Young people, digital cultures and everyday lifeVictoria CarringtonUniversity of East Anglia

Everyday?internet access 2010

Everyday?InternetCountries are beginning to declare internet access a legal right for citizens (including Spain, Finland and Estonia) 71% of population in developed countries are online; 21% of developing countries are online (Africa 9.6% online) = end of 2010, 2 billion online (doubled in 5 years; up 600m from 2009)home internet access worldwide 1.4 (2009) to 1.6billion (2010); hundreds of thousands of cybercafes around the worldNote: 256 kpbs = 34 hours movie download; 4 hours@ 2 Mbps; 10 hours @ 10 Mbps; 5 mins @ 100 Mbps. Broadband costs 6 times as much/month in a developing countrySource: International Telecommunications Union (ITU) (The world in 2010); AT&T

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/worldservice/internetcafehobo/2009/11/

Everyday?mobile phone access 2010

Mobile phones90% of world now has access to mobile networks (and 80% of rural populations); 76% worldwide coverage: saturation in developed world; 68% in developing world; 41% in Africa5.3 billion mobile phone subscriptions worldwide; 940 million subscriptions to 3G; 200,000 text messages are sent every second rapid shift from 2G to 3G worldwide. Data downloads have risen 5000% in the US alone over 3 years.

Young peopleGlobally, 200 million 5-19 year olds with internet access.UK, US, Aust, Canada have a combined 136 million 5-14 year olds with internet access91% of 12 year olds in the UK have a mobile phone

51% of 10 year olds in the UK have a mobile phone

so not hot...MSNMySpace (just relaunched in beta as Myspace, entertainment hub)Bebo (but missed by many)FlickrYahooSecondLife

hereiamworld blogsnon-3G mobile phonestime-locked television

Fading: Desktops - nowLaptops - soon

hot...FacebookYouTube channelsSkypeVirtual worlds (for kids, but not SL)Online shoppingP2Ptime-shifted programmingiPods/iPads/iPhones mobile, small technologies 3G everything (no internet, no point)

about to be hot ...Augmented realityGeocachingfoursquareSCVNGR... via 3G phone and data

Visual overlayStreetmuseum (Museum of London)London tube (Transport London)Get London Reading (Booktrust)

2010 xmas list Who wants an iPod touch/iPhone/iPad for xmas?17% of 5-8 years olds50% of 9-12 year olds66% of 13-18 year oldsThe top 10 toys for Christmas 2010:

1 iPhone 4 (14%)

2 iPod touch (13%)

3 iPad (12%)

4 Kinect for Xbox (6%)

5 Zhu Zhu Pet Hamsters (5%)

6 Flip Video Camera (4%)

7 Toy Story 3 Jet Pack Buzz Lightyear (4%)

8 PlayStation Move (4%)

9 LEGO Harry Potter Years 1-4 Video

Game (3%)

10 Barbie Video Girl (3%)

Duracell Toy Report 2010 (UK based survey of 2010)

How should we frame these shifts?

The digital natives argument

Digital natives (Marc Prensky)Net generation (Don Tapscott)Generation M(edia)Gamer generation

Digital natives (Marc Prensky)Net generation (Don Tapscott)Generation M(edia)Gamer generationessentialist notion of adolescenceoverlays generational identity with technological competenceeither/orassumes digital practices displace othersignores issues of diversitybut .. a counter to the risk arguments

The risk factorvideo games and social isolation/violence/attention deficitmobile phones and texting(declining spelling, sexting)/videoing (bullying, sexual harassment, happy slapping), phone bills, enlarged thumbsinternet and sexual predators/pornography/plagiarism/credit card fraud/virtual lives...

More interestingly ...The evidence around young peoples engagements with digital media and culture shows that: (i) engagement and learning moments are generally outside formal education;(ii) the shape and outcomes of peer-based communication differs from older generations in terms of expertise and peer networks/learningself directed learning, peer to peer, rapid development of specialist skills in particular areas (access to networks of expertise), just in time learning (use of online tutorials, peer contacts), use of peer group and expert adults in reciprocal learning environments

Youth literacies onlineshared norms about representation (e.g. profile pages) & displaying peer networksnew genres of written communication (e.g. profiles, fansubs, co-constructed public texts, web comics, interactive videos)elite vocabularies associated with fandom and gamingbuilding websites, hyperlinking, creating and uploading videos, information searching, locating and using cheat sheets, appropriate engagement in online chats amateur media production and distribution

a way to look at all of this stuff without the essentialist and simplistic sound bites about adolescents ... while recognizing that there is both change and continuity ... and attending to literacy practices as a central interest

Newer framingsPeter Paul Verbeek (2005) What things do (artifacts actively co-construct the world)Daniel Miller (2010) Stuff (digital communication is material culture and draws its value&meaning from praxis)Tim Ingold (2010) Lines: A brief history (traces - lines on a surface; and threads - lines in a medium)Mimi Ito et al (2010). Hanging out, messing around and geeking out (ethnographic case studies of kids online)

Communicative ecology

Communicative ecology

Communicative ecology

Formal educationglobal networked public, issues of representation, information controlpedagogies of consumption, gendered literacies, literacy-lite

facebook...a timelineSource: Facebook.comMark Zuckerberg = $US6.9billion; Facebook = $US35billion (Source: Forbes)

Australia 9, 306,520Source: http://www.checkfacebook.com/

facebookPrivacy is no longer a social norm (Zuckerberg 2009)Nissenbaum (2010) has identified three types of privacy issues associated with the rise of social networking:Individuals posting information about themselves that they later regret, for example, embarrassing photos that are seen by colleges or prospective employers;The posting of content onto other peoples social networking sites, including personal information about self or others;The capacity of new technologies to monitor, track, store and aggregate information for a range of purposes either unknown or unintended by an individual.spheres of justice and information injustice - attaches information to spheres (medical, financial, family). Injustice occurs when information flows unexpectedly from one sphere to another

Virtual worldsRevenue generation:

Microtransactions $1b 2008; $17.3b by 2015Subscriptions, Advertising, sponsorships

BarbieGirlsLaunched in beta in April 2007Attracted 1 million registrations in first 28 daysMore than 15 million registered users85% identify as girls 8-15yearsBegan with toy; quickly moved to subscription

Pedagogies of consumptionTo furnish bedroom and buy fashion & accessories, need Barbie Bucks. The more BB, the more options for styling and restyling self and spacePurchase and display is constructed as pleasurable leisure activity (and is linked directly to identity and taste). Most activities are linked to consumption; shopping is major recreational activityVIP subscription required to access all but the most basic of itemsVIP access requires Credit Card transaction (ergo parental buy-in)Independent participants in the economic cycle of BGConsumption and display linked to popularity and success in-worldBG makes available a shared social context that inculcates a strongly delineated set of practices and tastes linked to consumption and display of consumer goods that are, in turn, associated with highly gendered constructions of femininity. In Bourdieuian terms a global, gendered consumer habitus (1992) is being formed. In this sense the site is explicitly structured and highly pedagogic.

Textual landscapes in BarbieGirlsSafety & consumer informationInstructionsBot interactions Store signagePrice labelsAdvertising billboards (animated & static)Pop up menusNavigation listsInternal email messages & chatWord search gamesvideos & advertising footage

Range of genresRange of levels...but...Predominantly low level demandHighly genderedText production is monitored

Culturally significant social spaces and activities for young people Opportunities for new social spaces, interactions, customization, opportunities to engage with a variety of texts, informal/peer learning, aesthetically pleasing & entertaining

BarbieGirls: limited models of girlhood; gendered consumption; conflation of play, identity & consumption; in-world texts and textual practices that reinforce these messages

Literacy-lite

whats my point?Digital cultures are global & pervasiveNew theoretical and empirical work evidences that there is a change in kidshow you articulate this change can range from new communicative practices to new worlds and being Useful model: material communicative ecologiesavoids essentialist notions of adolescenceavoids risk/native polemicattends to the complex connections between praxis, identity and multiple forms of communication

There is a key place for education in these ecologies:building initial peer networks; start up projects, predicting skill sets and back-filling, supporting P2P learning; ensuring a multimodal view of communicative skill sets; being explicit about the print traditional of schoolingworking towards the bigger issues around ethical engagement, analytical and critical practices, good citizenship on/offline.Allows recognition of the communicative ecology in which school, new media technologies and kids are located.

Thank you

v.carrington@uea.ac.uk

Internet cafes and Lan Houses are endemic around the world. there are Lan Cafes in Brazil, over 5000 internet cafes (Warnet/Warung Internet) in Indonesian cities and Telecentres in urban areas; cybercafes in Malaysia; over 20,000 PCbanks in South Korea. nairobi, ghana, egypt and the old guy is from BeninMuseum of London iPhone app - street museumwhat degree of expertise makes you a native; when is too old to be a native; deficit model (attached to non-native/immigrant).what degree of expertise makes you a native; when is too old to be a native; deficit model (attached to non-native/immigrant).MacArthur foundation granted 3.3million to a series of ethnographic studies of youth. mirrors the findings of work we have been in the UK and here in australia. issues of access are not so much about getting onto the internet. theyre about the quality of participation and the quality of learning opportunities. difficult/not productive to attempt to frame these practices in terms of natives or riskdraw from these newer material theories and empirical work to create a material communicative ecology. non-determinist, non-essentialist, allows for diversity and informal learning networks, incorporates the particular priorities of formal schoolinginformal - profiles and other new online genres; rules of engagement in some netwroked publics; formal - ethical responsibilities as citizens, start-up skills/projects, opportunities to build specialist expertise, recognition of connections of kid to broader ecologies- facebook is an example of a broader issue around the creation and maintenance of various publics, of control of information, privacy and issues of online citizenship.- barbiegirls is an example of a specific virtual world - literacy, gender and identity practices; pedagogies of consumption ...Helen Nissenbaum. young are engaging in the largest global public ever created - experiment. comes with new issues as well as affordances...data harvesting of user profiles - by facebook and then by app makers; ethics of engagement in a range of publics, constructions of identity, citizenship and participation (some of these issues have traditionally been addressed via literature and media studies ...)