The morning after the massacre at Virginia Tech, I kept the radio on CBC -  being a kind of audio voyeur of this American tragedy, listening obsessively as the media examined the horrific story's entrails searching for clues. I heard a voice talking about what was happening online, and turned the radio up. What the interviewee was saying fascinated me, and matched some conclusions emerging  from my own observations of young people in their twenties, the Net Generation, the Digital Natives.

Emily Nussbaum is a writer, and had an article in the February 12, 2007 issue - http://nymag.com/news/features/27341/ - of New York magazine, which I found by googling her name. The description of the article, Say Everything, says -

• As younger people reveal their private lives on the Internet, the older generation looks on with alarm and misapprehension not seen since the early days of rock and roll. The future belongs to the uninhibited.
  

and she takes a look at one of the most interesting, fear-inspiring aspects of a large proportion the NetGen's behavior on the web, their 'lack' of a sense of privacy. She was interviewed on CBC radio because of the all the posting in the social networking sites, Facebook, MySpace and LiveJournal after the killings.

It is more than clear that social networking sites are not going to disappear, and as educators and/or parents of any level of the Net Generation, we need to study this phenomenum, this new way of being represented in the world.

Nussbaum's article is fascinating reading, as she lays out what she thinks is happening, and quotes from young people she has interviewed about it, and includes some samples of what they have put up on the web.  She quotes from Clay Shirky - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky - describing the difference between the media behavior of "Digital Immigrants" and "Digital Natives".* - 

•  Shirky describes this generational shift in terms of pidgin versus Creole. “Do you know that distinction? Pidgin is what gets spoken when people patch things together from different languages, so it serves well enough to communicate. But Creole is what the children speak, the children of pidgin speakers. They impose rules and structure, which makes the Creole language completely coherent and expressive, on par with any language. What we are witnessing is the Creolization of media.

The young are like fish who don't "see" the water they swim in. Those of us over 30 who pay attention, are "Digital Immigrants" and thus aliens who can see this radically new communication / personal identity culture develop.

Nussbaum muses about the future for these NetGens:

• What happens when a person who has archived her teens grows up? Will she regret her earlier decisions, or will she love the sturdy bridge she’s built to her younger self—not to mention the access to the past lives of friends, enemies, romantic partners?

This reminds me of Plato's  worries about the impact of writing on memory as writing was being added to the oral/aural culture. I wonder what happens to our narratives of ourselves when we can see, read, and hear our younger selves online. My memories of my young adulthood are pulled into a shape that fits the identity I now enact. My memory landscape keeps being reconfigured as I look backwards and different aspects take on new prominences. What was minor then, I may now see as major. I believe I was partially unconscious of its true significance then,  but now I see it is a foundation of great importance. And vice versa. Will the details of a 20 year old living their life online help or block the 50 year old in shaping their 50 year old self?

I recommend Nussbaum's Say Everything -  http://nymag.com/news/features/27341/

*Marc Prensky's terms

I am playing with Zotero - http://www.zotero.org/ - to store my online research. It's an interesting academically-oriented application. 

If you want a quick and easy-to-understand video on RSS to share with those not yet familiar with it, I recommend -

RSS in Plain English

It's short and clear. Anyone who uses the web should be able to watch and then set up their account.

Link thanks to Donna Papacosta

Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has published this white paper, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century that explores new frameworks and models for media literacy. 

• A central goal of this report is to shift the focus of the conversation about the digital divide from questions of technological access to those of opportunities to participate and to develop the cultural competencies and social skills needed for full involvement. Schools as institutions have been slow to react to the emergence of this new participatory culture; the greatest opportunity for change is currently found in afterschool programs and informal learning communities. Schools and afterschool programs must devote more attention to fostering what we call the new media literacies: a set of cultural competencies and social skills that young people need in the new media landscape. Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement.The new literacies almost all involve social skills developed through collaboration and networking.These skills build on the foundation of traditional literacy, research skills, technical skills, and critical analysis skills taught in the classroom. (Bolding added)

The whole paper can be downloaded from - http://tinyurl.com/yyrdpl

Even reading just the two page Executive Summary will give you lots to think about. And the concluding statement shows the dangers of ignoring the new participatory culture Jenkins is writing about:

• The Challenge Ahead: Ensuring that All Benefit from the Expanding Media Landscape
  Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education (May 19, 2006), Bill Ivey, the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and Steven J.Tepper, a professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University, described what they see as the long term consequences of this participation gap:
  
  
  • Increasingly, those who have the education, skills, financial resources, and time required to navigate the sea of cultural choice will gain access to new cultural opportunities....They will be the pro-ams who network with other serious amateurs and find audiences for their work.They will discover new forms of cultural expression that engage their passions and help them forge their own identities, and will be the curators of their own expressive lives and the mavens who enrich the lives of others....At the same time, those citizens who have fewer resources—less time, less money, and less knowledge about how to navigate the cultural system—will increasingly rely on the cultural fare offered to them by consolidated media and entertainment conglomerates... Finding it increasingly difficult to take advantage of the pro-am revolution, such citizens will be trapped on the wrong side of the cultural divide. So technology and economic change are conspiring to create a new cultural elite—and a new cultural underclass. It is not yet clear what such a cultural divide portends: what its consequences will be for democracy, civility, community, and quality of life. But the emerging picture is deeply troubling. Can America prosper if its citizens experience such different and unequal cultural lives?
  
  Ivey and Tepper bring us back to the core concerns that have framed this essay: how can we “ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community, [Creative] and economic life?” How do we guarantee that the rich opportunities afforded by the expanding media landscape are available to all? What can we do through schools, afterschool programs, and the home to give our youngest children a head start and allow our more mature youth the chance to develop and grow as effective participants and ethical communicators? This is the challenge that faces education at all levels at the dawn of a new era of participatory culture.
  

This is a rich and inspiring read for all who are involved in education.

Jenkins, Henry. "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century." Digital Media and Learning (2006). 27 Apr. 2007 <http://tinyurl.com/yyrdpl>.