New Media for Children & Young Adults, 2010-11

NOTE: I know this is a bit of a long post, but it’s because I’m not sure what to focus on specifically.  There is so much STUFF out there!  I figure because I’m working with YA literature a lot, I will incorporate some of what I have learned from fiction into this post.  I hope that I don’t confuse too many people.

A lot of what Baym has to say can be seen reflected back from the pages of fiction.  Currently, I am reading Cory Doctorow’s For the Win, in which a number of people meet, interact, and fight back the evil corporate world through online games and all sorts of other crazy technological things that I can barely follow.  What made me think of this book is Baym’s discussion of the curious dynamics of online relationships and interaction.  The cartoon that reads “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” is in both Baym and Doctorow and is relevant both in reality and in the slightly fictional world of the novel:

Although Steiner has said he didn’t know what the cartoon was about when he drew it, New Yorker cartoon editor Robert Mankoff said it “perfectly predicted both the Internet’s promise and its problems” (2004: 618). Whether this cartoon represents a dream or a nightmare depends on whether one is the dog or the fool unknowingly talking to the dog.

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Of course I can’t comment on everything within these chapters, so I’ve just chosen a few points I found interesting.  So I hope other people have taken some other stuff from later on in the chapters (like the section on working from home and entrepreneurship as opposed to office work…  cool stuff!)  Anyway, here goes:

I think, out of most of the reading, this was my favourite line put forward by Tapscott.  And I think it’s very true.  I’m honestly still unsure of what “generation” I am from, but I really don’t care for the purposes of this reading.  I think a bit like Tapscott’s son, and I’m hoping to start thinking more like Tapscott.  Indeed, his son was looking at Mars through the Hubble Telescope from his bedroom thinking how awesome Mars is, and completely forgetting how incredible the technology is that is letting him get such a great view of the planet.  I am much the same way, and for the purposes of this course, I suppose that will need to change.  This blog, for instance, to me, is a place where I put my words down through my keyboard, and then the computer amazingly does things and this all ends up in the ether for you all to read.  I never think about the behind-the-scenes technological makeup of the internet, or the coding that went into creating WordPress.  I can only hope that I will soon be starting to think a little bit more critically about the things that allow me do to do what it is that I do on a daily basis.

I think what I’m curious about is what other people think about some of the broad assumptions that go into Tapscott’s understanding of the Net Generation.  I do believe that whatever generation I happen to be a part of is very involved in technology, and there are certainly some who I would consider to be overly-involved with their technological thingamajigs, but I hesitate to say that our use–and perhaps reliance on–technology has made us in any way less able to express ourselves or work or think critically.  Of course, maybe that’s just me being defensive or something.  Who knows?  I like to think that it’s about how we utilize new technology that makes us different, and not that we are somehow lesser in any way.  New Media just forces us to think about things more, and to consider what we used to do before these new bits and pieces showed up on the technology stage, as it were.

But what do you all think about some of the assumptions in the reading?  Did you agree with the majority of what Tapscott had to say?  Or do you think he went overboard with his theories?

Thanks for listening!