Media+Ecologies

**Reflection: **-**How do we perceive ourselves (and others) in the real and digital worlds in which we live?**

In a digital world, we can perceive ourselves in a variety of ways. Online, I could be considered the "nerd" mathematician who other users go to for help on math homework (since I really like math and I'm rather good at it) while in real life we can be perceived as the "jock" (sometimes considered "dumb") since I grew up playing sports my entire life. Others who may have issues with establishing their identity and the way they are perceived by others, can make up their own personalities online, maybe of how they would like to be perceived. I think it's interesting in Chapter 1 when the writers discuss that people may be friends with one group online and friends with a totally different group at school. When I first read this, my first thought was that seemed to be two-faced and insincere when in reality people can connect with a variety of people in different ways. I know I do not have all the same exact interests as my best friends, but I can share the same interest with someone online whom I have never met and have a more meaningful discussion about that topic than if I were to have a discussion about that same topic with my friends who do not share the same passion.

One part discussed in Chapter 1 that I can relate to is the role of the techne-mentor. Although I can be perceived as technologically advanced, especially compared to my mom and some friends, at other times I don't know everything there is to know about technology. I think it is interesting that technology can be a means for communication and relationships among other people, especially in the work place, and that knowledge will be further passed from person to person.

A statistic given in Chapter 1 states, "media engagement does not crowd out time spent with parents, pursuing hobbies, or doing physical activity. Rather, those who engaged in high amounts of media reported spending more time on average with family, hobbies, and physical activity." (33). I think since the time of this statement, given in 2005, the times and relationships with technology and real life have changed.

  **Readings:** Ito, M., Sonja B., Matteo B., Boyd, D. Cody, R., Herr, B., Horst, H.A., Lange, P.G., Mahendran, D., Martinez, K., Pascoe, C.J., Perkel, D., Robinson, L., Sims, C., & Tripp, L.(2009). //Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media.//  Cambridge: MIT Press. [] <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-practices of sociability, learning, play, and self-expression are undergoing a slower evolution (1) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-young people’s use of digital media and communication technologies deﬁnes a generational identity distinct from that of their elders. (2) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-‘digital divide’ between in-school and out-of-school use.” (2) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-new media empower youth to challenge the social norms and educational agendas of their elders in unique ways.(2) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-How are new media being taken up by youth practices and agendas? And how do these practices change the dynamics of youth-adult negotiations over literacy, learning, and authoritative knowledge? (2) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-This book reports on a three-year ethnographic investigation of youth new media practice that aims to develop a grounded, qualitative evidence base to inform current debates over the future of learning and education in the digital age. (2) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-project began in early 2005 and was completed in the summer of 2008 (2) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-Spanning twenty-three different case studies conducted by twenty-eight researchers and collaborators (2) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-youth tend to be earlier adopters than adults of digital communications and authoring capabilities, and that their exposure to new media is growing in volume, complexity, and interactivity (3) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-How are speciﬁc new media practices embedded in existing (and evolving) social structures and cultural categories? (4) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-The ﬁrst goal of this book is to document youth new media practice in rich, qualitative detail to provide a picture of how young people are mobilizing these media and technologies in their everyday lives (4) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-We believe that an initial broad-based ethnographic understanding, grounded in the actual contexts of behavior and local cultural understandings, is crucial to grasping the contours of a new set of cultural categories and practices (5) -friendship, intimacy, family, gaming, creative production, and work. (5) -relevance of gender and class in determining new media practice (5) -studies of youth practices centered on online sites or interest groups. These include fans of Harry Potter and Japanese animation; video-game players; hip-hop creators; video bloggers; and participants on YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook (5) -we take youth seriously as actors in their own social worlds (6) -Adults often view children in a forward-looking way, in terms of developmental “ages and stages” of what they will become rather than as complete beings (6) -produce their own unique children’s cultures (6) -Our work has focused mostly on youth in their middle-school and highschool years, between the ages of twelve and eighteen (7) -We capture what is unique about the contexts that youth inhabit while also remaining attentive to the ways in which new media practices span different age cohorts. (7) -adults are important coparticipants in youth new media practices (7) -Ages 13 and under: "children" (7) -Ages 13-18: "teen", "teenager", "adolescent" (8) -Teens have more agency than children, develop more elaborate peer cultures, self-consciously construct public and private selves, and challenge conventions of adult life (8) -Youth culture....defined by the process of "becoming" and "leisure"...youth have been limited in their access not only to the workplace but also to other forms of public participation (8) -media continue to play a central role in the contestations over the boundaries and deﬁnitions of youth culture and sociability.(9) -Media industries have been increasingly successful in constructing childhood culture in ways that kids uniquely identify with (9) -popular culture can provide kids with a space to negotiate issues of identity and belonging within peer cultures (9) -participatory approach toward new media has been channeled into networked gaming and social media sites such as MySpace, Facebook, or YouTube (10) -ethnographic approach that looks at not only the content of media but also the social practices and contexts in which media engagement is embedded (10) -media are constantly undergoing a process of aging and identity reformulation...new ready to replace the old (10) -digital, networked, and interactive forms...deﬁne the horizon of “the new.” (10) -“new” at this moment social network sites, media fandom, and gaming (11) -email and instant messaging as preferred communication tools (11) -it is not only youth consumption that is driving the success of new Internet ventures but also their participation (or “trafﬁc”) and production of “user-generated content.” (11) -New media researchers differ in the degree to which they see contemporary new media practices as attached to a particular life stage or more closely tied to a generational cohort identity. (11) -more informal forms of online writing as part of a broader set of social and cultural shifts in the status of printed and written communication (11) -The aim of our study is to describe media engagements that are speciﬁc to the life circumstances of current youth (12) -we analyze how these same youth are taking the lead in developing social norms and literacies that are likely to persist as structures of media participation (12) -the new media practices we examine are almost all situated in the social and recreational activities of youth rather than in contexts of explicit instruction. (12) -the most engaged and active forms of learning with digital media happen in youth-driven settings that are focused on social communication and recreation (12) -much of young people’s learning with information and communication technologies happens outside of school. (12) -prioritize those social contexts that youth ﬁ nd most meaningful and motivational (12) -Our primary descriptive task for this book is to capture youth new media practice in a way that is contextualized by the social and cultural contexts that are consequential and meaningful to young people themselves, and to situate these practices within the broader structural conditions of childhood that frame youth action and voice (13) -Our primary descriptive research question is this: How are new media being taken up by youth practices and agendas? Our analytic question follows: How do these practices change the dynamics of youth-adult negotiations over literacy, learning, and authoritative knowledge? (13) -learning and literacy as part of a broader set of issues having to do with youth participation in public culture (13) -This social turn has been described in terms of new paradigms of situated cognition, situated learning, distributed cognition, and New Literacy Studies (13) -New media are a site where youth exhibit agency and an expertise that often exceeds that of their elders, resulting in intergenerational struggle over authority (13) -learning was an act of social participation in communities of practice (13) -situated learning theory suggests that the relationships of knowledge sharing, mentoring, and monitoring within social groups become key sites of analytic interest...people learn in all contexts of activity (13) -TV-dominated era have become increasingly mainstream because of the convergence of traditional and digital media...they also produce their own meanings and media products (15) -We recognize certain patterns of representation (textual genres) and in turn engage with them in social, routinized ways (participation genres). (15) -friendship-driven and interest-driven (15) -For most youth, these local friendship-driven networks are their primary source of afﬁliation, friendship, and romantic partners (16) -Peers are the group of people to whom youth look to develop their sense of self, reputation, and status (16) -“friend” to refer to those relations that youth self-identify as such, a subset of the peer group that individual youths have close afﬁliations with (16) -interest-driven practices, specialized activities, interests, or niche and marginalized identities come ﬁrst...geeks, freaks, musicians, artists, and dorks (16) -the interests come ﬁrst, and they structure the peer network and friendships, rather than vice versa. (16) -online sites provide opportunities for youth to connect with interest-based groups that might not be represented in their local communities (16) -friendship-driven practices of creating proﬁles on social network sites or taking photos with friends can lead to “messing around” (17) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-interest-driven engagements can lead to deep and abiding friendships (17) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-By describing these forms of participation as genres, we hope to avoid the assumption that these genres attach categorically to individuals.(17) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-When we consider learning as an act of social participation, our analytic focus shifts from the individual to the broader social and cultural ecology that a person inhabits. (18) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-a large part of what deﬁnes us as social beings and learners happens in contexts of group social interaction and engagement with shared cultural forms (18) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-“public culture” as an alternative to terms such as “popular culture” or “mass culture” (19) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-“networked publics” to reference the forms of participation in public culture that is the focus of our work (19) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-networked publics differ from traditional teen publics in some important ways...networked publics are characterized by their persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences...networked publics do create new kinds of opportunities for youth to develop their public identities, connect, and communicate (19) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-Friending, public social drama, ﬂirting, and dating are both reproduced and reshaped by online communication (20) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-networked publics open new avenues for youth participation through interest-driven networks (20) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-publics are settings where youth can connect with other creators or players who have greater expertise than they do, and conversely, where they can mentor and develop leadership in relation to less experienced participants..sometimes even getting famous or paid for the work. (20) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-relation between friendship-driven and interest-driven networked publics is complex and grows out of the existing status distinctions of youth culture (20) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-Unlike the older generation, today’s kids have the opportunity to engage in multiple publics (20) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-we also saw many examples of kids who maintain a dual identity structure...multiple online proﬁles for different sets of friends, or they might have a group of online gaming friends who do not overlap with the friends they hang out with in school (20-21) -kids gain most of their knowledge and competencies in contexts that do not involve formal instruction (21) -kids pick up academic content and skills as part of their play (21) -We discuss the implications for learning institutions in the conclusion of this book, but the body of the book describes learning outside of school...peer-based interaction...kids learn from their peers...adults often view the influence of peers negatively..."peer pressure" (21) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;">
 * <span style="display: inline !important;">The Introduction till page 21 ** -current youth adoption of digital media production and "social media" is happening in a unique historical moment (1)

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;"> **Chapter 1: Media Ecologies**

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-Geo Gem’s parents decided not to buy cable in an effort to shelter their kids from what they thought was the brash commercialization and high costs of cable television...presents problems when her friends come over, “since they usually watch cable.”... Instead of watching television, Geo Gem plays games such as basketball, online games, and the GameCube (30) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-Geo Gem’s home environment, the institution of the family, rules, and a variety of other factors constitute her everyday media ecology and her social and cultural context for learning. (30) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-Young people in the United States today are growing up in a media ecology where digital and networked media are playing an increasingly central role. (30) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-We also recognize that the ways in which U.S. youth participate in media ecologies are speciﬁ c to contextual conditions and a particular historical moment (30) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-metaphor of ecology to emphasize the characteristics of an overall technical, social, cultural, and place-based system, in which the components are not decomposable or separable. (31) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-[interest and friendship-driven]these are not unique social and cultural worlds operating with their own internal logic, but rather these forms of participation are deﬁned in relation and in opposition to one another (31) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-media ecologies used in communication studies, which has focused primarily on “media effects,” to studies of the structure and context of media use (31) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-The genres of participation—hanging out, messing around, and geeking out—reﬂ ect and are intertwined with young people’s practices, learning, and identity formation within these varied and dynamic media ecologies. (31)

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #0000ff; font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">**//Statistics//** <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-[In 2005 survey] On average, the youth in its sample lived in households with 3.5 televisions, 2.9 VCRs or DVD players, 2.1 video-game consoles, and 1.5 computers...more than 80 percent had access to cable or satellite television...94 percent of all American teenagers—which it deﬁnes as twelve- to seventeen-year-olds—now use the Internet, 89 percent have Internet access in the home, and 66 percent have broadband Internet access in the home (32) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-fall of 2007, 71% of American teenagers owned a mobile phone and 58% had a social network site proﬁle (32) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-[In 2006 survey] 51% of teens owned an iPod or MP3 player (32) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-[2005 survey] young Americans spend on average 6.5 hours with media per day: almost 4 hours a day with TV programming or recorded videos, approximately 1.75 hours per day listening to music or the radio, roughly one hour a day using the computer for nonschool purposes, and about 50 minutes a day playing video game (32) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-Pew’s 2007 survey found that daily 63 percent of teens go online, 36 percent send text messages, 35 percent talk on a mobile phone, 29 percent send IMs, and 23 percent send messages through social network sites (32) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-Pew reports a steady increase in teen Internet use, from 73 percent in 2000, to 87 percent in 2004, to 95 percent in 2007, and a rapid increase in mobile phone ownership, going from 45 percent in 2004 to 71 percent in 2007 (32)

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-Yet while new media have increased in popularity, they have not, according to the Kaiser report, displaced other types of media, nor have they led to an increase in the overall amount of time teens spend with media. (33)

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">- Interesting, may have changed since 2005: media engagement does not crowd out time spent with parents, pursuing hobbies, or doing physical activity. Rather, those who engaged in high amounts of media reported spending more time on average with family, hobbies, and physical activity (33)

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-signiﬁcantly greater proportion of teenage girls than boys owned mobile phones and communicated daily via text messaging, talking on mobile phones, talking on landlines, sending IMs, and messaging through a social network site (33)

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-youth living in the most economically disadvantaged households had signiﬁcantly lower rates of Internet access in the home and tended to rely on nonhome locations, such as schools and libraries, to access the Internet...70 percent of teens living in households with an income of less than $30,000 per year had Internet access in the home whereas 99 percent of teens living in households with earnings of $75,000 per year or more had such access..and more likely to have mobile phones (34)

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-minorities (blacks and Hispanics) were signiﬁcantly more likely to rely on nonhome locations to access the Internet...signiﬁcantly greater share of white teens went online daily than black teens, reporting 67 percent and 53 percent, respectively...signiﬁcant difference in the proportion of white teens who had broadband access in the home when compared to broadband access in black and Hispanic households—70 percent, 56 percent, and 60 percent, respectively. (34)

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-gaming is part of the construction of “afﬁnity groups,” where insiders and outsiders are deﬁned by their participation in a particular semiotic domain (35) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-development of knowledge and expertise is deeply integrated with being part of social groups engaged in joint activity (36) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-our genre-based approach emphasizes modes of participation with media, not categories of individuals. (36)

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">//** Hanging Out **// <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-contemporary teens generally see their peers at school as their primary reference point for socializing and identity construction. At the same time, they remain largely dependent on adults for providing space and new media and they possess limited opportunities to socialize with peers and romantic partners without the supervision of adults (38) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-The more passive and indirect mode of checking people’s status updates on Facebook or MySpace, or exchanging lightweight text messages indicating general status (“I’m so tired,” “just ﬁnished homework”), are examples of “ambient virtual co-presence” that in many ways approximates the sharing of physical space (39) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-When young people want to get together and hang out (for both online and ofﬂine meetings), they typically go online ﬁrst, since that is where they are most likely to be able to connect. (39) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-Those in suburban areas need to rely on parents for transportation while those in urban areas have friend who are close by and they don't have to rely on parents for transportation as much (40) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-While the content and form of much of popular culture has changed in the intervening decades, the core practices of how youth engage with media s part of their hanging out with peers remains resilient (40) <span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-While hanging out with their friends, youth develop and discuss their taste in music, their knowledge of television and movies, and their expertise in gaming, practices that become part and parcel of sociability in youth culture...One of the most common ways that kids hang out together with media is listening to music (41) -teens frequently displayed their musical tastes and preferences on MySpace proﬁles and in other online venues by posting information and images related to favorite artists, clips and links to songs and videos, and song lyrics (41) -Many teens also view new media as something to do while they are hanging out with their friends (42) <span style="color: #333333; display: block; font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif; text-align: left;"> - Fear of many parents : Rose worries a lot about Michelle visiting websites such as MySpace, where she fears her daughter might get in to trouble, talk to strangers, or be the target of sexual predators (44)-her mother’s concerns ultimately lead to Michelle having less time online for open-ended exploration and self-directed inquiry than might otherwise be possible. (45)-YouTube videos are contextualized by YouTube participants who provide a layer of opinion and linking that differs from the ways in which television has traditionally been organized by channels and networks...When I start watching a YouTube video, I cannot stop. It takes me to a link to another video and another... (46)-For college students in dorm rooms, the computer often became the primary TV-viewing mechanism. High bandwidth connections mean that there is little need for the added expense and clutter of a TV purchase. (46)-Many parents, teachers, and other adults we interviewed described kids’ and teenagers’ inclination toward hanging out as “a waste of time,” a stance that seemed to be heightened when hanging out was supported by new media (47)-When teachers and schools place restrictions on sites at school, students will find ways to get around to access the site using proxy servers (48)-multitasking,” or engaging in multiple media activities at the same time, is on the rise among kids (49)-even when teenagers and kids are hanging out in a face-to-face group, many feel the need to stay connected to other teens who are not there (49) -Faraway Lands also provides a forum in which Clarissa can be creative and hone her writing skills. (53) -“It’s something I can do in my spare time, be creative and write and not have to be graded. . . . You know how in school you’re creative, but you’re doing it for a grade so it doesn’t really count?” (53) -teens can do public-identity work by setting up sites deﬁning “who they are”; they can maintain and deepen romantic relationships; and they can make new friends, play, be creative, and be treated as competent artistic producers. (53)

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">-messing around as a genre of participation represents the beginning of a more intense engagement with new media (54)
 * //Messing Around// **

<span style="color: #333333; display: block; font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif; text-align: left;"> -One of the ﬁrst points of entry for messing around with new media is the practice of looking around for information online (54) -87% reported using a search engine at least once per week (54) -Many searches involve ﬁnding information to facilitate the completion of homework and school projects, looking for a “cheat” for a particular game or looking for a way to complete a particular task (55) -Fortuitous searching represents a strategy for ﬁnding information and reading online that is different from the way kids are taught to research and review information in texts at school (55) -the increasing availability of search engines and networked publics where they can “lurk” (such as in web forums, chat channels, etc.) effectively lowers the barriers to entry and thus makes it easier to look around and, in some cases, dabble or mess around anonymously (56) -[When searching online about something unknown] youth do use this initial base of knowledge as a stepping-stone to deeper social and practical engagement with a new area of interest. (57) - much of contemporary gaming is built on the premise that players will engage in a great deal of experimentation on their own in a context of social support (58) -Young people who are successful in learning advanced technology skills through messing around sometimes become experts among their families, friends, teachers, and classmates (58) -[Self-learning] Many students such as Joan were often driven to learn about technology on their own when they encountered problems with the technology and did not have other support to learn how to ﬁ x them. Other students started learning about computers while trying to get rid of viruses on their families’ computers (59) -It is important to note the nonstatic nature of the techne-mentor; the status of techne-mentor is relative to the knowledge of others within a social context. The signiﬁcance of the techne-mentor is that he or she provides information to others without implying absolute expertise. (60) - <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"> <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"> <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;">