Mizuko Ito: Working with New Media
Filed at 8:00 am on December 11, 2008 in Civic Engagement, Credibility, Games, Identity, Digital Divide • Leave a comment
Digital media can support opportunities for youth to engage in diverse forms of work and volunteerism. Mizuko Ito concludes our series from the authors of a forthcoming book on youth new media practice. Findings from a three-year ethnographic study were just released last month.
The focus of our project has been on learning in relation to youth practices of play, socializing, and creative experimentation. As we pursued our research, however, we also found that new media have important implications for how young people engage in activities that they see as “serious” or productive work, or that have a role in preparing them for jobs in the future. The promotion of new media use among youth is often justified in terms of skills training for competitiveness in the contemporary workplace and parents, educators, and kids often describe their relationship to learning and new media in these terms. In addition to this educative, future-oriented role of technology engagement, new media also have an important influence on the here-and-now of at least some of the more digitally mobilized youth we have met through our research.
In the chapter on Work, we describe the ways in which new media play into these dynamics around job training, jobs, volunteerism, freelancing, entrepreneurism and career aspirations. While most young people see their new media engagement as social and recreational, or at best providing some skills that can help their future careers, an important minority of them use new media for work during their teen years. This includes non-market labor in “free” culture such as fandom or online knowledge exchange, as well as work that results in direct economic benefit such as freelance technical work, or gaining revenue from online distribution of their creative work. We have even seen some teens parlay their technical expertise in staring their own small business ventures. In these cases, new media is helping provide access to experiences of volunteerism and work that give them a greater sense of autonomy and efficacy than those avenues of work that have previously been available to U.S. teens.
Next: Jonathan Fanton: New Fall Grants > >
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