Youth Media And Its Digital Afterlife

• In Event: Critical Pedagogies Across Subject Areas: Comparative Perspectives From Urban Science, Elementary, and Out-of-School Educational Settings

Abstract

Drawing on participatory ethnographic research over more than ten years at Youth Radio, a Peabody Award-winning afterschool program and youth-driven production company in Oakland, California, this paper highlights the new literacies activated by young people who produce digital media content and tools reaching mass audiences and serving community needs. My approach to literacy sees digital media as a site for interest-driven social and intellectual development under the right conditions (Ito et. al., 2009; Watkins, 2010), and I use a framework of “youthscapes” (Co-author & Author, 2006) to understand these conditions and their implications for learning theory and global youth culture. The paper adds nuance to polarized debates between those convinced that technology puts young people at risk and makes them dumber, versus those who see technology as a silver-bullet great equalizer and solution to everything wrong with education.

The analysis offered here centers on two projects from Youth Radio’s production company, which is staffed by young people 14-24 years old who’ve been recruited from the San Francisco Bay Area’s under-resourced, heavily tracked, and re-segregating public schools. 1. Trafficked is a transmedia series on child sex trafficking produced by a 21-year-old reporter in collaboration with teen researchers and veteran editors. 2. VoxPop is a new mobile platform for collaborative storytelling created by a team of young people working in collaboration with emerging and experienced app developers.

Digital and mobile tools increasingly shape how resources flow and change happens, so disparities in this area can seriously compromise learning and citizenship. On the flipside, these tools also present significant opportunities to engage young people as critical, vital participants in discourse communities and democratic life—especially when they are the ones not simply using but developing new content, applications and platforms.

Participant-observation, interviews, written student reflections, and text/product analysis comprise the paper’s primary data sources. Though materials and recordings are drawn from inside Youth Radio, unlike much youth media research, the analysis tracks the “digital afterlife” of young people’s media projects. By digital afterlife, I mean the ways in which the projects were linked to, commented on, used, embedded, and otherwise reproduced, in some cases long after their first publication or release dates. Examining the digital afterlife of youth-made media reveals the extent to which adult institutions with their own ideologies, interests, and political economies re-contextualize youth stories, in ways the authors can neither predict nor control. As more and more young people produce digital content and tools that forever follow them beyond the initial period of production, there is a pressing need for both scholars and practitioners to understand how to support young people as they anticipate and navigate the afterlives of their digital experiments. The essay closes with an account of four new literacy practices young people deploy through their experiments with social and mobile media. They are: network mobilization, discovery, analytics, and platform programming.

Author

• Elisabeth M. Soep, Youth Radio