Lec 6 MIT CMS.930 Media, Education and the Marketplace

okay so hello I'm Henry Jenkins the director of comparative media studies here at MIT um about two weeks after the Coline massacre in Littleton Colorado I got called before the US Senate Commerce Committee to testify on the relationship of youth culture and violent entertainment and the thing that struck me when I was in that room was that there were all kinds of adults sitting around the table talking about young people their relationship to technology their relationship to culture their relationship to schooling and to each other and not a single young person in the room except my son who was then a teenager who would tagged along to see his father testify and it struck me that that that there was a lot missing from the picture that was being given in Washington as they were trying to set policies that would affect education that would affect the regulation of entertainment in terms of an understanding of young people's relationship to technology so I set about on two two missions the first was to visit high schools around the country and talk to young people about their use of digital technology and the second was to go online and begin to look closely at the websites chat rooms internet list that young people were creating so that we had a more Vivid picture of what that Community was like um you know why why focus on digital media well because in the wake of Colum comine there was we entered into a period of moral panic and moral Panic is when you stop asking questions and start assuming you know the answers Time Magazine initiates that in part when if you look on the week of the shooting their cover story was the monsters next door what made them do it and the very next week they provide their own answer growing up online The Washington Post uh surveyed its uh readership and discovered that uh asked people what they thought were the most significant causes of the shooting and the top answer with 82% was the internet something like 60% said that they thought the availability of guns was a significant factor in the Columbine shooting so more adults were frightened of young people's access to the internet than young people's access to weaponry and I think that's that was a chilling comment to me it's as if no other website existed for teenagers except the website created by Harris and cold U the two Shooters in in that case which is significant that a lot got written about those websites but almost no one saw them because they were removed from public view within a few minutes after the shootings that took place at the high school so journalists wrote about them as if they'd seen them and in fact very few of them actually did um many generalizations got made about those websites but they weren't tested against any kind of Baseline of what youth culture actually looked like that's fairly typical of the way journalists have covered the internet for example one of the statistics when I I talked to people about youth online was a study that was done a year or so ago where they said that one out of four teenage girls had received an unwelcome sexual Advance on the internet well two problems with that study the first was that it didn't bother to establish a baseline of what percentage of teenage girls had received an unwelcome sexual advance in their day-to-day interactions with people and secondly it turns out that their definition of unwelcome sexual Advance was broad enough to include someone being asked out on a date by someone they didn't want to go out with so you have to be in fact s it would be surprising if only one out of four teenage girls had ever been asked on a date by someone they didn't want to go out we have let alone been subjected to sexual harassment or sexual molestation or sexual stalking which was the level of of language that was used mostly in the media and Reporting them so what did I find when I began talking to teenagers and going online well the first thing I saw when you look at teen websites they often present themselves as a utopian space that's totally removed from the world of school and the world of home they're described as a place where people can have their own identities that they can preserve their dignity and self-respect that they can express themselves that they can form communities with other people and what's interesting is if you look at that utopian rhetoric it almost always includes hints of a dystopian relationship to schooling because if you read some one of the websites I like to look at is a site called Palisades and Palisades is described as a strong fence that protects you from being torn down and in fact the woman as the girl describes her sight she several times emphasizes this need for protection need to be free from being torn down from people around around them and that emphasis on the dark side of schooling should give pause to adults uh who are looking for an understanding of why something like Coline comes about that when I talk to young people about Columbine they almost always understand it in a context of school bullying in the context of Parental neglect in the context of kids' lack of self-esteem and dignity then many of them say it's remarkable that they were never pushed to the point where they wanted to gun down their classmates because they feel like they know what kinds of experiences these young boys went through and we see that when we look on the web we see that expression of both a hope for something better that the web seems to represent for them and we see that sense of fear or anxiety about what the school classroom actually means means to these kids I think it's very significant to think about what it means to have a homepage when you don't have a home what is it to have a homepage when you don't control the physical environment around you where the virtual environment becomes the only space where you can decide what you want to tell who you want to be as opposed to having identities and assumptions foed on you in the school environment it becomes especially important for kids who are Outsiders kids who were alienated within the school community cuz those kids often feel like there is no safe haven for them in the school I was one of those kids and I oft I remember rather vividly walking through the hallway of my high school having people spit at me call me names threaten to beat me up and I remember one day the school was a square and I remember walking around the Square during my lunch hour walking faster and faster trying to get around four or five different clusters of kids all of whom were verbally abusive to me and feeling there was no place that I belonged there was no place that I felt connected to other kids my son who's something of an outcast in his high school but he was able to go online and connect with other kids and form a social network that supported him he found someone somewhere who was not didn't stigmatize him on the basis of the public perception of him in his immediate face-to-face environment but instead respected him for what he contributed to the well-being of that group what kinds of ideas he expressed what kinds of values he embodied in his own relationship and so his early relationships took place online they were social and relationships initially friendships but gradually romantic relationships with teenage girls who he knew but knew knew intimately but were in fact living halfway across the country in in one case and halfway across the world in another and that set of social connection seems very very important the act of forming say a weing among websites for teenagers becomes a moment of acceptance of linkage to other kids that I think that become Central to the social rituals of that Generation Um subcultures become particularly important in that context uh there's an amazing site that I stumbled across in my research that had a picture of Audrey heurn on it and I was curious to click down and see who would put what teenage girl would put a picture of Audrey heurn on her website and what it said was I'm a person of mixed racial ancestry and she rattled off like eight or nine different National cultures that were in her blood her family ties and she says I don't know what race or nationality I am I don't know where I belong that sense of not of old categories of racial and national identity breaking down in a Multicultural Society over Generations leaves one hungry for that sense of affiliation or cultural connection of rootedness but the search becomes for a self-selecting cultural Community something like the goth Community something like the riot girls something like the skaters or ravers become communities of affiliation that these young people feel tied to they become very very powerful parts of who they are and how they see themselves and schools attempts to suppress those views as took place with the goth Community following Coline become direct threats to their sense of developing cultural identity their sense of who they are and what their place is in the world I remember talking in a high school in my lecture tour and this teenage girl came up to me wearing pastel colors and little pink flip-flops a little bit of glitter on her cheeks and she said I'm a goth and I said that's remarkable and she pulled down uh pulled open up her top a little bit and showed me this necklace which she wore which was clearly a marker of goth subcultural identity that she wore underneath all the pink and pastel and she said I went into the closet I went under cover because of the reaction to my subculture following Columbine and it was like my friends who were gay or lesbian but are not out of the office who wear a little pink triangle underneath their top that she was hiding who she was but she clung to that symol because it was a central part of her cultural identity the other thing one wants to say about the web in these teenagers lives is that it's a space of creativity one of the letters that I got after Coline was describing the fact that Harrison kold got all this attention for the message they wanted to deliver about what it was to be an outsider what it was to be alien in high school and ask if they'd written an essay or a for or taken a photograph would anyone in the adult population paid attention to those ideas and it's a legitimate question because all through the web one sees site after site where kids teenagers are writing stories doing Photoshop collages writing poems publishing their own literary magazines composing music and putting it on the web and MP3 files making digital films there's an enormous array of creativity on the web by these teenagers that is totally Unknown by the adults and their surroundings by their parents by their teachers that is fostered by their participation in online subcultures now what are the implications for that of that for us as Educators I think it invites us to go back to this question of media literacy which is a word that gets thrown around an awful lot in educational circles media literacy normally in the United States seems to mean just say no to Nintendo turn off your TV sets don't consume media and that purely negative notion of policing Taste of telling kids what's bad for them to consume seems totally out of touch with the reality these kids have found of community of mutual support of self-esteem and of creativity in the web environment it is simply not an approach to Media education that is going to fly beyond that if we're being honest about what we mean by literacy it is literacy isn't a taste it's a set of skills and literacy if we talk about traditional literacy and we imagine someone who could read but couldn't write we would not describe them as literate we would not describe them was someone who had the full skills necessary to participate in a society of literacy so for me the way you approach media literacy is to begin by empowering teenagers to create to express themselves to build on the existing base of subcultural expression or personal expression which is taking place in the web environment to give them projects which gets them in the frame of mind of thinking about building media and then through that have them began to think more critically about the media and their own environment the med media they consume to if you want to make messages about racial stereotypes or role of violence or commercialization the way you do it is not to say this is bad don't touch it but rather to say you're making this product what choices are you going to make about the relationship you have to your consumers what values are going embody in that product what kinds of role model you're providing for other teenagers through the site that you've constructed to think through it as an ethical set of choices as media producers as literate citizens of a digital environment rather than as simply consumers of a passive traditional media the other thing I I get out of this research is to really think about how we create environments for learning that are that reflect that utopian dimension of cyberspace that I've described we ought to take what we learn about teenagers on the web and turn them back on the schools and say why do kids find schools such a threatening inhospitable environment why are skills schools destroying people's self-esteem and breaking down their eagerness to learn and what could we learn in the school Community by better understanding the the kinds of Worlds teenagers are building for themselves in the web environment what could we learn about teaching for example by examining games where people confront challenges and problems and work through them over and over again that they're willing to put in the drudgery of learning a game system that they're not particularly willing to put into learning their math homework or their science homework and I think we have to understand what that is and why the drive there is so powerful when traditional forms of learning for this generation has broken down it's commic cliche to make the point that this is a first generation of kids that grow up with interactive Technologies in the home that sociologists have started to call this generation.com now I find that something of a slander because the phrase generation.com again implies a generation of consumers who were tied to thecon and what's remarkable is that in fact this is a generation of doers creators Community Builders it's much better to think of it as generation.org especially when you consider that the cult the provisional culture the culture that teenagers have built for themselves keeps working and working and working when many of the Dooms that were attempting to exploit the youth Market have folded in the result of the recent Market crashes that whatever the teenagers have built seems to be a sustainable form of culture that lasts in the case to The Goth subculture 20 plus years at this point whereas what we've attempted to build for kids and Market to kids seems highly transient and disposable so if we're really going to understand education and the mission of education for the 21st century then what we really have to do is develop a much more ethnographic perspective on the kinds of cultures and the kinds of learning and the kinds of community that have emerged in the online world of teens thanks