This past week, NPR has been doing a series on The E-mail age. I haven’t listened to all of them. In fact, I found the series serendipitously because of a story I was looking for that I heard on the radio this morning on Chinese Fans of American TV Shows, which I may try to come back to in a later post.

I listened to a few of the email stories that struck me because of their relevance to Digital Youth research.

First up: Connected Kids Talk to Many at Once. That seemed to be an old topic, but maybe there’s something new here based on the provocative abstract:

Beyond e-mail, there are ever more ways to connect and communicate: text messages, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, IM and, for the old fashioned, phone calls. Help! How many connections can one person manage? How do people decide what is the best way to keep in touch?

The piece is rather strange. It’s four minutes long and there are two people featured by the journalist, Laura Sydell. The first person is actually not a kid at all, but an adult, Lenny who is 35 and is a marketer at a “Silicon Valley tech firm.” From Lenny, we hear a bit about all of the different technologies for communication that he uses and how he segments those he uses depending on situation. He describes how he can have “multiple layers of conversation” as a part of his job (Skype calls with clients, while text messaging colleagues at work, etc.). Sydell reports that when she arrived he had three IM windows open at the same time. Apparently, he used six different technologies of communication in the forty five minutes that Sydell spent with him.

This is actually quite interesting, but so far, nothing to do with kids.

Almost a minute and a half into the story the voice of Stanford Communications professor Clifford Nass comes in and talks about how at one point psychologists would have said that these kinds of multiple conversations shouldn’t be able to happen—due to “interference” which can lead to “mixed up” and “chaotic conversation” for the brain to process—but they are. Okay, sounds reasonable: theories of communication and psychology need to be refined and reconsidered (besides, sometimes I feel like my head is exploding when I have too many conversations going at the same time).

But here’s the funny transition, about halfway through, and where kids finally come into the story:

Nass says he and other social scientists suspect that many of us are walking around a little mixed up. But, it may be different for people who adapt to it versus those who are growing up with it.

Enter 16 year old Sonia (or Sonja?). Sonia is ending an IM conversation when Sydell walks into the room and, like Lenny, has a few up on the screen of her computer at the same time. She’ll talk to up to six people at once, we learn from Sonia. We also hear that she uses different communications for difference purposes, depending on the context. So far, sounds a lot like Lenny.

Lydell says that even Sonia can get overwhelmed. Going back to the point of the story, though, we didn’t hear Lenny getting overwhelmed. Not that he doesn’t, but we didn’t hear about it. (I should add that I’m not sure Sonia’s quote really supports the interpretation of “overwhelmed.” Decide for yourself around the 3:20 mark.)

The piece ends with Nass making some good points about how, historically, communication media, for the most part, don’t replace each other when they are invented. Though that point has been made before it’s worth repeating over and over again until people stop claiming otherwise. Thus, it seems like that all of us will have to deal with more and more choices of media going forward.

Okay. I am still trying to figure out how this story ended up with the title that it did and what it says about any differences between kids and adults.

To recap: here’s what I heard, at a little more abstract level.

1. 35 year old marketing guy is using many different communications media, has reasons for using different ones with different people, and often has many conversations at the same time.


2. Researchers once thought this not possible. In fact, maybe adult brains are still a little mixed up by all of it (implication: Lenny is an outlier). Ah, but what about those “growing up” (different than “adapting”) with all of this?


3. Answer: 16 year old Sonia is is using many different communications media, has reasons for using different ones with different people, and often has many conversations at the same time.


4. Conclusion? We will continue to have lots of choices in communication technologies going forward and, well, we’ll learn to deal with them.

I think I know what Sydell (or is she paraphrasing Nass and the other social scientists?) are trying to say when they differentiate “adapt” vs. “growing up with” but I’m not sure that this distinction would really hold up as we unravel what “growing up with” really means. Superficially, sounds like “adapt” just a younger age, but adult brains, as I keep hearing more and more, don’t just stop developing. I can’t really get into this here and now, but it’s worth thinking about some more.

Even though I really enjoyed the responses that Lydell elicited from her interviewees and even liked the little concluding points offered by Nass, what bothers me about this story, is that it seems to be designed to fit into the larger narrative of how adults and kids are so different from one another when it comes to technology. I won’t say more on my thoughts on that now (mainly because they are largely incoherent and I’m still working through them). But, titling this story “Connected Kids Talk to Many at Once” and then trying to turn the story on a difference between those who adapt vs. those who grow up with seems kind of sloppy considering how what Sydell reported on doesn’t seem to fit at all.

An obvious alternative framing might have been: given all that we have heard about kids and adults being so different when it comes to technology, how are Sonia and Lenny so similar? In what other ways might they be different?

I’m not one for posting my emotions all over the web. So for my audience of four people, sorry about this. But Tim Russert’s death is really bringing me down. I have been quite unhappy with the media coverage of the primaries. Actually, I was thoroughly annoyed last year before the primaries started. But to me, Tim Russert has been the only person on air to consistently remind me that good TV political interviewing and coverage is possible (I am not counting the Jim Lehrer News Hour in my mental comparison list, which is consistently good in their political coverage, but it’s almost apples and oranges).

I have no idea who will fill in the huge void this summer and fall. I spent the evening trying to think of one plausible new host for Meet the Press and couldn’t think of anyone who seems remotely feasible for doing what Russert does on a consistent basis. So, yes. I’m kinda down.

A couple of weeks ago, the rhetoric was out of control over a book called The Dumbest Generation by Emory U. Professor Mark Bauerlein. I haven’t read the book so i won’t comment on it. There have been lots of comments on it all over the web and internal among the members of the Digital Youth research group. In a recent article by Bauerlein that appeared in Inside Higher Education, we were rolled up into a mass critique of research funds for technophiles, so I’m not sure what I can say that would have much credibility anyhow. Let’s just say that the nice thing about the work that we have been doing is that we aren’t studying the fascinating question of whether or not this “generation” (uh, whatever that means) is dumber or not (uh, whatever that means) than previous ones.

But if you want to inquire into the Generation Dumbest Debate some more, than I’d highly recommend two recent articles on Radar Online. I suggest we start by collectively reading Robert Lanham’s piece in Radar:

In an article titled “Generation Slap: They’re naive, self-important, and perpetually plugged in. This is a call to arms against Millennials,” Robert Lanham is attempting to rally the 30 million or so Gen-Xers against the 50 million or so Millenials (formerly Gen-Yers) who downright suck:

“That’s why the time has come for Generation X to unite. We need to call bullshit on these naive, self-important crybabies trying to rob us of what is rightly our own. Remember how the Baby Boomers all turned into self-serving, narcissistic assholes who deified Michael Douglas in the ‘80s? The time has come for us to turn into assholes, too, minus the Michael Douglas part.”

If you have fond memories of 80s and early 90s pop culture this is a great read and downright hilarious. Some of my favorite parts include a photograph of the Apple Store with the caption: “MECCA The Apple Store, where Gen Yers congregate to kneel at the foot of Steve Jobs.” There is also a nice elucidation of the double standard in coverage of this gap in his comparison of media coverage of Gen X back then and media coverage of the Millenials now. And, I like this discussion of the millenials’ 2008 venture into politics:

“Sure, there are those who defend the Millennials against the accusations of superficiality, generally by suggesting that they’re more politically engaged than the disenfranchised Gen X. But let’s be honest, had George Bush, Jr., been in office when we turned 21, my generation would have sweat through our flannel shirts running to the voting booth to replace him.”

As a member of Generation X (I guess! I used to not be. Then I was. Then I wasn’t again. But now I am.), I was so mad afterwards, I wanted to take a club to the next punk 12 year old DS-player I saw. Stupid stylus.

Oh, but then I saw that there was an equally funny response from a Millenial called “Get Off the Stage: One Millennial responds to Gen X’s discontents” by Alex Pareene. Apparently, he’s one of those meddling millenials.

Shoot. This guy makes the pop culture of my childhood and teenage years super-lame. On the list of ridiculous products of my generation: Reality Bites, “a generation of dudes whose primary goal in life was to sleep with Winona Ryder.” (Hey! When I was a kid I thought she was super cute in Lucas. Wait, no I didn’t. I thought Kerri Green was super cute in Lucas. Goonies also. Well, at least on this point Pareene’s not making fun of me!).

And this comeback is right on the money:

“I’m sorry Time made fun of your generation. But, guys, it’s Time. Don’t worry about it—we Millennials made it irrelevant. We’re killing print! You think we want Morley Safer calling us the Next Greatest Generation? We don’t know who Morley Safer is!”

(Man. All great points. Anyhow, Safer didn’t seem that credible in that 60 minutes show two weeks ago anyways.)

I guess it’s time to go buy a DS and take a club to the next person I see going into a library.

Enjoy the reads. Much better than outrage against the dumbest generation.

Henry Jenkins recently came to speak to the School of Information (audio here). While much of the talk was on his take on the notion of new media literacies, the beginning of the talk was more focused on the problematic concepts of “Digital Native” and “Digital Immigrants.” He recently wrote about the these metaphors that both academics and the popular press often invoke to refer to a sense that that the consequences of “those kids today” being born into an internet-ed world make their brains fundamentally different from those of their parents and the rest of us adults.

So, even though I’ve been lucky to have had easy access to a computer since I was in elementary school, have had difficulty writing essays in long-hand for the past ten years, and my laptop and I are best of friends, I am still an immigrant to some digital world. Jenkins talks about the power this metaphor had for him at one point but also why he can no longer use it. Not only does it rely on “out of date assumptions about immigrants” (the not-digital kind), the implications, he says are dangerous:

Yet, I worry that the metaphor may be having the opposite effect now—implying that young people are better off without us and thus justifying decisions not to adjust educational practices to create a space where young and old might be able to learn from each other.

I agree with Jenkins here. Additionally, however, I would add that the metaphors also imply a universal notion of what “kids today” do. This to me is just as silly as trying to describe what the rest of us do in universal terms.

One of the themes that the researchers on the Digital Youth project have discussed for the past three years is how complex the world of young people looks when you start to compare across situations and forms of technology use. We have been delighted and surprised by both the differences and similarities between what participants in our studies say and do and things that we thought and did in our pre-Internet days. For example, Christo Sims found at that…surpise…kids in rural California still value all of the freedoms that come with getting a drivers license (even though they should be able to do everything through the internet…right?). Starting our research with the assumptions that go along with the rhetoric of a generation gap would have been costly.

Recently, a UK study made some empirical findings to help bolster this critique of the notion of digital natives and digital immigrants, of the obvious generation gap.

Besides having one of the greatest report covers I’ve seen for an academic publication, some of the findings were quite interesting. The researchers used data presented in other studies (surveys by other organizations, such as Ofcom) and did their own research on how the so-called “Google Generation” and older people used various library services (note that the term “Digital Native” predates the rise to prominence of Google so this “generation” may be even younger, but it’s hard to say how to relate the terms precisely…). Their conclusion: the idea of a generation gap is overblown and misunderstood. When there are differences amongst age groups, they note that they don’t know what can be attributed to generational issues or what can be attributed to moving through different life stages:

This is a powerful reminder that people have different information needs at different points in their lives. There are very very few controlled studies that account for age and information seeking behaviour systematically: as a result there is much mis-information and much speculation about how young people supposedly behave in cybersace.

Later, they point out that while it is “generally true” that younger users are “more competent with technology” (confidence level: medium), they also believe that “older users are catching up fast.” Note that they don’t present empirical results that justify this sense of “catching up,” but it seems no more far-fetched than the idea that young people “naturally” are more competent than their parents.

They have several pages addressing the usual claims made about younger generation vs. their elders and they shoot down most of them (see pages 18-20).

Here, their conclusions actually make a great deal of sense:

“In a real sense, we are all the Google generation now: the demographics of internet and media consumption are rapidly eroding this presumed generational difference. The evidence indicates that more people across all age groups are using the Internet and Web 2.0 technologies widely and for a variety of purposes…

In many ways the Google generation label is increasingly unhelpful: recent research finds that it is not even accurate within the cohort of young people that it seeks to stereotype.”

There’s a lot of other stuff worth checking out in the study, especially if you are a librarian or educator.

Read the full report (warning: large PDF).
Go to the “Google Generation” project page.

I just posted a short “Story from the Field” over on the Digital Youth site called “No, I don’t feel complimented: A young artist’s take on copyright.” It talks about the experience of 15 year-old Sharon, an aspiring photographer, and the tensions she experiences as she posts work to various online art websites and then grapples with the consequences of having her work available for people to repost, reuse, and “remix” on their own sites, blogs, or other places. The scenario I describe shows that the notion that all teenagers have radically different take on copyright than the rest of us is (as if the rest of us have a uniform take) is not necessarily the case. As I conclude in the article, I can’t claim that Sharon is representative of all teenagers or all artists, but that I suspect there are others dealing with the same conflicts.

Spring semester started this week at Berkeley. But, if most of last fall felt like Spring and Summer, Spring semester feels like winter. It’s no snow belt (though there is snow on Mt. Diablo), but I felt almost as warm in Dayton, Ohio a few weeks ago as I do now.

I don’t update this blog very much as my two readers are aware. But every semester I try to start up again, so I thought I’d do a little update to kick this one off. For me it’s the beginning of my last phase of grad school. I’ve been here longer than I spent as an undergraduate. But last semester, I passed my qualifying exams, which ended a not-so-fun semester of working seven days a week and missing most of my friends (who work strenuous days jobs, but get paid and get to take most weekends and evenings off).

To give you a picture of what last semester felt like, picture poor Smeagol:

“And we wept, precious. We wept, to be so alone… And we forgot the taste of bread, the sound of trees, the softness of the wind.”

Yep. That was me. Beady eyes and all. (Thanks to these folks for being number one on Google for the search “we forgot the taste of bread.”)

But somehow the worst part was all over by Thanksgiving and by the time I took my quals a few weeks later, I was more Deagol than Smeagol, and by the time I passed my quals, I was more Merry, than Deagol. Now, I’m just me (here endeth the silly LOTR references), ready to finish my dissertation proposal, begin research in earnest, and live a normal life again. Yee-haw.

I’m not supposed to take any more classes (though Berkeley still requires us all to have 12 units of something or other), but I can’t help myself and will try to get some classroom time to help me structure my life a bit. I’m also continuing to work with my research group as we try to figure out what’s going in the everyday technological lives of American youth.

On that note, a couple of my colleagues (CJ Pascoe and danah boyd) were interviewed for last night’s Frontline—“Growing up Online.” It’s all online now and I think it’s definitely worth watching. It’s not the whole story by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s more nuanced and compelling than a lot of the other stuff I’ve seen on TV on this topic. The stories were quite powerful and while I’ve been reading contrasting opinions on the balance of positive and negative portrayals of young people’s engagements online, I found the many of the statements made by the young people and their parents transcended the positive/negative debate. I hope this show sparks more discussions between parents and their children and sets a different tone for discussing these issues.

Back in May I attended the annual conference for the International Communications Association for the first time. It was held in San Francisco, which made it quite convenient. danah boyd and I presented a talk based on some of our research on looking at home kids put together their MySpace profiles. The context for the talk was a panel entitled “The Rise of Remix Culture: Identity, Power, and Imagination.” I wasn’t really a part of the panel organization process, and so going into the preparations for the talk, I found myself wondering what “remix culture” really meant. While I have used the term “remix” in the past as a way of describing some specific practices on MySpace, I wasn’t (and still am not) a big fan of it as an adjective a specific form of culture or as a new form of cultural expression. As it turned out, my co-panelists, Mark Latonero, Aram Sinnreich, and Marissa Gluck, also offered some of their own criticisms of the term, which made me feel a bit less like an outsider.

Here is the text from the talk. It’s not that long, but to make it even shorter here is the basic gist: With respect to the teenagers that danah and I have talked to on our separate efforts, we have noticed a few patterns in how teenagers describe how they first learned to make their profiles and how they put them together. A MySpace profile isn’t really “mine.” That’s not just a cynical way of saying it’s Rupert Murdoch’s, either. Rather, a profile is the product of collective effort and collective technical resources that is ongoing. When teenagers (and adults as well) copy and paste code to create their profiles, they are not really remixing media, at least not in the way many people use the term “remix.” Rather, they are mixing code. This is not a trivial difference.

The result is that they are mixing pointers to other people’s materials, or at least materials that are technical managed and perhaps even “owned” by others. And this leads to some interesting tensions when savvy, snarky, and irritated media hosters have to deal with those who are stealing their bandwidth (see this guy and this guy though both contain some not so pretty pictures including a quite disturbing one in the second). Presidential hopeful John McCain ran into some trouble on his MySpace page this past March.

Given the nature of the practices and the tensions that come as a result, I don’t feel that comfortable simply lumping what teenagers are up to on MySpace and the resulting network of media into some unknown concept of “Remix Culture.” Rather, I’d like to understand what is different about MySpace profile customization than other cultural practices, such as remixing music or video.

Text from the talk.

Peter Lyman’s memorial service is going to be held on on Tuesday, September 11, at the Morrison Reading Room in the Doe Library, from 5pm to 7pm. Everyone is invited to attend (Map of campus with Doe Library).

Ryan forwarded me these two links regarding an adult’s (Gabe) participation at a Pokemon tournament (courtesy of Penny Arcade). Gabe wrongly suspected that there would be other adults there also and his reflections on participating, not just watching, are quite interesting, especially with regard to the different reasons people seemed to have for choosing their Pokemon teams (“cute” vs. powers and strategy) and also his battle with a slightly less big kid.

What I really liked though is 12-year-old Nausica’s response to his story.

Says 12-year-old “Nausica”:

Then the older guys came, I dunno how old they were but they were much older then most of the other kids there, they pretty much ruined the fun of it for everyone else there. I guess they weren’t really mean, but how they acted sounded alot like the boy you described…

So afterwards I really didn’t wanna play pokemon very much, and I thought I was gonna stop playing, cause I only really play to have fun, not to beat everyone else. Then today my mom (who is a big fan) showed me what you wrote, and it made me feel a million times better

I couldn’t believe I almost let some jerks take away my love of pokemon!

It reminded me something that I’ve heard repeatedly from a few of my colleagues in the Digital Youth project: that we can’t idealize or romanticize kids’ social worlds uncritically. Kids have to grapple with politics and power in out of school, out of home, activities as well.

Gabe noted that he’d be “smiling for the rest of the week.” I think I might also!

On a related note:

I know someone who has either Asperger’s syndrome or high-functioning autism (not quite sure which and the Wikipedia article on Asperger’s notes some controversy on how to classify). He’s now an engineering undergrad at a large state university, but when in high school he loved playing Pokemon tournaments. I haven’t seen him in a few years, but he was (and I assume is) a really nice kid who I think probably loved to play with kids who were younger than him.

I remember him playing in a local tourney in Dayton, OH (at a card store?) when he came for a vacation; he was proud that he won the tournament and I couldn’t understand at the time why he would be excited about being kids who were several years younger. But, I think he saw them as social peers and there was nothing strange about it. Just yesterday, a friend of mine mentioned the amount of high-functioning autistic kids she has worked with in various internships who loved playing in Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! tournaments because it didn’t require eye contact, but I barely know what I am talking about here. I’d be curious to read more about this.

I have been (barely) using this blog to talk about things related to my academic interests. But, this bothered me so much this evening that I felt a need to do anything I can to get this story in front of more people.

This movie shows some footage of the LAPD breaking up what appears to be a rather peaceful protest two days ago. Please watch this movie in its entirety. It gets worse and worse as you go through it.

(Also can be viewed here.)

There is a police investigation underway. Apparently, some journalists from a public radio station and a Fox affiliate were among those injured.

As of this posting, there hasn’t been much media attention on this story. Hopefully, things will change as people’s videos get uploaded (where you at, Digg people??).