Networking Young Citizens Blog

I raised this question earlier in an email to the group.  We need to rethink how we approach the study of the impact of new media on youth.  Here are some questions I’ve been pondering and would be interested in what others think:   How do digital technologies and emerging interactive platforms challenge our traditional methods for understanding young people’s relationship to media? In a digital media environment characterized by its virtual, immersive, peer-to-peer, user-generated, and increasingly mobile nature, it is no longer a matter of examining the “effect” of media “content” on individual behavior. What are the most promising ways of investigating how youth engage with media and with each other in these new platforms?

To what extent is this project looking specifically at online social networks? How far do we want to buy in to the Web 2.0 rhetoric? Do we think that young people are now using ICT in distinctively different ways from 3-5 years ago?

There is one methodological question that really interests me. If much of the civic action is now taking place in discreet online spaces, protected from public view by passwords etc, how do we gain a sense of what’s going on?

Stephen