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Tuesday 28th November 2006 9:02 am
This week’s theme: innovative uses and unexpected outcomes
Once upon a time not so long ago, one of the largest, most active groups of innovators in technological communications weren’t scientists or corporations but everyday citizens and amateur system operators.
(Editor’s reminder: This week spotlights “Innovative Uses and Unexpected Outcomes”. Last week Miriam and Andrew spotlighted credibility.)
These network enthusiasts imagined a world of open communications, new forms of fun, and social exchange. They envisioned an essentially free and democratic system of bottom-up, participatory culture, and they were stoked.
While this might sound like a tale lifted from the hacker boys of the 1990s or from the creators of YouTube, I’m actually talking about early radio hobbyists almost one hundred years ago. In his powerful book, Selling the Air, Tom Streeter argues that such hobbyists helped create modern broadcasting, but the one-to-many world of commercial radio and TV that developed in their wake bears little resemblance to the open, plural networks imagined by early ham radio enthusiasts.
This brief parable reminds us that technologies always enter into powerful, pre-existing social systems, networks of meaning and privilege that can severely circumscribe how technologies develop and whom they best serve. It also illustrates that youth are often early adopters of new technologies, deploying emerging devices and platforms in ways that often outstrip the expectations of engineers and parents.
This week’s Spotlight focuses in on various innovations and unexpected outcomes that might emerge from our current digital moment. While such outcomes might typically be seen as ‘positive’ or ‘negative,’ we aim to push beyond simple accounts of digital media and learning as either utopian or dystopian in order to explore today’s practices with an eye attuned to history, policy, and possibility.
We’re interested in how youth can function as drivers for technological change while also recognizing that technologies are embedded in larger social networks, including the family, peer groups, schools, and commercial culture. A broad range of topics can be taken up under such a rubric, including issues of access and equity; of media panics and cultural anxieties; of citizenship vs. consumerism; of policy and IP; and of new modes of media literacy and learning.
Category: Unexpected
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