Blog #9 - Participatory Culture in a Networked Era by Henry Jenkins, Mizuko Ito, danah boyd

Chapters 4 & 5

In these chapters, Jenkins, Ito, and boyd talked about learning and literacy and commercial culture. When it comes to any topic, I find it fascinating when statistics are able to define so well what it’s really happening. The chapter stated that “according to YouTube’s statistics page, more than 100 hours of video are uploaded to the site each minute.” Talk about information overload. I’m pretty sure that many other sites have the same amount or more information being shared through their sites. I agree completely with boyd when she says that it’s not remotely possible to be able to consume all the data that’s available for us. Statistics like this allow me to understand more why so many people spend hours and hours online jumping from one site to another. I’m guilty of it myself. Whether I’m doing work, homework, or personal research/entertainment, a day does not go by where I don’t engage with the online world.

The chapter also talked about multitasking and when I read this section, I was reminded of a comment a professor made while he was lecturing several years ago. He said that there was no such thing as multitasking. Then he said there is no way your brain is capable of doing two things effectively at the same time. For some reason, I never forgot his comment. He went off saying how bad it was to try to multitask and so on – I cannot remember any other claims he made regarding the topic. I just know he had a very negative perspective about it. Up to that point, I had always heard that multitasking was something positive; something employers look for you to be able to do. I thought employers needed you to do many things at once and loved when you wrote on your resume or said at the interview that you were skilled in multitasking. But there are actually people that think otherwise. “Commenters like Linda Stone (n.d.) argue that there is no such thing as multitasking: there is only continuous partial attention, and it’s physiologically and socially costly.” Have you ever been out with friends or worse out with family and suddenly someone grabs their phone and that’s it, you’ve lost them for a few minutes? The worse is not only that they grabbed their phone but when they claim “I’m listening… I am paying attention…” but they really aren’t. They are trying to multitask but they can’t do that effectively. They can give you partial attention but not complete attention. 

Later on, Jenkins talks about the fact that this is not the first time that we experience such thing as a society. He reminds of the turn of the twentieth century, “when an exposition of mass media was impacting American life, urban areas were experiencing the introduction of electric lights, signs and billboards cluttered the landscape for the first time, millions were moving from the farm to the city, blacks were moving from the South to the North, and waves of immigrants were bringing new peoples to America.” While all these examples were massive changes and perhaps as a society we are still trying to accept these changes I have to agree with him saying that we have survived all of this. As humans we have adapted to all these changes and we’ve been able to deal and work around all these changes. Perhaps it’s true what Ito says that we have to remember that information abundance is a good thing. And social connection is a good thing as well.

BLog #8 - Participatory Culture in a Networked Era by Henry Jenkins, Mizuko Ito, danah boyd Chapters 2 & 3

Reading the chapters for this week made me think about how there is a never ending conversation about what youth should or should not do while using the internet. Jenkins shares that his son’s teachers and principal struggled with how much they should allow youth an autonomous space of free expression online and to what degree they should police what occurred there for liability reasons. I think that this struggle is something that not only teachers and principals experience but also parents. I think that often parents feel liable for what youth experience online or what youth may encounter while being online. I’ve heard from teachers and parents how they don’t really trust youth to make good decisions while being online. I’ve seen how parents and teachers try to control how involved teens are online because they fear youth getting in trouble or getting expose to inappropriate content. 

Later in the chapter, Jenkins also shares how adults historically could not monitor what children did down by the playground or while they were walking home from school. The difference now is that now it’s much easier to monitor what youth is doing online while adults are not around. There are also ways to limit what youth get into while they are online. As I was reading this section of the chapter I thought about my teen nieces and while I don’t know all the details about how their moms are monitoring what they do online, I can say that the girls have, for instance, social media accounts where they are friends with their moms as well. They also have other social networks similar to blogs (from what I understand) where their mom’s also have access. So there are some ways to monitor what the teens are doing online. 

But what about what boyd says regarding youth maintaining their privacy even while being public online. Then how are adults really monitoring what youth is doing if they may not be able to decipher youth’s codes? For instance, boyd says that youth have develop sophisticated techniques for being private in public. They use song lyrics, pronouns, and in-jokes to have conversations that can technically be accessed but whose meaning is rendered invisible. So, I wonder, how do my sister and sister-in-law deal with this? And how do all the rest of parents deal with this as well? I think that it’s important to give youth the opportunity to express and interact online and trust plays a big role in this process. I think that parents would also have to trust how they are raising their kids, if they taught them well, there is a big chance teens won’t make poor choices. 

I sensed as I was reading the chapters like there was a strong focus on advocating for youth to be able to participate online but the chapters focused a bit too much in making the adults seem like they were over reacting. I think there needs to be a nice balance as to how much does youth interact online. Yes, they need to participate and interact online, if that’s what the teen is interested in but there needs to be a balance in what the parents monitor. Teens need to be monitor in a moderate way. After all, they are still learning how to make the best choices and they will make mistakes in the process. 

I also sensed in the chapters like the authors were advocating to close the participation gap, and to an extent, I’m all for it. But is it really possible? boyd says it very well when she asks “but what would it mean to close the participation gap? How do we grapple with the fact that people learn different things through their different experiences?” then she says “I can’t imagine either of you would argue for homogenizing people’s experiences… The notion of truly equal opportunity is a fantasy”. I totally agree with her on this. I think that the thought behind closing the participation gap is great and all but it is nearly impossible to do.