Horst, Herr-Stephenson, & Robinson: Media Ecologies, Genres of Participation
Filed at 9:00 am on November 21, 2008 in Civic Engagement, Credibility, Games, Identity, Digital Divide • Leave a comment
How does young people’s social and cultural participation shape new media engagement, interest, and expertise? This post continues our series from the authors of a forthcoming book on youth new media practice. Findings from a three-year ethnographic study were just released this week.
by Heather A. Horst; Rebecca Herr-Stephenson; Laura Robinson
How does young people’s social and cultural participation shape new media engagement, interest, and expertise? In our chapter on media ecologies, we outline a set of genres of participation that correspond to different practices of new media engagement.
The first genre, hanging out, corresponds with the genre of friendship-driven participation, or the mainstream practices of youth as they go about their day-to-day negotiations with local and school-based friends and peers. By contrast, geeking out is tied to an interest-driven genres of participation where participation centers upon specialized activities, interests, or niche and marginalized identities. Messing around describes those modes of media engagement in which kids are tinkering, learning, and getting serious about a particular practice, which are often supported by the social networks they have developed in their friendship- or interest-driven groups. Messing around is a genre of participation in its own right, but it is also a transition zone along a continuum between geeking out and hanging out, and between interest-driven and friendship-driven participation.
Together, the genres describe differing levels of investments in new media activities in a way that integrates an understanding of technical, social, and cultural patterns and represents an alternative to existing taxonomies of media engagement that generally are structured by the type of media platform, frequency of media use, or structural categories such as gender, age, or socioeconomic status. Rather than focusing exclusively upon variations such as age, educational status, race and ethnicity, school grades, or the personal contentedness of individuals, our approach is closer to those of researchers who take a more holistic approach and emphasize the ways in which such sociocultural categories are part and parcel of media engagement.
In essence, we found that participation take shape as an overall constellation of characteristics, which are constantly under negotiation and flux as young people experiment with new modes of communication and culture.
“Michelle Looking Around Online” Photo courtesy of Lisa Tripp c.2006
Next: danah boyd: Friendship-Driven Practices > >
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