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Thursday 20th November 2008 8:00 am
Mizuko Ito: Digital Youth Project Findings
Mimi Ito announces the release of a report of findings from a three-year ethnographic study of youth new media practice. This is the first in a series of posts by the book’s authors we will feature here over the coming weeks.
Over the past three years, I have had the privilege of working with a group of 27 researchers and collaborators on a study that aimed to document how young people in the US are incorporating new media into their everyday lives. In addition to individual publications resulting from the 23 ethnographic case studies in the Digital Youth Project, we have just completed a book that synthesizes our findings project-wide. The book was written collaboratively by 15 of the project researchers, and involved sharing ethnographic materials as well as engaging in joint analysis and writing.
Today, we are pre-releasing a draft of the book online, in addition to a white paper that summarizes the findings of our work. Our work is guided by two research questions: How are new media being taken up by youth practices and agendas? How do these practices change the dynamics of youth-adult negotiations over literacy, learning, and authoritative knowledge? We address these questions by taking a youth-centered perspective, examining the details of how they incorporate the digital and networked media into their negotiations over friendship, intimacy, family, gaming, creative production. Although we have examined some cases of digital media production in school and afterschool settings, most of our work has been on social and recreational practices; our aim was to understand youth-driven participation and the peer-based learning that happens in contexts where young people feel ownership over the learning agenda.
This is the first of eight spotlight blog entries that will highlight different chapters of our forthcoming book. The white paper and a draft of the full book can be accessed at: http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/report.
Editor’s Note: Read an article about the study from today’s New York Times.
Hear the book’s authors talk about their work in a forum we sponsored last spring, now on available youtube. Part One. Part Two.
Also see additional posts in this series:
Connie Yowell: New Ethnographic Research to Release this Week
Horst, Herr-Stephenson, & Robinson: Media Ecologies, Genres of Participation
danah boyd: Friendship-Driven Practices
C.J. Pascoe: Flirting, Going Out and Breaking Up in Networked Publics
Heather A. Horst: Families and Media Ecology
Ito and Bittanti: Genres of Gaming Practice
Lange and Ito: Literacy and Creative Production
Mizuko Ito: Working with New Media
Category: Civic-Engagement, Credibility, Ecology-of-Games, Identity, Race-Ethnicity, Unexpected
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