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Thursday 13th November 2008 9:00 am

Rodic and Corriero: Engaging & Educating Global Citizens on Youth Media Exchange

Creators of Youth Media Exchange discuss the launch and development of the online social network for youth interested in using digital media tools to share information on major global issues.

by Natalie Rodic and Jennifer Corriero

The demonstration phase of Youth Media Exchange sought to examine the question: how is youth-produced media best conceived, organized, and disseminated to engage and educate a broad audience of global citizens?  This social networking website went about answering this question by aggregating and amplifying youth voices through digital media with the aim of increasing media literacy skills in the process. Throughout the course of the last year a number of new questions arose for this collaborative group of professionals informed by the process of experimentation and academic advisors on the project.

Is sharing media the entry point into an interest-based social network such as Youth Media Exchange? What are youth most interested in sharing?

Launched publicly on May 1st, 2008, ymex.org has had 2,302 young people from around the world sign up for membership and averages 22,000 hits a day. The website offers interactive and collaborative features such as guided learning activities (Quests) and a peer-to-peer mentorship system (Youth Guides and Explorers). In this initial phase the amplification of youth voices has happened most frequently and effectively by members sharing digital media on global issues that they either created or found elsewhere on the web.

The most engaged members on ymex.org have been those who created their own images, blogs, and videos. Out of the top 10 most active members, 8 of them shared digital media that they had created and two of them shared only third-party media. Additionally, the digital media literacy survey results which members had the option to take upon their first visit to the website affirmed that many members had engaged in creating and collaborating as well as re-mixing media prior to joining ymex. But, further examination of site activity revealed that the majority of young people who signed up for ymex.org began their engagement by submitting third-party media and then did not participate further other than as observers. Do these more reluctant members need extra motivation to try out new skills and need to be nurtured through the process?

In considering the next steps and honing in on the learning potential of this website, the ymex team consulted with the project advisors. danah boyd raised the question: Do we want to find super engaged media superstars or is there a way to step people through and have layers of participation without them having to be those superstars? Erin Reilly encouraged us to further examine how users are creating, circulating, connecting and collaborating with each other. She and her colleagues at Project New Media Literacies are curious about what drives new users to become creators and what tools and motivations allow them to start collaborating with each other.

The initial phase was generally more concentrated on recruiting young media superstars and those who were already initiated into the process of creating digital media with a global-social focus in order to seed the network with exemplary content. Would an ideal direction for the future involve guiding young people from initiation to completion of digital media creation? Can this occur in tandem with broadening their understanding of digital media’s potential to be an instrument in creating positive social change?

Category: Civic-Engagement, Identity, Race-Ethnicity, Unexpected

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