Thankful for new media & what they're teaching us

Here in the US, this is kind of, partially a week of reflection and thanksgiving, as many of us shop, cook, travel, cook some more, and feast and some of us try to keep it really simple. But for the reflection and thanksgiving part, treat yourself to this enriching example of participatory media, a video by Michael Wesch and his students (the main one on this page). Then treat yourself to Professor Wesch's whole playlist on the right-hand side of that page. These students of anthropology – of humanity, really – understand social media from the inside out, so this is efficient, fun, joyful, profound, unsettling, mixed-media learning for us people who grew up in the profoundly different mass-media era.

In 12 years of writing about youth and tech, I have not seen a better resource for parents, teachers, police, and policymakers working in the youth and online-safety or 21st-century-learning spaces (pls see Related links below for teaching and parenting resources). [I've seen many, many great resources, mind you, but nothing quite as moving in the social-media space as this one.] Young people deserve to have their parents and teachers informed. And we all deserve exposure to the care and quality of thought that went into producing and presenting this 55.5-minute video that was presented at the US Library of Congress June 2008 (months later Wesch was named Professor of the Year; see his brief acceptance speech here). It's a global picture, which is essential, I think, given the nature of new media, and naturally it's not entirely a pretty picture – some viewers may find parts of it disturbing. But what picture of humanity is entirely beautiful? What's important is the humanity.

I think Mike Wesch understands cultural shifts, media shifts, and human beings well for two reasons: 1) his own shift from 18 months' anthropological field work in a remote (Iron Age?) village in Papua New Guinea to teaching the anthropology of social media in and with YouTube in 21st-century Kansas and, 2) as his talks and sound bytes indicate, he loves working with people and seems to have a way of bringing out the best in them – even when the picture is grainy. You'll get that in his playlist.

Related links

Parents, here's why we need to understand new media: Prof. Henry Jenkins at the University of Southern California says it's because social media "weren't part of the world of our childhood," and "now we're in a space where we're dealing with stuff our parents never had to deal with.... But we have to be open to the new ... there's much more valuable stuff here [online] than risky stuff.... At the end of the day, they need us to be informed about this. They don't need us looking over their shoulders; they need us watching their backs.... We have to recognize that they're going some place we never went and that's what's exciting and what's terrifying about the present moment," he says. [Thanks to CommonSenseMedia.org for linking to this clip at the MacArthur Foundation site.]

Teachers, if you wonder how Prof. Wesch uses new-media tools in his classes, he describes how (both in his huge undergraduate anthropology classes and small graduate-level digital ethnography classes) in a talk he gave at the University of Manitoba a little over a year ago. You can read a description of how the class is set up here, with an insightful comment below it from Bryan, a teacher of 9th- and 10th-graders, about how social-media tools can be used at those grade levels.

Here's the spring 2009 work of Wesch's class - a 6-min. video they created out of the class's "trailers," or spring semester projects (each student produces one) - and one of the trailers.

This month YouTube named Wesch its Curator of the Month. He explains all that here.

My previous piece on Wesch, August 2008: "Watch this video, parents"

Why participatory media need to be in school

Writer, tech consultant, and educator Clay Shirky just gave a talk at the State Dept. explaining the media sea change we're experiencing globally. Keeping participatory media, the most fluent though not necessarily most literate users of which are youth, out of school only solidifies the firewall between formal and informal learning and holds school back from 21st-century relevance. Isn't the idea of adults unidirectionally disseminating to students info that the latter have actually never encountered before beginning to sound quaint? Doesn't helping students make sense of all the info they're gathering and think about the implications of all the info they're sharing, multidirectionally, almost 24/7, sound a little more current? Remember that old term "information superhighway"? Well, even back in Web 1.0, when the Internet was more mass-media-on-screens, it was getting to be like a "highway" for all forms of "transport." It simply can't be called either "technology" or a new medium that's being layered on top of life or school. It's technology + media + communication + producing + consuming + community and so on. It's a planet-size screen displaying, pipeline carrying, and mirror reflecting virtually all of human life. Shirky says the Net has become "the mode of carriage for all other media ... less a source of information and more a site of coordination" because people can now consume, produce and also gather 'round and talk about the info simultaneously.

So the Internet or participatory media simply can't be an add-on to what students are currently learning - just "another subject to be shoehorned into the curriculum as job training for knowledge workers," as author and professor Howard Rheingold put it, quoted by professor Michael Wesch here. That approach would sell students, the learning process, school, and participatory culture short. They need to learn new media literacy and how to function well and civilly in community (be civically engaged, good citizens) in and with multidirectional, many-to-many social media throughout the curricula, the school day, and all grade levels. Visionaries like Rheingold, Wesch, and Shirky - and some amazing tech educators I feel so lucky to have met - show how important it is for students, as both producers and consumers, to approach participatory media in an ethical, mindful, and literate way. That's what school could do if it stops blocking participatory media: bring the rigor and enrichment of formal learning to the informal-learning that's engaging students and, in the other direction, bring the meaningfulness of informal learning to school. I ran across all three of the above links while doing some research for a talk at Purdue University this week. I hope they'll be as thought-provoking for you as they were for me.

But those are just a couple of reasons. Send yours! (Post here or in the ConnectSafely forum) - you can email me via anne(at)netfamilynews.org.

Virtual, real 'Global Sim' class

Ever thought of doing a non-virtual sim of the world, a mini Planet Earth, in a football stadium? Prof. Michael Wesch did. It's his Anthropology 204 class at Kansas State University, the Christian Science Monitor reports. Actually, his class's World Sim is in a giant rodeo arena, not a football stadium. It's designed "to push students to stop asking, 'What’s going to be on the test?' and to contemplate bigger questions: Why are some people poor and some rich? How does the world work?... to create an environment where students can expand their capacity for empathizing with and loving those who are different from them." The sim's also a big mashup of virtual and real-world spaces and tools (wiki, digital video, big arena, people), with student collaboration and decisionmaking (40% of the sim's rules get jettisoned at the end of each course to make room for the next class's rules development) - also a simulation of how young people use social media and mash it all up with the rest of their lives. Do not miss another class of Wesch's on the anthropology of YouTube (see "Watch this video, parents").

Watch this video, parents

If you want to understand...

who digital natives are and what they're doing online

how community is experiencing a rebirth online

how identity-exploration can be a collective experience and how that can be therapeutic

and maybe even why YouTube is the No. 1 site among 2-to-11-year-olds for video viewing (see this)

...pour yourself a tall glass of iced tea or something and watch "An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube," presented by Kansas State University anthropology Prof. Michael Wesch's last month at the US Library of Congress. Just click on the title, then hit the little "Play" button in the middle of the picture of the two tiny brothers, and I suspect you'll find - as I did - that you'll actually enjoy becoming more digitally enlightened in this way. I guarantee that, if you have kids and they're online, they'll appreciate your taking the time.

If you want to know a little more before you invest the 55.5 minutes, here are some highlights:

Why YouTube? It's a force and a fixture in many people's lives worldwide. If the 3 major TV networks broadcasted 24 hours a day, every day for the 60 years they've been broadcasting, they would've produced 1.5 million hours of programming. YouTube has published more than that in the last six months, Dr. Wesch said. People post 9,000 hours of video a day (another way to say it: 200,000 three-minute videos a day) - most of them meant for fewer than 100 viewers.

Linking what? The Web is increasingly about "linking people, not information."

Not trivial. The experimentation with video, identity, and collaboration going on in YouTube is courageous ("your bedroom as the most public place on the planet") - with many unknowns, including audience and what happens to one's very personal work and exploration. It's also global. Note the hero of "Free Hugs" worldwide at 35:35 minutes into Wesch's talk.

Not isolating. "New forms of community" have developed in this global video-sharing, and with them "new forms of self-understanding," Wesch said.

Ok to stare. Yes, viewing some of self-exploration videos seems a little voyeuristic, and there are some cruel comments and reactions, but this also happens: people experiencing "a profound, deep connection" free of social anxiety and other constraints of "connecting" in "real life" - because they can stare at the person in the video, study his face while he's talking on camera, while he's taking that leap of faith in humanity by putting himself out there.

Sexy images. Very often the sexy titles and screen shots (called "flash frames") that present videos are not what parents and other newcomers think (they're not presenting x-rated videos). They're about serious or funny completely innocuous videos. Representing them in a "sexy" way is a way of gaming the system. Their creators are just trying to get their videos noticed and watched so they'll rise to the top of the list (YouTube's home page) and so get noticed even more so they'll become famous or they'll raise awareness for their cause.

"Era of prohibitions." Don't miss Stanford Prof. Laurence Lessig's message (at about 46:15 min. in) about the impact on youth of knowing that remixing media, a way of life for them, is technically illegal in this "era of prohibitions": "That realization is extraordinarily corrosive, extraordinarily corrupting," Lessig said. We can't stop our kids from playing with digital media, he said, we can only send them underground, where we can't learn about what they're doing. Parent and Prof. Liz Lawley at the Rochester Institute of Technology echoes this below (in "Social networkers want more privacy options").

This is the kind of presentation that recharges, nourishes, keeps you going and going and going as you try - in the area of youth online safety - to maintain a balance of three needs: to alert parents to the risks that do exist, to mitigate fears and encourage (when "be very afraid" is so often the message to parents), and to communicate all the good, important growth and learning that's going on as young people use media that so many adults don't really understand.

Related links

"An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube," the talk he gave at the Library of Congress, June 2008

MediatedCultures.net, Professor Wesch's site (blog, bio, video portfolio, and intro to his students) - "Reasons Why We Tube" may answer more questions you have, as it explores and summarizes the 370 video responses Wesch's class got to "Why do you tube?"

The Wired Campus column about Wesch in the Chronicle of Higher Education

Author, tech-publishing entrepreneur, and pundit John Battelle's interview with Michael Wesch

Two resources Dr. Wesch recommended at the end of his Library of Congress talk: 1) AnthroVlog, the digital video research blog of Dr. Patricia Lange at the University of Southern California, and her paper, "Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube" and 2) the work of MIT graduate student Kevin Driscoll, particularly "Thanx 4 Da Add: How Soulja Boy Hacked Mainstream Music" and got a major-label contract from a base in MySpace.com.

Two stories show YouTubers' rants can go only so far. 1) Trying to be funny, maybe, a frequent YouTube ranter known as "Trashman" was arrested by federal agents this week for claiming to have told "Gerber employees to lace baby food with cyanide," CNET reports. 2) In "Wife's rant on YouTube falls foul of judge," The Guardian reports that "a British actor who took her battle against her millionaire husband to the internet, posting videos that lambasted him on YouTube and gained an audience of millions," was ordered to leave her New York home by a judge who ruled her behaviour was 'spousal abuse'."