This past weekend, I spent an amazing two days at ROFLCon, a conference self-described as a mix of a “bunch of super famous internet memes [and] some brainy academics.” As promised, it was provided lots of laughter but also posed some interesting questions. During the opening panel, the question was asked(I’m paraphrasing), “If the Internet is a thought of as this democratizing force, why all the panelists white men?” Various retorts and theories were thrown around the issue, and it become somewhat of a running gag throughout the conference. “I apologize for being a white male,” said Christian Lander, writer of Stuff White People Like, before beginning his talk.

As the conference progressed though, it became obvious that all the panelists were overwhelmingly male. (To be fair, Alice Marwick gave one of the keynotes and women were well-represented in both the ROFLCon attendees and organizers.) Yet if ROFLCon aims to bring together the most famous people on the Internet, it seems like the most famous people on the Internet are usually white and male, even though online interactions are usually gender-blind. What makes this particularly striking is the fact that girls are no longer a minority on the Internet. Pew Research Center’s Dec 2007 report on “Teens and Social Media” found that of teenage content creators, 55% were girls and 45% boys.

This is a sweeping generalization, of course, but it may simply be that girls are interested in using the Internet in different ways. Girls are more active on social networking sites dominate the teen blogosphere (Pew) as a way of keeping in touch with their friends. Along the same lines, there exist certain online communities online dominated by females just as there are communities dominated by males. And the type of humor that ROFLCon particularly caters to just happens to include a lot of men.

The crucial distinction is that ROFLCon does not reflect the average Digital Native. It represents certain niche communities, outside of which names such as 4chan or Anonymous have little resonance. Parsing the gender discrepancy of the panelists is really a moot point, as they represent a very specialized demographic within the Internet, not the Internet at-large. Although the exact definition may still be open to discussion, the term digital natives encompasses far more people than those whom we – for lack of a better term – would call geeks. In includes Kyle, who figured out how to connect a computer to IRC in 1st grade, and me, who’s never gone on IRC, and my roommate, who’s never heard of IRC. In short, it includes a generation of young people who have grown up immersed in this digital technology, be it cellphones, iPods, YouTube, or Facebook.

Related posts:
No Boys Allowed
“Digital Natives” Under Attack

– Sarah Zhang

Cross-posted from Corinna Di Gennaro’s blog. Full version with links here

As Miriam Simun from our Digital Natives team is off this morning to present our research findings on digital natives and their attitudes towards privacy at the Harvard CRCS Privacy and Security seminar series, news comes from Italy that the Agenzia delle Entrate – the department of revenue – has made available online for all to see citizens’ annual incomes, searchable by anyone with an Internet connection. After a few hours the site was up it got clogged with requests, while protests started to come in for the breach of tax payers’ privacy. The Garante della Privacy intervened later in the day to stop the data from being released online.

What’s interesting about this story is that one might expect general outrage at the revenue department’s initiative to make such highly personal data public. But a quick look at two online opinion polls published by two of the major national newspapers shows that the outrage is not as widespread as it might be believed. At the time of writing this, sixty four percent of the readers who replied to the poll answered that they saw nothing wrong with the initiative – while 34 percent of respondents replied that making data available online was too much (La Repubblica). A poll by another newspaper, il Corriere della Sera – shows slightly different results, with 52 percent of respondents agreeing with the initiative to make the data available online.

While these polls are in no way representative, they are nonetheless indicative of a shared feeling that if personal data is made available online in order to increase transparency, then loss of privacy should be seen as acceptable. I was surprised – but less so when I put these results in context of our findings from our Digital Natives project. We live increasingly in a surveillance society where data is constantly collected about us from different technologies without people being necessarily aware of it – at the same time, we are increasingly sharing details of our personal lives online. Amongst the young people we’ve interviewed for our project, there is some awareness that loss of privacy is the trade off for living increasingly connected lives online. Clearly the tide cannot be stopped – what’s needed is a concerted effort to address these issues from an educational, technical and legal architecture standpoint in order to educate people (and institutions) on how to navigate this new world.

cross-posted from Dr. Palfrey’s blog; full version with links here

Learning, Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media is the fourth book I’ve read in the MacArthur/MIT Press Series on Digital Media and Learning. This volume, edited by Anna Everett, is the furthest from my own field — law — and, for me, the most challenging.

Prof. Everett’s opening essay, (which follows the excellent foreword by the series authors, as with each volume in the series), is an effective overview of what follows in the volume. She takes up the familiar debate about the term “digital divide” and why it now rankles more than it helps. She also reminds us that the old joke about how online nobody knows you’re a dog is no longer true, with the advent of rich media and other “advances” in digital technology and how it’s used. I was left, from her chapter, with one line resonating in particular: “the color of the dog counts.” (p. 5)

The rest of the volume consists of three clusters. Future Visions and Excavated Pasts is the first. Dara Byrne leads off with a piece on the future of race. She pulls in and incorporates a series of great quotes from message boards and other online public spaces; takes up (and takes on) John Rawls on the public/private question that runs through so many of our discussions of online life, (p. 22); and digs deep on the future of whether there will be dedicated sites for different races as we look ahead. The punchline is that yes, “minority youth must have access to dedicated online spaces, not just mainstream or ‘race neutral’ ones.” (p. 33)

Tyrone Taborn’s “Separating Race from Technology” is the other essay in this first cluster. Tayborn compares the likelihood of any group of students (”majority white or minority, rich or poor”) knowing Kobe Bryant and Dr. Mark Dean, the African-American engineer involved in IBM’s development of the first PC. His point is clear. As one of a series of possible solutions to the problem of too few minority youth having mentors and heroes in the technology world, Tayborn calls for Digital Media Cultural Mentoring (p. 56).

The second cluster of essays take up art and culture in the digital domain. Raiford Guins guides the reader through a tour of the ways that hip-hop culture, art, and use of technology come together online in the form of “black cultural production in the form of hip-hop 2.0.” (p. 78) It’s a must-read essay; heplful to read with a browser open and a fast broadband connection on tap. Guins has an intriguing segment on the future of the music label, among other take-aways (p. 69 – 70).

Guins’ essay is well-paired with Chela Sandoval and Guisela Latorre’s celebration and contextualization of Judy Baca’s work at the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) in LA. (One wonders why LA gets more than its fair share of intriguing digital media production experiments and narratives?) Among other things, Sandoval and Latorre challenge the notion of “digital youth” and the challenges of overly delimiting based just on age — a helpful reminder of a point too easily forgotten. (p. 85) In the final essay of the cluster, Antonio Lopez offers insights into (and concerns about) digital media literacy with respect to Native American populations, told largely in the first person.

Jessie Daniels opens the third cluster with a jarring piece on hate, racism, and white supremacy online. Daniels picks up on themes about the fallacy of colorblindness established in Anna Everett’s introduction. With a link to Henry Jenkins‘ work, Daniels argues for a “multiple literacies” approach to shaping our shared cultural future online and offline. (p. 148 – 50)

Yet more jarring, to me anyway, is Douglas Thomas’s piece on online gaming cultures, called “KPK, Inc.: Race, Nation, and Emergent Culture in Onling Games.” Thomas draws us into gaming environments only to reveal a culture of wild adventure, first-person shooter games, acquisition, treasure, money, and hate all rolled together. The crux of his argument centers on the “Korean problem,” (p. 163-4), a blend of bigotry, nationalism, and competitiveness. The racists that Thomas exposes “are usually Americans / Canadians and white” — and gamers. (p. 164) Along the way, Thomas distinguishes his approach from that of our Berkman colleague Beth Kolko. (p. 155-6)

The final essay, by Mohan Dutta, Graham Bodie, and Ambar Basus takes us in a new direction, further afield, toward the intersection of race, youth, Internet, health, and information. The authors synthesize a great deal of disparate information in unexpected ways. The essay left with an expanded frame of vision, and a frame that I never would have come up with on my own. Their punchline: “disparities in technology uses and health information seeking reflect broader structural disparaties in society that adversely affect communities of color.” (p. 192)

On balance, this collection of essays hangs together very well. Each essay takes a on strong point of view. Overall, the collection both informed my thinking and provoked more by raising hard issues about the impact of growing up online for race, ethnicity, identity, and health.

We often talk about the “blogosphere” as a singular entity—a hive mind, almost, that reflects the beliefs, activities, and interests of its participants. When we assume that this supposedly singular entity can tell us something about “global youth culture”—or, indeed, about any culture—we immediately run into problems.

For one, if “the blogosphere” is a hive mind, it is one perpetually at war with itself; blogging may be a push-button method of publishing beliefs and proselytizing agendas, but there’s nothing in the method itself that determines the slant of the content. In fact, anyone who has read the comments on a politically contentious blog post probably recognizes that blogging facilitates disagreement and reactionary debate to the point that every opinion will find its opposite in “the blogosphere.”

There is another problem, however, and this one is more trenchant. The word “sphere” goes beyond connoting a network; it subtly suggests a global quality that “the blogosphere” simply does not possess. Yes, people blog all over the world. But the network created by these blogs appears not as one sphere, but as many.

This alternate understanding of the term “blogosphere” emerges especially when we try to study specific groups of bloggers, and run into a language barrier. The Internet, by erasing the barrier of distance, enables English-language bloggers in Australia and English-speaking expats in Brazil to belong to the same sphere of understanding; they can freely traffic in each other’s blogs, comment on them, understand them. In fact, the English-speaking expat in Brazil might write regularly on the 2008 presidential election, and effectively be a part of the same conversation as a fellow political blogger in Kansas. Nationality, location, and age have almost nothing to do with this mutual legibility; language has everything to do with it.

The Internet & Democracy Project at the Berkman Center has a fascinating new paper on Iran’s blogosphere that delves into many of these questions: “Mapping Iran’s Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere.” The very premise of the paper hints at one of its larger claims: that there is a specifically Iranian blogosphere. Interestingly, though, many contributors to this blogosphere are physically located far from Iran. According to the report,

Iranian bloggers include members of Hezbollah, teenagers in Tehran, retirees in Los Angeles, religious students in Qom, dissident journalists who left Iran a few years ago, exiles who left thirty years ago, current members of the Majlis (parliament), reformist politicians, a multitude of poets, and quite famously the President of Iran, among many others.

These bloggers span the spectrum from very secular to very religious; from politically conservative to radically liberal. But the conversation in which they engage, and its consequences for Iranian politics, is sometimes hard to parse because anyone who writes in Persian—regardless of location or citizenship—is, by default, a part of the Iranian blogosphere as we are able to measure it. The report addresses this problem at length, admitting that

It is often difficult to judge where a blogger is physically located, especially since Iranian bloggers inside and outside Iran use the same Persian language blog hosting services, but our analysis suggests that a significant proportion of the bloggers who live in what is thus popularly understood to be the “Iranian blogosphere” do not live in Iran.

It’s alluring to think of a “global youth culture” emerging on the internet—a cyber-space where distance is no object, and young people on opposite sides of the globe can trade ideas, stories, and favorite music. This is not a pipe dream. However, language is a very real barrier, especially because the internet as it exists right now demands textual navigation. If you search in your own language, you will, for the most part, only encounter results in your own language—even if someone writing in Russian, Japanese, or Swedish might have something smart or provocative to say on the topic. Perhaps we perceive “the blogosphere” as a singular entity because we are blind to its boundaries; “beyond” lie dragons, and words we cannot understand.

For more on blogospheres and language barriers, see this post on my blog, about the Russian internet and the difficulties presented by Cyrillic characters.

–Diana Kimball

Astute readers will probably have noticed that although we’re supported by Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center, Digital Natives has more of a sociological rather than legal bent. Not that these two spheres are disparate, of course, as this post will hopefully demonstrate. Another one of the great projects affiliated with the Berkman is the Citizen Media Law Project (CLMP), which offers legal guidance to people creating digital media.
Here, I’d like to take a look into the CMLP’s Legal Threats database and examine a few representative cases most relevant to Digital Natives: schools and Internet speech. It’s no surprise that students talk about school, and it’s certainly no surprise that students are now doing it online. With the forum for their words now so open, how much power do schools have in regulating what their students say online?

I won’t go into the obscure legal details here – there are other people much more qualified than me – but I do hope to lay out some outlines. This essay from the First Amendment Center provides an excellent (and longer) introduction to the issues and provides a good framework to keep in mind when evaluating these cases:

Is it on- or off-campus speech?
Is it a true threat?
Is it vulgar, lewd, or plainly offensive?
Is it school sponsored?
Can you predict a substantial disruption and invasion of other’s rights?

Hermitage School District v. Layshock (2006) – High school student Justin Layshock created a fake MySpace profile of his high school principal containing lewd and drug-related references. School officials, upon finding out about the site, blocked all computer access in school for five days and suspended Layshock. The court entirely ruled that the school was out of line because Layshock himself did not cause a substantial disruption.

Hudson High School v. Bowler (2005) – The Conservative Club at Hudson High School (HHS) put up posters advertising its first meeting that included a link to the club’s website, which contained video footage of beheadings in the Middle East as criticism of Islam. HHS’s Technology Director banned the website from all school computers due to the violent content on display, even though the website contained ample warnings. In court, it was ruled that this was a violation of First Amendment rights as the videos were only available to students “outside of school as a matter of conscientious choice.”

Weedsport Central School District v. Wisniewski (2001) – Eighth-grader Aaron Wisniewski’s instant messaging buddy icon depicted a pistol firing at a man’s head along with the words, “Kill Mr. VanderMolen,” referring to one of Wisniewski’s teachers at school. When school officials found out about the buddy icon, Wisniewski was eventually suspended for a full semester. The district court, later affirmed by the 2nd Circuit Court, ruled that the icon constituted a true threat, so the school did not violate Wisniewski’s free speech in undertaking disciplinary action.

Doninger v. Niehoff (2007) – When junior class secretary Avery Doninger was upset by the administration’s cancellation of a music festival, she vented out her frustrations online, calling the school officials “douchebags” in a Livejournal entry. The school then prevented Doninger from running for class secretary, and the Doningers filed suit in response. The court ruled that school officials were justified in their punishment because Doninger’s “blog was related to school issues, and it was reasonably foreseeable that other LMHS students would view the blog and that school administrators would become aware of it,” meaning that the post constituted on-campus speech.

The actions of these students are not really defendable, but neither they are that different from what was once whispered in hallways or scribbled into diaries either. Posting them on the Internet, however, gives them both more permanence and a wider audience.

Talking about these four very different cases together also seems a bit silly, as they run such a gamut of issues. Thus, it seems a blanket policy for all school-related Internet speech would not be feasible. The key, perhaps then, is not to be reactionary or overreaching in response. Might ignoring these comments even been better policy in some cases? Had the school officials in Hermitage v. Layshock not reacted so strongly, would we still be reading about them two years later?

The other part is educating students about the consequences of their actions. Teenagers will probably always be making the occasional misguided comment, but there’s no reason they can’t learn to be more prudent about their words and actions. For example, after the initial controversy, Avery Doninger set her livejournal to private. It can be hard to understand the far-flung consequences of an online comment, but both students and school administrators should better learn to better grasp the shifting boundaries of the digital age.

-Sarah Zhang

Profiles never tell the whole story. The word “profile,” in its pre-web definition, meant “the outline or contour of the human face, esp. the face viewed from one side.” Fast forward to now, when most young people in the U.S. and elsewhere maintain at least one “profile” online. Maybe it’s a Facebook profile; maybe it’s on MySpace. Maybe it’s somewhere else. But imagine being able to create an avatar of yourself from scratch—a two-dimensional version of you that amplified what you considered to be your best features, and hushed the parts you weren’t so fond of. In fact, that’s exactly what many teens on social networking sites do every day: manage their avatars, the “profiles,” or artificial outlines, that act as vessels for their online identies

It can be intoxicating. It can be empowering. It can also be confusing.

A new study by OTX Research and the Intelligence Group reveals that

“Teens tend to be happier with how they look online (e.g., their MySpace profile) than with their actual looks — 78 percent vs. 68 percent.”

That statistic may not seem huge, but that’s actually a full 10% of teens who responded that, while they were not happy with how they looked in real life, they were happy with how they looked online.

These “profiles”—the way teens look online—are necessarily full of artifice. That’s not because they’re false, but simply because they’re completely constructed. A Facebook profile is a collage: of photos lifted from your own camera and the cameras of others, quotes and bands and movies you liked and want others to know you liked, applications that you choose to display, and other people’s affirmations of your identity in the form of public Wall posts. And yet, it is allowed to stand in for identity.

This isn’t necessarily a terrible thing. But the ways that teens manage and manicure their online profiles are worth paying attention to. If you ever want to really get to know someone—not just the outline, the profile, the side-view—ask him to take you on a tour of his favorite profile. All of the decisions that go into creating that image speak volumes about the fears, desires, and beliefs of the person behind the profile. We constantly create and recreate avatars of ourselves; sometimes, avatars we prefer to the genuine article. That’s not something to condemn, but it is something to interrogate.

When I was first exposed to the “Internets” in fifth grade, I was given a stern warning to not only watch out for safety but also not to trust everything I read online. To illustrate this point, our Information Studies teacher pointed us to a website bemoaning the death of California’s Velcro Crop (see below). I think I took her words to heart, as I’ve learned to look at Internet content with a critical eye. Anything that doesn’t pass the “fishiness” test I don’t believe.

Yet in a 2006 study by the Naeg School of Education, every single seventh-grader in the study fell for a website about the fictitious Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus (again, see below). When told that the site was indeed a hoax, the students had a hard time identifying clues why and some still insisted that the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus did insist. In the world of Wikipedia and an user-generated content, critical literacy is a crucial skill to teach our students. Below, I’ve compiled a list of hoax websites that all seem to have a stake in legitimacy. How can you tell they are fake?

• Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus
• California’s Velcro Crop under Challenge
• Sellafield Zoo: Where the Wildlife has a Half-Life
• Dihydrogen Monoxide
• Boilerplate: History of a Victorian Era Robot
• Buy n Large is a fake corporate website used in the promotion of Pixar’s new movie, WALL-E.
• RYT Hospital offers male pregnancy, mouse with human brain, designer babies

I provide these links for your amusement but also to discuss how hard it can be to spot these hoaxes. Some websites are obviously better hoaxes than others, but wouldn’t you usually trust a .org website such as for Dihydrogen Monoxide or a website as slick looking as RYT Hospital? The intentions of these sites may be educational, artistic or just for fun, and they certainly are not malicious. Yet they can be easily misconstrued by the uncritical reader.

So how do we exercise critical literacy? Certainly the old rules still apply: look at the dates, the url, and the source of the information. But I’d like to add one more thing: Google. If you’re not convinced of the legitimacy of a site, search for what other people are saying about it. Look for corroborating evidence. Chances are, if you’re skeptical, someone else was too.

via Thinking 2.0

-Sarah Zhang

cross-posted from Dr. Palfrey’s blog

The MacArthur Foundation’s Series on New Media and Learning, published by the MIT Press, includes a book called Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected (2008); open access version here. I opened this book first when I was writing a chapter on Innovators, for Born Digital, a book I’m co-writing with Urs Gasser. I had reason to come back to this book again in thinking about the Task Force we’re chairing, called the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, as there’s a chapter that centers on risk and moral panic in the context of Internet safety. (I’ve previously written about the series as a whole and the volumes Youth, Identity, and Digital Media and Civic Life Online.)

As with the other volumes in the series, there’s much in this book that informs and provokes.

The first essay, by editor Tara McPherson, has a title with particular to the lawyer interested in this topic: “A Rule Set for the Future.” It did not disappoint. This first essay serves both as a guide to the book as a whole as well as a description of six rules to lead to a bright future. As McPherson points out, “This volume identifies core issues concerning how young people’s use of digital media may lead to various innovations and unexpected outcomes, including a range of unintended learning experiences and unanticipated social situations. While such outcomes might typically be seen as ‘positive’ or ‘negative,’ our investigations push beyong simple accounts of digital media and learning as either utopian or dystopian in order to explore specific digital practices with an eye attuned to larger issues of history, policy, and possibility.” (p. 1) She promises that the book will take up a broad range of issues within this frame, including “policy, privacy and IP,” and to do so in a way that will inform a series of core questions, about what’s really new here, the historical background for these changes, the manner in which these changes are occurring, and what recommendations one might make for “policy, curriculum, or infrastructure.” (p. 2)

These issues that McPherson raises are in many ways the same questions we are seeking to answer in Born Digital, to be honest. She puts them nicely here. (And as a side note: the first footnote of McPherson’s opening essay points to the fact that there have already been — at least — three books on roughly the topic that Urs and I are working on: Prensky’s Don’t Bother Me, Mom — I’m Learning; Tapscott’s Growing Up Digital; Howe and Strauss’ Milliennials Rising.)

The bulk of McPherson’s opening essay is devoted to laying out “six maxims to guide further research and inquiry into the questions motivating this study.” (p. 2) These six maxims, or rules, are wonderful, both on their own and as a guide to the essays that follow. I will not ruin it by citing them all in this blog-post; you should read them for yourself if you are interested enough in this topic to be reading this paragraph of this obscure blog post. I will say that in Rule 4: Broaden Participation, she cites to a number of the prominent cyber-lawyers, including Lessig, Boyle, and co.

In her essay, “Practicing at Home,” Ellen Seiter does the unexpected: she “draw[s] out the similarities between learning to play the piano and learning to use the computer.” (p. 28-9) One such similarity is the barrier to entry of cost. Overall, it’s a worthy exercise. She informs nicely the issue of how to conceive of digital literacy in the curriculum. Her assessment of the digital divide data and literature, with an overlay of concerns about cultural capital and participation, (e.g., pp. 37-8) invoke Henry Jenkins’ fine work on the participation gap as a better way to think about the relevant split. (There’s also a critique of a passage in Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks on related grounds. (pp. 41-2) Ultimately, as Seiter admits, hers “is a pessimistic essay,” (p. 49) though one worth engaging with, especially for those of us who are hopelessly optimistic.

Justine Cassell and Meg Cramer take up the safety issue in the third essay, which is why I picked the book back up again now. It is a bit unexpected to see this essay in this volume — it fits less neatly than some of the others do with the rest — but is very helpful, especially when thinking about what we should really be worried about with respect to young people online. Cassell and Cramer lay out the facts about how great the risks are to young women of using the Internet, wonder why the media portrayal of the issue is quite so hyperbolic and misaligned with these facts, and ultimately “argue that the dangers to girls online are not as severe as they have been portrayed, and that the reason for this exaggeration of danger arises from adult fears about girls’ agency (particularly sexual agency) and societal discomfort around girls as power users of technology.” (p. 55) Cassell and Cramer do an especially nice job of placing into historical context the worry around teens online, in light of previous, similar fears that cropped up as earlier communications media became popular.

Christian Sandvig’s piece on “Wireless Play and Unexpected Innovation” offers a nice overview of how unexpected innovation may happen and what the prerequisites are for its occurrence. He locates Eric von Hippel within the literature and Sandvig’s own argument, which, as a von Hippel devotee, I found a helpful anchor for aspects of his argument. (p. 89) The last paragraph is an accurate — possibly scolding, certainly daunting — call to action. “‘Participatory culture,’” Sandvig contends, “will only move beyond the elite if the desire for decentralized control and widespread participation can animate changes in our society’s fundamental structure of opportunity.” (p. 94)

A cluster of essays that drive down further on the literacy and curricular questions follow. Sonia Livingstone offers insights aplenty in her strong essay on Internet Literacy. She stresses “the historical continuities between internet literacy and print literacy,” to great effect. (p. 115) She ends with a challenge nearly as ambitious and daunting (and just as accurate) as Sandvig’s. Paula Hooper has an instructive take on the use of programming in the curriculum. Sarita Yardi writes up a fun take on the “backchannel” in the classroom — “an exciting innovative space for a new learning paradigm.” (p. 160) Henry Lowood dives deep into games and “the expressive potential of machinima.” (p. 191) Robert Heverly reviews the topic of “growing up digital” and its impact on identity, privacy, and security — with many themes invoking the work of danah boyd (such as persistence).

The second-to-last essay, by Robert Samuels, is the most challenging. He argues, off the bat, “that in order to understand the implications of how digital youth are now using new media and technologies in unexpected and innovative ways, we have to rethink many of the cultural oppositions that have shaped the Western tradition since the start of the modern era.” (p. 219) Like the challenges at the end of the Sandvig and Livingstone pieces, Samuels’s argument strikes me as right, and hard work. He also argues “that we have moved into a new cultural period of automodernity.” I admit I did not understand it in full. (p. 219, 228-33) But I suspect that I like the idea of what he sees ahead: “by defending the public realm against the constant threats of privitization, we can open up a new automodern public space.” (p. 238) It sounds like something you need a whole conference on to understand properly, rather than the one-way street of a 20-page essay.

In the final essay, Steve Anderson and Anne Balsamo explore perspectives on the current state of digital learning. I am glad I made it this far in the book — propelled by the fine essays that preceded it — because they take up some efforts near and dear to our hearts at the Berkman Center, including Prof. Charles Nesson’s Harvard Law School/Harvard Extension School/Second Life class, CyberOne, taught with his daughter and my law school classmate Becca Nesson. (p. 249-51) Anderson and Balsamo end with a spirited manifesto for “Original Synners,” which I intend to think about adopting in my own teaching. (p. 254-7)

Taken together, these essays fit together as a series of detailed examples that string together issues that are not immediately connected in one’s mind. McPherson predicted as much in her opening essay. As she puts it, together, these essays, “encourage us to recognize that innovation as a cultural phenomenon often happens in unexpected places (as does learning) and produces unanticipated outcomes. They remind us to ask who innovation serves and how we might best reap its benefits for broader visions of social equity and justice. And, finally, they underscore that the term ‘innovation’ is value laden and historically complex.” (p. 5) It’s worth making it all the way through; the connections become clear in the full telling of the tales.

version with full links here

On Sunday, the New York Times ran an article on transgendered men at women’s colleges in the US. The entire article was sensitive, fascinating, and raised some provocative questions. It’s been hovering on the most-emailed list at the Times for over 24 hours now, so I have to imagine that others found it to be as engaging as I did. The most interesting part, though, at least in relation to the work we do here at Digital Natives, was the comment a college freshman named Rey made about the role of the internet in forging supportive communities for transgendered individuals:

For most of high school, Rey spent hours online reading about transgendered people and their lives. “The Internet is the best thing for trans people,” he said. “Living in the suburbs, online groups were an access point.”

The article mentions that Rey entered this sphere through a familiar portal: he typed the word “transgender” into Google.

Rey’s deeply personal story uncovers one corner of the larger schematic: the internet is where it’s all happening. For teens whose parents, schoolmates, relatives, or close friends don’t have the answers, there are countless supportive communities online. The trick, as usual, is finding the one that fits—and being able to identify the ones that don’t. This article is interesting to me in particular because Rey found this support on the internet years ago; memories of those online groups now constitute the foundations of his transgendered experience. Though he is now in college, the internet came into play at exactly the moment in his adolescence when he had questions that needed answering…and Google was the first place he turned.

Rey’s experience points to a larger trend toward online communities of interest as formative spaces. One of the most powerful capabilities of the network that constitutes the internet is the way it enables people to find others like them, to gain knowledge and support, and to feel not only less alone, but more connected. Whether a group of transgendered teens, railroad fans, soda pop experts, or victims of specific crimes, these communities of interest offer more than just “interest”; they offer access to experience.

How have communities of interest, online or off, shaped the lives of people close to you? How have they shaped your own life? What are their dangers and their rewards? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.

cross-posted from Dr. Palfrey’s blog

I’ve been making my way with care (and great pleasure) through the fine series of books that the MacArthur Foundation and MIT Press have put together on Digital Media and Learning. There are six in total, each worth reading. (I previously blogged about the volume on Youth, Identity, and Digital Media.)

I’m trying to finish the edits on Born Digital, the book on related themes that Urs Gasser and I are writing. The sticky chapter for me at the moment is called “Activists.” It will probably end up as the next-to-last chapter. I think it’s crucially important as a topic. A few weeks ago, our wonderful-and/but-tough editor at Basic Books said the chapter had to be rewritten from scratch, starting with a blank, new page (she doesn’t like Microsoft Word much). As I’ve gone through the rewrite, I am working in inspiration from another of the DM&L books, Civic Life Online. As I’ve felt about the others, it’s a great contribution to our understanding of a critical topic. The entire collection of essays is worthy of a read; I point out just a few things that jumped out at me, but I don’t mean to imply that other segments aren’t helpful, too.

The opening essay, by editor W. Lance Bennett, sets the frame for the book. He looks at “Changing Citizenship in the Digital Age,” and compares two paradigms: one of young people as engaged and active in civic life, the other as disengaged and passive. He argues that we need to “bridge the paradigms” or else our youth, digitally inspired or not, will continue to get disconnected from formal civic life. He argues in favor of a better approach: show young people how, through their use of new technologies and otherwise, they can have an impact on the political process (p. 21). In the process, we ought to enable young people to “explore, experiment, and expand democracy.” Sounds quite right to me.

Kathryn Montgomery traces a growing youth civic culture in the second chapter. Her emphasis is on the 2004 get out the vote (GOTV) efforts. She challenges the movement toward the insertion of corporations and their brands into the Rock the Vote process and other online communities. This strand of argument brought to mind the core themes of Montgomery’s recent book, also by MIT Press, called “Generation Digital: Politics, Commerce, and Childhood in the Age of the Internet,” in which she builds out further on the issues of corporate branding in the online space and marketing geared toward children. To build on the growing youth civic culture, Montgomery calls for “a broader, more comprehensive, multidisciplinary effort, combining the contributions of communications researchers, political scientists, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, economists and young people themselves.” This too sounds right, though I was amused to see us lawyers left out of the mix of who might be useful — especially when the “key policy battles” that she refers to earlier in the chapter include intellectual property, net neutrality, and online safety, which seem to me issues on which lawyers might have something to say. (Perhaps we are indeed more trouble than we’re worth.) Lots of mentions here, too, of the work of danah boyd and Henry Jenkins to keep bad things from happening in the Congress.

In “Not Your Father’s Internet: The Generation Gap in Online Politics,” Michael Xenos and Kirsten Foot take up the fascinating question (to me, anyway) of how young people are getting their news and information about politics. They argue, as many others do, that young people do so in ways that are generally quite different from the ways that older people do. Young people, they find, are more likely to access news and information about politics either online (and in social contexts) or through comedy programs rather than through print newspapers and evening newscasts — which seems true enough. “Clearly coproductive interactivity is foundational to the way that young people, more than any other age group, engage with the Internet,” they claim. (p. 57) They do a nice job also of linking their theories back to the actual uses of the Internet by campaigns and pointing, in the process, to the kinds of interactivity that work for campaigns to engage young people by building a sense of efficacy and trust. (p. 62) They call, in the end, for a balanced approach between “transactional and coproductive web practices.” (p. 65)

Howard Rheingold has a typically (for him) colorful and engaging piece on the bridging of media production and civic engagement. It’s great to have his voice directly in the set of essays, especially since many others throughout the MacArthur series cite or quote him, especially for his work on Smart Mobs. Rheingold, not surprisingly, has the money line of the whole book, perhaps the series: “Talking about public opinion making is a richer experience if you’ve tried to do it.” (p. 102). He then sends the reader through a tour of exercises and points us to a wiki where we can play ourselves. Many of us talk about Media Literacy. Rheingold (like Henry Jenkins and others) is doing something about it. Right on.

Much in the same spirit, I loved the opening line — as well as what follows — in Peter Levine’s essay: “Students should have opportunities to create digital media in schools.” (p. 119) I get teased for this, but I believe it’s true not just for younger students but for law students, too. Levine’s four strategies are convincing. Marina Bers, our neighbor at Tufts, expands on this point. She uses a lively set of examples (including pulling the reader briefly into virtual worlds). Just as helpful, Bers sets the challenge of developing an effective civics curricula into a helpful theoretical framework. Kate Raynes-Goldie and Luke Walker take a deep dive into one of the most promising projects in this space, TakingITGlobal. They also set TIG in context of related sites.

Stephen Coleman, a British scholar and one of the giants of this literature, concludes the book with a short essay that puts the entire work in context for governments themselves. Coleman points to six things (pp. 202 – 3) that governments can do “to promote democratic youth e-citizenship” plus four “policy principles” (p. 204). Coleman links his themes back to arguments by Rheingold, Bers, and Levine in the process, bringing things full-circle.

I put down this volume hopeful again about what we can do to engage young people in civic life. It’s clear, from the work of these scholars, that we’ll have to expand our thinking about what we mean by “civic life” if we mean to engage these young people. It’s clear, too, that experiential learning — learning that is rewarding and fulfilling and encourages them to come back to these activities — is an essential part of what we have to do next, whether that’s something that we structure in the classroom or that we just encourage and promote when young people just do it themselves.

version with full links here

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