Youth Participatory Culture and Media Literacy - Class 6 PDF Download

Jenkins et al. (2009) initiated the idea of participatory culture amongst young people in the context of online media from a media literacy perspective. Young people, as per Jenkins et al. (2009), play the role of consumers as well as producers in online media spaces. Ito et al. (2009) illustrate that youth participate in online media spaces for two primary purposes-friendship-driven and interest-driven. In this context, Ito et al. (2009) identify three sub-genres of participation: hanging out (friendship-driven participation), messing around (acquiring a new skill online), and geeking out (intensive and focused participation after acquiring the skill online, hence, learning).
The notion of participatory culture, as per Jenkins et al. (2009) stems from three core gaps:
1. Participation Gap (unequal access to opportunities, experiences, skills, and knowledge) 2. Transparency Problem (difficulty to recognize how media shapes their perception)
3. Ethics Challenge (ethics to communicate and participate responsibly e in online media spaces)
The role of media education and literacy, therefore, becomes imperative to make online media a dynamic environment to be engaged with up to its full potential. Moreover, the participatory culture essentially shifts the focus on literacy from individual expression to community involvement, especially amongst young people.
They were borrowing the idea of “Affinity Spaces” (Gee, 2004), Jenkins et al. (2009) state that affinity spaces have become the base of participatory culture amongst young people which offers them opportunities to learn and also bridge differences of age, class, gender, race and educational level. Furthermore, participatory culture includes both popular cultures as well as informal learning for efficient participation in online media spaces.
There are four forms of participatory culture:
1. Affiliations: forming formal and informal memberships in online communities centered around various forms of online media such as Friendster, Facebook, message boards, metagaming, game clans, etc.
2. Expressions: producing new forms such as digital sampling, skinning and modding, fan videomaking, fan fiction writing, zines, mash-ups, etc.
3. Collaborative Problem-Solving: working together in formal and informal teams to complete tasks and develop new knowledge through Wikipedia, alternative reality gaming, spoiling, etc.
4. Circulations: shaping the flow of media through podcasting and blogging.

New Media Literacies’ (NML) Framework

Jenkins et al. (2009) have identified 11 new media literacies that comprehensively cover social skills and cultural competencies amongst young people to fully participate in online media spaces. The new media literacies’ framework is based on traditional literacy, research skills, technical skills, and critical analysis skills taught in the classroom and are developed through collaborations and networking. Therefore, participatory culture as a concept combines traditional literacy skills (how to search information, evaluate the credibility of information, synthesize and make sense of information, make a decision and action) and new media literacy (social skills or methods of interaction with larger communities).
The core media literacy skills are as follows:
1. Play: the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving Through play, children and young people try on roles, experiment with culturally central processes, manipulate core resources, and explore their immediate environments. Children can play games and shift their emphasis from fun to engagement and learning, which is also enormously motivating for them. It allows educators to tap into play as a skill when they encourage free-form experimentation and open-ended speculation.
2. Simulation: the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes New media provides powerful new ways of representing and manipulating information. New forms of simulation expand our cognitive capacity, allowing us to deal with larger bodies of information, experiment with more complex configurations of data, form hypotheses quickly, and test them against different variables in real-time. Contemporary video games allow youth to play with sophisticated simulations and, in the process, to develop an intuitive understanding of how we might use simulations to test our assumptions about the way the world works.

3. Performance: the ability to adopt alternative identities for improvisation and discovery The gameplay also is one of a range of contemporary forms of youth popular culture that encourages young people to assume fictitious identities and through this process, develop a richer understanding of themselves and their social roles. Educators have used dramatizations to teach children to reflect more deeply on their experiences of stories. One of the most prominent examples is Model United Nations (MUN) which helps young people to develop new knowledge and strategies by donning alternative identities.
4. Appropriation: the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content Appropriation is understood as a process by which students learn by taking culture apart and putting it back together. It may be understood as a process that involves both analysis and commentary. Sampling intelligently from the existing cultural reservoir requires a close analysis of the existing structures and uses of this material; remixing requires an appreciation of emerging structures and underlying potential meanings. Such appropriation is visible in drama, theatre, art, and music and can also be acknowledged in terms of gaining insight into educational materials.
5. Multi-tasking: the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus onto salient details on an ad hoc basis Focusing attention is essential in order to learn cohesively, but difficult for learners nowadays mainly due to the emergence of digital media. However, instead of focusing on narrowing attention, young people often respond to a rich media environment by multi-tasking. Multitasking involves a method of monitoring and responding to the sea of information around us. Students need help distinguishing between being off task and handling multiple tasks simultaneously. Currently, young people are playing with these skills as they engage with games or social activities that reward the ability to maintain a mental picture of complex sets of relationships and to adjust quickly to shifts in perceptual cues.
6. Distributed Cognition: The ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand our mental capacities. Applications of the distributed cognition perspective to education suggest that students must learn the different tools and information technologies, and know in which functions of tools and technologies to excel at and in what contexts they can be trusted. Students need to acquire patterns of thought that regularly cycle through available sources of information as they make sense of developments in the world around them. One of the recent examples is Augmented Reality (AR) which is a potential tool for distributed intelligence to apply in the learning process.
7. Collective Intelligence: the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others towards a common goal Currently, children and adults are acquiring the skills to operate within knowledge communities by interacting with popular culture. We often learn through play that we later apply to more serious tasks. For example, young Pokemon fans, of whom each one knows some crucial detail about the various species, constitute a collective intelligence whose knowledge is extended each time two youth on the playground, share something about the franchise. Educators can deploy aspects of collective intelligence when students pool observations and work through interpretations with others studying the same problem from scattered locations. Such knowledge communities can confront problems of greater scale, and complexity than any individual student might be able to handle.
8. Judgment: the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources The new mediated landscape of mainstream news sources, collaborative blog projects, unsourced news sites, and increasingly sophisticated marketing techniques aimed at ever-younger consumers demand that students be taught how to distinguish fact from fiction, the argument from documentation, real from fake, and marketing from enlightenment. Even when media content has been determined credible, it is vital for the student also to identify and analyze the perspective of the producer: who is presenting what to whom, and why. Media literacy education, therefore, relies heavily on the concept of judgment to distinguish information from misinformation and disinformation.
9. Transmedia Navigation: the ability to deal with the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities Transmedia stories at the most basic level are stories told across multiple media. Modem literacy requires the ability to express ideas across a broad range of different systems of representation and signification including words (spoken or written), images (still or moving), music, 3D models, etc. Students must learn to sort through a range of different possible modes of expression, determine which is most effective in reaching their audience and communicating their message, and grasp which techniques work best in conveying information through this channel.
10. Networking: the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information In a world in which knowledge production is collective and communication occurs across an array of different media, the capacity to network emerges as a core social skill and cultural competency. Students today tap into popular search systems such as Google.com, Amazon, etc., readily available on Web 2.0 to collect and annotate data for themselves as well as for other users. Therefore, networking is only partially about identifying potential resources; it also involves a process of synthesis, during which multiple resources are combined to produce new knowledge. Educators take advantage of social networking when they link learners with others who might share their interests or when they encourage students to publish works produced to a broader public.
11. Negotiation: The ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative sets of norms The fluid communication within the new media environment brings together groups who otherwise might have lived segregated lives. Culture flows smoothly from one community to another. People online encounter conflicting values and assumptions, come to grips with competing claims about the meaning of shared artifacts and experiences. Therefore, it becomes increasingly critical to help students acquire skills in understanding multiple perspectives, respecting and even embracing the diversity of views, understanding a variety of social norms, and negotiating between conflicting opinions. Educators can foster negotiation skills when they bring together groups from diverse backgrounds and provide them with resources and processes that ensure careful listening and more in-depth communication.
Therefore, the core media literacy skills as highlighted by Jenkins et al. (2009) combine social skills and cultural competencies in and out of school for young people to adapt and learn virtually about the dynamic environment through the tools available at hand. Apart from school, parents become another agency that can help shape the relationship of young people with online tools for enhancing their mental capacities in order to be media and information literate right from communication to effective participation in the online media spaces.