I would argue that game play has always been more social than many non-gamers expect. I recall my son and his friends going to each other's houses as a kind of victory house when they beat a level in a challenging game, showing the others how to do it and helping them over the hump. Indeed, playing a game alone is often seen as a rehearsal mode, getting ready for more social forms of play, much like a kid bouncing a ball against a house and catching it, because there aren't people around to play ball with. The Pew data suggests that for many kids, games is sometimes social, sometimes solitary, but most have a healthy range of different ways of engaging with the games medium.

The Pew Research does indicate some areas where parents should be concerned about the gaming lives of their sons and daughters. Nearly two-thirds (63%) of teens who play games report seeing or hearing "people being mean and overly aggressive while playing," and 49% report seeing or hearing "people being hateful, racist, or sexist" while playing. However, among these teens, nearly three-quarters report that another player responded by asking the aggressor to stop at least some of the time. Furthermore, 85% of teens who report seeing these behaviors also report seeing other players being generous or helpful while playing. Many of us believe that cyberbullying is a much more real concern than the worry that playing violent games might somehow make young people more aggressive in the real world. A decade ago, the digital world felt like a safe space for many young geeks, especially when compared with school hallways or gyms, but now that everyone is playing games and going on line, the bullies are showing up there too and young people are having to confront in cyberspace those problems which haven't been resolved in the real world. It isn't that games make kids more aggressive; it may be that real world aggression and conflict is spilling over into games.

The Pew Research also challenges the prevailing myth that most parents are worried or alarmed about their young people's relations to games. 62% of parents of gamers say video games have no effect on their child one way or the other. 19% of parents of gamers say video games have a positive influence on their child. 13% of parents of gamers say video games have a negative influence on their child. 5% of parents of gamers say gaming has some negative influence/some positive influence, but it depends on the game. I see this data less as an indication of the "actual effects" of game play on children but rather as an indication that most parents have come to accept games as a normal part of American childhood and that more of them now see positive benefits than negative harms. After all, a significant number of contemporary American parents were part of that first Nintendo generation, grew up playing Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog, and are thus less likely to be panicked by an unfamiliar technology in their living rooms. Many discussions about games and parenting fail to reflect this generational shift in who these parents are and how they think about this medium.

There's lots more to chew on in the Pew report, including some interesting suggestions about the civic impact of games and whether online play has the same social value as face to face play. I am hoping that this new data will further sharpen the conversations around games.

For more interesting insights on these questions, check out the podcast of a recent CMS colloquium, "The Myths and Politics of Video Games Violence Research," featuring Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson, authors of the recent book, Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do. If you don't know this book, you should since like the Pew research, it challenges many common assumptions about this issue, daring to ask and find answers to basic questions about the place of violent games in young people's lives.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 1:20 AM | Permalink

Framing the Candidates (Part One): A Closer Look at Campaign Biography Videos

George Lakoff's book, Don't Think About an Elephant, has been one of the most influential arguments about the nature of American politics to emerge in recent years. Lakoff, a linguist, turned his attention to the "framing" of political discourse. If you want to look more closely at his argument, "A Man of His Words" is an online excerpt which pulls out most of the ideas that are going to interest us here.

Lakoff argues that the Democrats lose elections even though they often have the facts on their side because the Republicans typically frame the debate. Consider for example the ways McCain has transformed the current energy crisis from one which might deal with the environment or economics or alternative energy to one which rises and falls on the question of off-shore drilling. Or consider the ways that the Republicans have deployed terms like "maverick" and "reformer" to distance themselves from the Bush administration. To turn this around, the Democrats need to reinvent themselves -- not by shifting their positions but by altering the frame.

As Lakoff explains, "Reframing is social change.... Reframing is changing the way the public sees the world. It is changing what counts as common sense." Much of the early excitement around Obama was that he seemed to offer the most compelling new way to "reframe" progressive politics and thus offered a way out of failed rhetoric of the past. For some, this is about style over substance or a matter of "just words," but Lakoff argues that framing is about a structure of ideas that gets evoked through particular words and phrases but has its own deep logic that shapes how and what we think.

In a simple yet suggestive analysis, Lakoff characterizes progressive and reactionary politics in terms of what he calls the Nurturing Parent and the Strict Father frames. According to the Strict Father model, Lakoff writes, "the world is a dangerous place, and it always will be, because there is evil out there in the world. ...Children are born bad, in the sense that they just want to do what feels good, not what is right." The strict father "dares to discipline" his family and supports a president who will discipline the nation and ultimately, the world. According to the progressive "nurturing parent" scenario, "Both parents are equally responsible for raising the children. ...The parents' job is to nurture their children and to raise their children to be nurturers of others."

Swing voters share aspects of both world views. The goal of politics, Lakoff suggests, is to "activate your model in the people in the middle" without pushing them into the other camp.

We can see this as almost a reverse of old-style Christian doctrine in which the relation of a husband to his wife or a father to his child is supposed to mirror the relations of God to man. In this case, the family becomes a microcosm through which we can understand the relationship of the president to the nation and the world.

This is consistent with an argument that I put forth in the introduction to The Children's Culture Reader that the Republicans and the Democrats both use the figure of the child as a rhetorical device in talking about their visions for the future of the country, but they understand the family in very different terms. In an analysis of the 1996 GOP and Democratic national conventions, I contrasted Hillary Clinton's deployment of the phrase "It takes a village to raise a child" with oft-cited Republican images of the family as a "fort" defending its members against a hostile world.

As a teacher, I've found that one of the best ways to introduce this important argument to my classes has been to engage in a critical comparison between the official campaign biography videos, shown at the national conventions, and intended to link the candidate's personal narrative with the larger themes of the campaign. Here, we can see very explicit connections between the ways that the two parties understand the family and the nation. These videos are easy to access on the web and bring into your classrooms.

Over my next three posts, I will look more closely at first the videos for the two Presidential candidates, then the bios for the two Vice Presidential candidates, and finally parodies of these videos produced for The Daily Show. I am hoping that this will provide inspiration for educators who might want a way to talk about the campaigns, the differences between the parties, and the role of media in the process.

First, a few general points. Students often react to these videos when they first see them as if they were documentaries, straight forward presentations of the facts of the candidates' lives. If Obama and McCain tell very different stories, it is because they led very different lives. And this is of course partially true. The videos mobilize elements from the candidate's biographies to construct narratives about them which are designed to introduce them to the American people. For many votes, these videos and the acceptance speeches are the first time they are paying attention to these candidates.

Yet, keep in mind the role selectivity plays here -- we can't tell everything about their lives in a short video, so get students to think about what they decide to include and what they leave out of these videos. There's also the question of framing -- what gets said by the candidate, by the people in his or her family, by others, and by the narrator -- which helps us to understand this person in specific ways. And then there's the matter of technique -- what kinds of images do we see, what role does the music play in setting the tone for these stories.

I've found that these videos work best in a classroom setting where I show them side by side so that the students compare the differences in their approach. On one level, there's a well established genre here -- a general framing, followed by childhood experiences, early career, courtship and marriage, education, national service, early political life, fatherhood and family, and launch of the campaign. These similarities make it easy to see the differences in framing at work. If you are pushed for time, as I was in class the other day, you are better off showing the first 2-3 minutes of each, and then getting the discussion started, than showing one through all the way. It is through the comparison that we really understand how these videos deploy melodramatic devices and images of the family to shift how we think about the candidate's relationship to the nation.

Obama and the Nurturing Parent Frame

From start to finish, the Obama video is focused on constructing the ideal image of the nurturing parent who will insure the well being of all Americans. The very opening lines of the video already evoke the image of childhood: "It is a promise we make to our children that each of us can make what we want from our lives" and the climax of the video comes when we return to that opening statement and build upon it: "It was a promise his mother made to him and that he intended to keep." Think about the difference between talking about the "American promise" and the "American dream," and you know a great deal about the ideological differences between the two parties.

The idea of "empathy" is a central cornerstone of the family as depicted in this video. It emerges most powerfully in the story about Obama's mother urging him to "imagine standing in that person's shoes. How would that make you feel." and again, by the end of the video, this concept of empathy becomes a cornerstone of Obama's relationship to the nation, as he describes how he remembers his mother as he travels "from town to town." Empathy runs through the list of values Obama tells us that he and Michelle want to pass down to their children: "hard work, honesty, self-reliance, respect for other people, a sense of empathy, kindness, faith." And we can see this respect for nurturing and empathy when he talks about the death of his mother, who was "the beating heart" of their family. Indeed, moments when candidates talk about personal losses of family members and loved ones are often potent appeals to the viewer's own empathy, since many of us feel our common humanity most powerfully through our shared experience of mortality.

And this logic of empathy emerges through the suggestion that Obama knows first hand the suffering and anxieties felt by average Americans: "I know what it's like not to have a father in the house, to have a mother who's trying to raise kids, work, and get her college education at the same time. I know what it's like to watch grandparent's age, worrying about whether their fixed income is going to be able to cover the bills."

We can see this last comment as part of a larger strategy in the video to depict Obama's personal narrative as the "story" of America and his "search for self" as a quest to better understand the nation that gave him birth. As the narrator explains, "By discovering his own story, he would come to know what is remarkable about his country." And this is an outgrowth of the first thing we are told about his mother, that she knew her son was an American "and he needs to understand what that means."

This video works hard to combat images of Obama's background as exotic, as outside the mainstream. There is no reference here to Hawaii and only an implicit nod to the fact that he spent part of his life overseas, even though this last detail has been central to the candidate's appeal internationally. The focus is on the most "heartland" aspects of his family background -- a strong focus on his grandparents who come from Kansas, and their experience of the Depression and World War II. Obama got into trouble for suggesting that some people in rural Pennsylvania were "bitter," so the video is careful to say that his grandparents were not "complainers." When it comes time to capture his sense of pride in his country, he tells a story about sitting on his grandfather's shoulders and waiving a flag at the return of the astronauts.

The representation here of his marriage might be summed up with the old feminist slogan, "the personal is the political." Michelle describes the moment she fell in love with Barrack: watching him deliver a speech in the basement of a community center in which he spells out "the world as it is" and "the world as it should be." This story collapses Obama's hopes for his family and his hopes for his country in a sublime moment of utopian possibilities. Michelle emerges as the ideal arbiter of his political integrity because she can testify that he lives these values through his personal lives.

And the final statement of the "nurturing parent" model comes when Obama tells us, "One person's struggle is all of our struggles." The government becomes a mutual support system that looks after its weakest members in a world which is often unjust. The president's job is to insure that all of his children gets what they need and deserve and that the "American promise" gets fulfilled and transfered to the next generation.

McCain and the Strict Father Model

If the Obama video sets up issues of nurtering and empathy from its first images, suggested by the long panning shots across American faces and a voiceover about the "American Promise," the McCain video opens with us staring directly into the face of the candidate as a young naval officer, trying to read his character and understand the relationship of this national service to the "mission" ahead. The opening narration starts with descriptions of him as "a warrior, a soldier, a naval aviator, a Pow," before pulling us down to the family -- "a father, a son, a husband", then into his political career. And then we get that surprising moment when he is called "a mother's boy," one suggestion of softness amid a series of hypermasculine sounds, images, and terms. My students suggested that the reference to the mother helps him deal with issues of age and mortality, yet it also seems part of a strategy to manage the negative associations which many independents and Democrats may feel towards the repeated references to his toughness throughout the video.

Strength of character and conviction, coupled with physical toughness as proven through war, are the central virtues ascribed to McCain by the video and they are introduced here once again through the narrative of his family. As suggested by the gender specificity of the "Strict father" construction, the family here, except for the references to the mother, is represented almost entirely through patriarchal bloodlines -- again a contrast to the absent father and strong mother image in the Obama video. We learn about his grandfather who died the day he returned from World War II; we learn about his father who ordered the carpet bombing of a country where his son was held captive, even as he waited at the border hoping for his return. When we see him with his son in the opening series of shots, he is standing alone with his offspring on the side of a mountain. Fatherhood is an extension of manhood and it gets expressed through discipline and competition more than through images of cuddling and craddling.

The critical moments here, of course, deal with his Vietnam war experience which require a recognition of vulnerability and weakness even as the larger narrative centers around his toughness and will power. Consider this key description: "Critically injured, his wounds never properly addressed, for the next five and a half years, John was tortured and dragged from one filthy prison to another, violently ill, often in solitary confinement, he survived through the faith he learned from his father and grandfather, the faith that there was more to life than self."

So, again, we see the passing down of civic virtue through male bloodlines as a central motif in this video. There's no question that the video constructs these experiences as a form of martyrdom out of which a national leader emerged: "The constant torture and isolation could have produced a bitter, broken man. Instead he came back to America with a smile -- with joy and optimism. He chose to spend his life serving the country he loved." or consider the phrase, "he chose to spend four more years in Hell." Or the ways the video depicts his role in the normalization of relations with Vietnam -- "Five and a half years in their hell and he chose to go back because it was healing for America. That's country first." Note this is one of the few places where metaphors of "caring" or "healing" surface in the video and it is specifically in relation to the pain of wartime. A more complex metaphor emerges as Fred Thompson reads aloud a passage from McCain's autobiography about "living in a box" and ends with "when you've lived in a box, your life is about keeping others from having to endure that box."

This toughness and individualism carries over into the discussions of national policy. McCain doesn't believe that the country should care for each of its members but rather he has "a faith in the American people's ability to chart their own course." He is "committed to protect the American people but a ferocious opponent of pork barrel spending and would do most anything to keep taxes low and keep our money in our pockets." What is implied by that contrast between "protecting" the public and "pork barrel spending" and "higher taxes"? There is a clear sense that as a stern father he will give us what we really need but protect us from our own baser urges and desires.

While the Obama video distributed its points across a range of different voices, including a large number of women, the McCain video tends to rely on a voice of God narrator who speaks the unquestioned truth about this man and on comments from McCain himself. All of this creates a more authoritarian/authoritative structure where truth comes from above, rather than emerging from listening to diverse voices, and reflects this notion of stern responsibility rather than nurturing.

This centralized discourse is consistent with the videos focus on experience and its tendency to read McCain as "superior" to others -- "no one cherishes the American dream more," for example, but also no candidate has had his experiences in public service. There is an underlying suggestion here of predestination -- "McCain's life was somehow sparred -- perhaps he had more to do." In this case, the hint is that he is fulfilling God's plan for him and for the country. This issue of predestination resurfaces near the end when the video repurposes some of the core themes of the Obama campaign, including some that McCain has criticized and turns them around, "What a life, what a faith, what a family! What good fortune that America will chose this leader at precisely this time. The stars are aligned. Change will come. But change must be safety, prosperity, optimism, and peace. The change will come from strength -- from a man who found his strength in a tiny dank cell thousands of miles from home."

There's so much more that we could say about both of these videos and that's the point. They are great resources for teaching young people to reflect critically on the ways the campaigns are being "framed." Next time, I will look more closely at the Vice Presidential videos.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Fans, Fair Use, and Transformation

Earlier this year, I ran an interview with Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi from American University's Center for Social Media about their work articulating the "fair use" rights of documentary filmmakers and media literacy teachers.

I have been lucky enough to be one small part of a team they pulled together of media scholars and lawyers focused on better understanding how fair use might apply to remix practices now common online. Other members of the team included: Mimi Ito, Lewis Hyde, Rebecca Tushnet, Anthony Falzone, Michael Donaldson, Michael Madison, Panela Samuelson, and Jennifer Urban. Last week, the Center released their findings.

The resulting report offers a very strong, legally credible defense of many now common remix practices, including some language which should prove especially helpful in helping fan vidders to know how far they can go and stay within a common sense understanding of fair use rights. The report's recommendations center around two core questions:

• Did the unlicensed use 'transform' the material taken from the copyrighted work by using it for a different purpose than that of the original or did it just repeat the work for the same intent and value as the original?


• Was the material taken appropriate in kind and amount, considering the nature of the copyrighted work and of the use?

If the answers to these two questions are 'yes,' a court is likely to find a use fair. Because this is true, such use is unlikely to be challenged in the first place.

This focus on "transformation" clearly compliments the focus on "transformative works" in recent fan conversations in the wake of the creation of the Organization for Transformative Works.

And the report's findings will be especially relevant to fan vidders, who have been struggling to decide how public they want their work to be, given their historic vulnerability to legal prosecution and yet their concern that other remix communities are gaining greater visibility in the era of YouTube. The report certainly doesn't address every concern vidders will face -- in particular, it raises questions about whether vidders would be legally better off drawing on multiple songs rather than basing the entire video on a single piece of music. But the authors hope that the publication of this document will spark further conversations.