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Today’s ‘low barrier to participation”

October 29, 2010 By Anne 1 Comment

Those are media professor Henry Jenkins’s words in a talk he gave to USC students’ parents this fall about “raising the digital generation.” It’s good to be reminded that Facebook, MySpace, (or Hyves, studiVZ, or Tuenti in Europe, for example) are not the all of social media for youth – that today’s highly interactive, global digital media lower the barrier of participation in all sorts of interests (music, travel, anime, film, gaming, politics, sports, etc.) as well as to sharing those interests, finding mentors and competitors, and promoting one’s own interests and talents in all sorts of apps, services, sites, games, and virtual worlds. In the talk, Jenkins describes how he and his wife helped their child become “an author of his media culture, not just a consumer of it and not a victim of it.” He also talks about the 12 social competencies of new media literacy, described by the New Media Literacies Project, which he started – “skills that involve citizenship,” he said in the talk.

What I’ve learned from him and other social media scholars is that, in working with youth in the new media environment surrounding all of us – whether we’re participating with phones, computers, or other devices – we can no more separate citizenship from media literacy (because media are behavioral/social now) than we can separate online and offline (because both are participatory “spaces” where life is learned and lived). If we stop seeing the online part of young people’s lives as virtual and the offline part “real,” maybe the online part will become less inconsequential in their own eyes – we’ll be supporting increasingly meaningful use of social media. Taking our traditional-media blinders off will also allow us to see how our children’s use of social media can complement and support their offline civic engagement and other kinds of participation in communities that are expressed both online and offline (I was surprised that, in a recent article about social activism and social media in The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell represented online and offline as an either/or proposition, that anybody who’s really paying attention thinks online civic engagement somehow replaces the “real world” kind). As Carrie James of the Harvard School of Education GoodPlay Project called on us to do: “Challenge the young people you know to see themselves as citizens of online communities, to use social media for something greater than themselves, then to move beyond mere clicks or what some people call ‘clicktivism’ to deep, sustained commitments to urgent global or local issues” (see this for more on that).

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Filed Under: Literacy & Citizenship, Social Media Tagged With: civic engagement, Facebook, Henry Jenkins, Hyves, media literacy, New Media, New Media Literacies, participatory media, Social Media, StudiVZ, Tuenti

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  1. Tweets that mention Today’s ‘low barrier to participation” | NetFamilyNews.org -- Topsy.com says:
    October 29, 2010 at 7:18 pm

    […] This post was mentioned on Twitter by annecollier, annecollier, cyberdoyle, Sangeet Bhullar, LouLouK and others. LouLouK said: RT @cyberdoyle: #socmed RT @sangeet: Great post! RT @annecollier: New blog post: Today’s ‘low barrier to participation” http://bit.ly/chOG4F […]

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Childnet International
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Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
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Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
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The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
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Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

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