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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I hope you’ve all been as intrigued by the reading this week as Rob — I selected it because it’s provocative and represents a strong view of young people as enabled by technology.  It also hints at lives constrained, more or less, by technology: people unable to start their day without Facebook or Twitter, always on and constantly connected, seemingly dependent on technology use as a defining aspect of their lives, even as it appears seamlessly integrated (flows like water or surrounds them like air, both commonly used metaphors).

Tapscott’s view is one of many that have emerged in recent years attempting to define the role of media in the lives of young people, and in particular attempting to identify the effects of media on a generation of connected youth.  We have extreme detractors, such as Mark Bauerline’s treatise on the Dumbest Generation.  Or Nicholas Carr, who poses the question of whether Google Makes Us Stupid.  More balanced approaches, which document both the risks and opportunities can be found in books by John Palfrey and Sonia Livingstone, both significant scholars with a wealth of empirical evidence for their claims.

A recent interview with Howard Rheingold frames the challenge of defining a generation that many regard as “digital natives” but might better be thought of as digital naives: “I think we need to dispense with the assumption that a majority of young people are skillful users of social media.” It’s one thing to be connected, another to understand what to do with the information you find or assess it effectively. Where do you stand with regard to these portraits of young people?  Since many of you are of this generation, what do you think of these depictions of yourself and peers?  How good is your “crap detector” (to borrow from Howard’s interview)?