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Monday 13th November 2006 9:10 am
Mimi Ito: Digital Youth are a Diverse Lot
It’s often tempting to make general claims about how “kids these days” are different because of new technology. But if you look closely at kids in different neighborhoods and homes, you will be amazed at how diverse uses of technology really are. Here are two examples.
One challenge in our ethnographic work is how to understand the diversity of uses of digital media among young people. The closer I look at new media in kids’ everyday lives, the more I am in awe of how it varies from household to household, and neighborhood to neighborhood. When I get questions regarding how “kids these days” are different because of new technology, I often like to tell stories about how diverse young people are in their attitudes and engagement with new technology.
For example, one of the graduate students on our project, http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/user/7">Christo Sims, has been http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/node/39">looking at families in rural California who are home schooling their children. These kids have chosen Bebo, rather than the more mainstream social network site MySpace, because they feel it is “safer.” They use the site primarily as a way of keeping in touch with their small circle of local home-schooler friends whose homes are physically quite distant due to the rural setting.
Contrast this with the uses of MySpace among youth in Los Angeles who are the focus of postdoc Katynka Martinez‘s.http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/node/7">study. MySpace is a social standard in their large urban high school. Even if they maintain private profiles and small networks of friends, they need to negotiate with a broader social network of peers in their school who may ask for access to their profiles, and where access to private profiles can be markers of social inclusion and exclusion.
These are just two among dozens of cases we are looking at that exemplify the range of uses that young people make even of similar technology infrastructures. I expect this documentation of diversity will be as core to our fact-finding mission as the identification of general trends in this generation of digital kids.
Category: Unexpected
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Elaine Young
Champlain College
http://www.champlain.edu
Posted on November 15 2006 4:15 PM
As I examine technology use and acceptance within an undergraduate classroom environment for my dissertation research, it is becoming ever more clear to me that there is a wide range of current use, comfort-level, and willingness to use technology applications.
As my grounded theory study is unfolding, I’m finding an interesting mix of individuals who are fully plugged in with MP3 Players, cell phones, social networking through both MySpace and Facebook and IM. They focus on the ability of technology to keep them connected.
And yet, there are others who do not wish to use social networking and find it invasive, who don’t even view an iPod as technology ("because it is easy"), and who feel that technology is not something they want to be involved with—they prefer face to face communication because it is clearer.
It is this diversity of interest, experience and acceptance that fuels my interest so that I can find out how to improve my teaching methods in classes where I push students to explore social media from a marketing perspective. I continually work with students to introduce them to the many ways technology is being used by marketers and I find students who feel they are experts in social marketing and yet have no understanding of Wiki’s or blogging.
I applaud the point that the use of technology among our youth should not be generalized. We have a lot to take into consideration when teaching technology to our students...we can’t loose site of that.
Elaine