Key learnings: Old media is giving out a strongly negative message about new media. Learning teamworking and collaboration are key skills for work in the future. TV in future where online has more depth than the broadcast show. Why Obama uses the language of 'we' versus Hillary's language of 'I'. Video games may be the central civic force for this generation.
Is there a further wave of backlash against US youth culture for the current generation? We are overdue a backlash – studying informal learning by Macarthur Foundation. Parents want to think their children are dumb – because they go into areas that weren’t part of our childhood. Children are looking for a space to exert autonomy and exert identity beyond the watchful eyes of parents. Parents see the engagement with technology and seeing fear. A conservative reaction to alien experience leading to moral panic.
New literacies are emerging that are powerful and not understood. E.g. WoW, Second Life. Parents want to be told that this is OK – but in print media the dominant message is that this is worrying. [link back to ]
Can we develop empirical measures for these new skills / literacies. Not reading skills but usability and mastery of new technology adoption. School skills are assessed on the basis of the autonomous individual learner not today’s collective intelligence, processing collaboratively. Everyone has some expertise that they can contribute. You can’t know everything that is in the textbook…. and this lack leads to disappointing scores on a traditional model.
Future – teamworking, pooling knowledge.. this is how we play and work but not about how we teach students today. A fundamental shift between learning and knowing. Jenkins was trained in cultural studies….. some new technologies and online stuff seems to be rubbish but the challenge is to find out why it has meaning to the people who engage in it. What I think is not relevant. What does it mean to engagement that is alien to me? People are usually doing things for a reason… find it.
Quick aside vote for The Wire versus Lost…. but I watch Heroes!
for the TV show Lost much of the phenomenon is happening online rather than just on the TV for the Wire. The community makes some of this so compelling. Lost may be the first glimpse of TV that we’ll see more of in future. E.g. the annotated map of the underground layer from the opener from Season 2 of Lost using 45 freeze frames uploaded from tivo!
What is wrong with America that these bright people who spend time online in Lost are not given the chance to articulate this creativity in the workspace. Most of their intellectual reward happens outside work – community respect and creativity. Under-utilised skills in todays workplaces. We could harness this to build a better society. New skills harnessed through play and then taken to apply in new situations e.g. the military, schools. The culture of collective intelligence and the online trust from coillabroation – how do we turn this back into solving the societal problems that we have? These are the beginnings of changes that are coming and are very powerful.
Fan fiction culture e.g. Harry Potter We are Wizards film. A generation both learning how to read and write via Harry Potter. Internet novels from the stories… they are learning how to socially network e.g. Wizard Rock – bands whose songs are based on Harry Potter themes…. circulating outside the commercial music sphere. Politics also happens from this….next stop might be the Harry Potter alliance to get young people involved in issues like child soldiers, Darfur etc and using the theme of standing up to authority and doing what you believe in and motivating others to come with him to change the world. The learnings from play moving to world change – ethical issues.
What do the 18-24 year olds like online? Broadly they are very good – the least violent generation since 50s and the most entrepreneurial on record and the most polically engaged since TV started. The prediction was that the internet would cause more engagement than the age of mass media created. There is therefore no reason for moral panic. The Obama phenomenon is symptomatic of this. Justine Cassell has been mapping young people online and the language of leadership… they use the language of "we" and adults use the language of "I". This shows the ‘what are we going to do together?’. This language is a powerful way of understanding the world. Obabma has maybe unconsciously hacked this language… "yes we can". A different way of modelling society. Hillary speaking she is I and You and it is all about her…. compared to Obama who has a world where we do stuff together. It’s not about the personality of the individual. The obama platform is a stub on Wikipedia – we will develop the platform together. He has built a movement not just a campaign. This is not about a campaign but a circule around the candidate of boters who have ownership nd involvement in the campaign.
People waiting in line in Boston to hear Obama were given phone numbers of undecided voters to call them so they felt engaged and had a stake in the outcome of the Massacheusets primary.
Our institutions have not kept up with this… the Centre for Future Civic Media at MIT founded to look at how we build an infrastructiure at a local level to build community engagement. Video games may be the central civic force for this generation. What does a culture of democracy look like when it is a lifestyle of social connection and the impact of others’ life on ours matters to us.
We now carry our friendship networks wherever we move because of mobile and network communications. We invest more in online connections – common interests which survive physically moving house. But this depeletes cities and towns and local communities.
Outside In – Johnson working with them to build new structures with technology. The internet is an urban location enhancing device if you use it well. At the level of local bloggers – neighbourhood community – people care passionately, they have expertise, and are working at a level uncovered by traditional media. They use geotagging tools to enable this. On My Radar – the facebook news feed put onto geography – yahoo’s fireeagle. Conversations based on GPS. Giving voice to local experts on the ground and amplifying word of mouth chains. It is a hard problem… the pothole paradox.
School age children are an underestimated force – livejournal accounts are growing but school newspapers are closing. They can contribute to bottom-up news but need freeing from a restrictive atmosphere.
Questions:
ratio of consumption versus creation for children. If you spend time online you have to both consume and create. 57% of teenagers online had produced media and many had circulated it more widely than close family and friends. What to do about the 40% that are not producing because don’t have access, nor feel empowered to get involved. Inequalities – technical, social and cultural. Parents don’t understand the ethical challenges of what is going on in the children’s worlds – don’t snoop over their shoulders but do watch their backs as support. Limiting screen time by houses is not the issue.
Collective intelligence – the aggregative model like the wisdom of crows and averaged solution versus a deliverative consensus formed after sharing. This depends on diversity of inputs. Create mechanisms where diversity is valued. Wikipedia as diversity versus youTube majority voting perspective.
