Youth Participation in Networked Publics

Copenhagen.
The first keynote speaker at AoIR 2008 is Mimi Ito, well-known from her work on mobile media. Today, she presents early results from a different research project, however, on youth participation in networked publics. This ethnographic research involved a significant number of interviews, group meetings, diary studies, and surveys, as well as observations of activities and outcomes. This, then, investigates activities as embedded in a broader network ecology.

Mimi points out the growing availability of tools for creating and modifying creative content, and to publish, share, and distribute such material, and how in the process professional and amateur media content creation are being 'munged' together. In the middle of scales from consumer to producer, from personal communication to mass media, and from gift, barter, and dialogue to commodity exchange there are plenty of interesting things happening - but how are youth learning, socialising, and communicating in such networked publics?

Traditionally, the online world was dominated by geeks (that is, marginal groups), but this group is now being overshadowed by more mainstream participation in sites like MySpace and Facebook. Online life increasingly reflects the familiar categories and social groupings present in everyday life. However, such sites also amplify existing practices and are different due to the continuous accessibility, persistence of peer spaces, and similar specific factors related to the digital platform.

What genres of participation in networked publics (as opposed to a classification of participation forms according to the technologies used, to skills of participants, or other factors) exist here, then? One group of genres can be described as friendship-driven learning and participation - going online as a form of hanging out online, which also involves peer-to-peer sharing and related practices, and is focussed largely on - tightly interwined with a continuation of relations fostered in school. This also reacts to a growing restriction of hanging out possibilities at school or in other physical environments (such as shopping malls, for example). Such practices also involve flirting and dating, but Mimi points out that research finds that flirting and dating still tends to happen offline first, and that online tools are used later to extend and deepen the relationship. Meeting online first is often described by teens as 'creepy' and 'weird'.

A further interesting aspect of such continuations of offline relationships online is the role of peer pressure in friending patterns and the development of online profiles; Mimi describes this as not least also a learning experience which has direct relevance for the process of developing social status in networks of friends. Managing online representations makes hierarchies and social distinctions more public, and allows for more reflection on the processes of self-representation and networking, as well as the broadcasting of personal status (such as relationship status) to an existing friends network on MySpace or Facebook. This translates dynamics previously known mainly by public figures to everyday participants. Some of this could be seen simply as excessive peer pressure, but again it also provides important learning experiences for youth growing up in the digital age. In the process, youth pick up certain forms of baseline digital literacy, and such digital practices are now seen as completely unremarkable even though they may exist very much at the vanguard of online practice.

This, then, relates to interest-driven forms of learning and participation (geeks, freaks, musicians, and dorks, as Mimi describes then). Such practices are necessarily more marginal, and are often focussed less on generic social networking sites and more on specialist online social network communities. Interest-driven sites involve expanding social networks beyond local groups, and deep interest in specific knowledge domains (also involving the creation and transmission of knowledge).

One example for this is the Japanese-to-English fansubbing community for Japanese anime films and television series. There is a pre-digital, VHS-based prehistory here which has now translated to online groups which variously specialise in speed of translation (even within 24 hours of first broadcast of anime shows in Japan) or quality of translation and subtitling, and are organised into specific roles (raw footage capturer, translator, subtitle typesetter, quality checker, etc.). There is a significant sense of expertise, craft, and love evident in such fansubbing practices, and participants take their work very seriously; such focus on detail is also driven in good part by a perception of peer pressure and a sense that participants are able to set quality standards through their work. Pure consumers are seen as 'leechers', even though viewer numbers are also valued as an indication of quality. (Indeed, viewer numbers for fansubbed videos often exceed sales of commercial releases.)

A related example are are fan-created videos which combine clips from various anime shows in the form of music videos or short narratives. Participants here move from being anime consumers to actively creating content, often through a moment of revelation in which they first encounter material created by fellow fans and realise that they, too, could participate actively in this form. This is what it means to be part of a networked public rather than a traditional media public, where such possibility of active content creation is far more backgrounded. The networked public community also acts as a crucial source of knowledge, expertise, and support, as well as of models to aspire to; in the process, participants develop their own identities (and sometimes become known in their local communities for such pursuits). Incidentally, such video sharing takes place through specialist sites rather than YouTube; the term YouTube is even automatically censored in some community discussion fora.

There is significant communal evaluation involved in this process, which also helps maintain the broader social ecology of the community and develop shared understandings of the video creation practice; this is aided by other social systems, such as anime conventions. Indeed, the videos can also be regarded as conversations between video creators. Approval from the community is seen as a significant validation of their own work and community status by video creators.

There is a strong diversity of youth participation in online environments, then, and this is related to the increasing role of networked publics in the lives of youths. Peer-based learning, participation, and reputation building are driving such processes, but in the process, what constitutes a peer can also change, perhaps especially for youths participating in interest- rather than friendship-based networks. In the process, youths are also routing around traditional gatekeepers (parents, teachers, etc.) for their activities; young people are experimenting with adult forms for accessing broader publics and audiences in the process. There are consequences of such actions, of course (well beyond the kind of recognition for their work that youths may get in school); there can be instant and immediate results of their work rather than the delayed gratification linked to skills developed in school.

Additionally, these practices are spreading beyond youth populations, of course, and far from a process by which youths currently involved in these practices will eventually return to a more conventional style of using the Internet, it is likely that adult populations will gradually have to learn how to engage in the processes Mimi has described here.

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