Youth, Media, and Education in the United States

The second day at ATOM2006 has started, and we're beginning with a keynote by Kathleen Tyner from the University of Texas at Austin. She begins by noting the relationship between form, content, and context in studies of the media - and that the relationship between skills and knowledge in media studies and production is very difficult to reconcile. She also notes 'the tyranny of the narrative' - creating a conflict between how things are done, from a practical perspective, and what the storyline of any one media artefact is.

In youth media, there is now a transition to a digital literacy culture, with better access to lower-cost tools; this has also led to a remix culture supported by greater availability of content archives and new distribution networks. Further, there is also now the beginning of more supportive academic standards and practices. Newseum.org, Internetarchive.org, Livingroomcandidate, and the Library of Congress's American Memory project are all useful archives which can provide raw materials for such remix culture projects.

At the same time, however, there are also new challenges for youth media. There is the notion of digital natives vs. baby boomers (but Kathleen suggests that the dichotomy isn't as clear-cut as such divides might suggest - there are some kids today which are perfectly happy to be readers or writers only) and the notion of old vs. new media (even though so much of new media is as screen-based as old media); further, the notion of youth media production is complicated by school policy: kids tend to flock to the informal, non-school spaces rather than formal spaces of media production as they are offered in schools because their choice of options is more limited there. Further, Kathleen also notes existing dichotomies of art vs. activism and art vs. science, but suggests that effective activism needs to embrace art in order to get its message across effectively, as well as that artists in new media environments now need to embrace the scientific tools for the effective use and development of new media.

Kathleen now shows a number of examples to demonstrate the wide variety of approaches to youth media production. Such differences again make youth media production problematic (perhaps especially in the U.S. context?), as some of the more experimental or alternative content developed through such projects - whether in formal or informal contexts - is easy to attack for political point-scoring. Youth media organisations often rank giving youth a voice, building community, and encouraging self-expression as very important goals of their projects - but what is produced may not meet mainstream 'community values'.

She finishes up on a project called GREAT - Girls Redesigning and Excelling in Advanced Technology - where 13-year-old students worked with state-of-the-art 3D modelling packages to produce topical animations. Positives from this are small improvements in maths and sciences skills, strong software application skills (which may or may not be transferable to other packages, however), an increased awareness of careers in technology, and increased social and community networking. At the same time, however, their schools were too poor to offer arts programmes, making it very difficult to learn the basic artistic skills required for these projects; there was strong resistance to collaborative work especially from the most talented girls; the learning space (provided by Intel) was not ideal; skills and knowledge gained may or may not be transferable to other projects; and there were a lot of problems recruiting and retaining appropriate mentors for this project. Even worse, too, once the project is complete there is virtually no opportunity to continue this work in everyday schoolwork after the conclusion of the project, and there were significant obstacles to the project (and to any further work) from school administrators and school tech support staff.

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