Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

11.16.06 | In my earlier post, I mentioned some of the challenges of social networks.  What’s the flip side?

The exciting potential of Web 2.0 is that user-generated content isn’t forced to abide by the Federal and corporate restrictions placed on broadcast. As Bertolt Brecht saw the emancipatory possibility of radio in his era to consist of listeners becoming “suppliers”, today’s users are generators of content that flows well beyond the limitations of band-width. 

What I think needs to be stressed in thinking through how “race and ethnicity matters in digital media spaces” is that we are debating events in a mediated public sphere where users are increasingly given the responsibility to generate content and further expand the Web. What will it consist of? Old music video? Jackass copycats and back yard wrestling? Southpark episodes? Old television commercials? More girls going wild? More Star Wars fandom? I’m not knocking these approaches to content generation (well, maybe Star Wars). I only want to see additional content that isn’t akin to America’s Funniest Home Videos, or the shifting and self-distribution of television programming as a sign of “user generation” (i.e. taping and uploading a favorite program).

Is that all social networking is—party invites, hook-ups, sharing one’s favorite television episodes to the world?  Social networking spaces are crucial to youth communities as they prove to be the few spaces that young people can inhabit as so many social opportunities are restricted and no longer available to young people. Especially for marginalized groups as surveillance and policing are parts of daily life.

Of course, social networking isn’t over determined as its architecture can be occupied and made to circulate in a number of different ways. The case in point being the use of MySpace by young people to organize anti-immigration legislation rallies across the US. I also find the establishment of the “music label site” to be especially provocative.  Hip hop labels like Chuck D’s slamjamz.com and Paris’s guerrillafunk.com provide spaces where young people are put into contact with alternative forms of hip hop that are critical of mainstream product.

These sites stretch well beyond the distribution of music as they are also information sources on racism, global politics, media regulation, and the US’s “terror wars”. For instance, guerrillfunk.com provides video streams of political figures (Cynthia McKinney for example) speaking out against the war in Iraq. As big media has kept a tight grip on views critical of the Bush-Cheney regime and as media services continue to fail citizenry (ClearChannel’s vast ownership of radio and its conservative agenda) for corporate profit, innovative initiatives become increasingly important and necessary.

In the case of the label sites that I’ve mentioned and am researching for the Macarthur Series, popular culture and education collide as the label site greatly broadens what hip hop culture can be and what roles young people can play. It can serve as an inroad to civic/social responsibility and political awareness. Here young people are called upon to partake in democratic practices as democracy requires active participation in the forms of egalitarian participation and access to public agendas. Through these practices we witness the full realization of the Internet’s democratizing possibility at a time when these freedoms are not ensured, both off and online.