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Wednesday 23rd April 2008 7:00 am

Dilan Mahendran: Expression, Music & Meaning in the Digital Age

In conjunction with our upcoming forum on New Media in the Lives of Everyday Youth at Stanford this evening, a researcher from the University of California Berkeley reflects on kids’ informal learning in after school programs that focus on art, music and technology.

As a part of our ethnographic research on youth and new media I spent hundreds of hours hanging out at after school art, music, and technology programs in the San Francisco Bay Area. This was some of the most exciting research I have ever done because I had the privilege to spend time with young people and learn about their love of music. We are particularly blessed in the Bay area to have so many programs in after school settings where young people can do art and learn about new media. One of the dominant themes in these programs is the desire to give young people a place and means to express themselves. Some programs have slogans like “express yourself”, “tell your story” or “youth are producers not just consumers”. These are important outlets because for the most part young people often feel they are not heard. After school spaces give them the opportunity for expression and to describe their experiences through video, music, poetry, spoken word, prose writing, photography, graphic design, drawing etc.

These mottos which encourage expression and real experience are in and of themselves wonderful and positive but cast in the wider web of society they perhaps play into the logic that has made formal institutional schooling problematic for young people in general. What I mean by this is formal schooling is thematically intended to produce adults who are rational animals.  The pedagogy of the animal rationale transforms children who are in fact understood to be irrational into norm conforming, logical, and analytic problem solvers. The rational animal is one who forgoes immediate gratification and the expression of bodily desires in favor of long term practical goals usually in relation to the free market. Additionally the rational animal uses reason to transcend the limitations or desires of one’s own experiencing body. In short formal institutional schooling is designed to produce well rounded ‘minds’.

The obverse of this is seen in some after school settings where young people are encouraged to express themselves and produce narratives of experience. In essence youth are encouraged to produce narratives about the experiencing ‘body’. Expression in this sense implies a reaction such as a gene expressing a phenotype. However young people are not mere mechanisms. In this dualistic mode youth will only be understood as empirical and not theoretical. This tendency to see young people as only expressive and experiential puts a veil over seeing them as thinking and theorizing about their world through their bodies in music and dance or other modes of art. As well simply producing rational animals makes knowledge they acquire in everyday experience illegitimate. Music is a mode that challenges this dualism of mind and body. Music making is not simply expression of experience but also theorizing about it. Music is a mode of thinking about ones world which cannot be measured up against the same metrics of animal rational. As progressive scholars and adults we often pride ourselves in our ability to listen to youth, but are we hearing them?

Editor’s Note: For more information about tonight’s panel discussion from MySpace to Hip Hop: New Media in the Everyday lives of Youth click here.

Category: Civic-Engagement, Credibility, Ecology-of-Games, Identity, Race-Ethnicity, Unexpected

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