Peter Levine's article for this week (A Public Voice for Youth: The Audience Problem in Digital Media and Civic Education) brought up an issue I had not thought much about--who is the audience for all of this digital media that we are having kids create; and even more importantly, what impact can sharing the work have in their lives and the lives of users?
I'm already convinced that facilitating the creation of digital media by youth is beneficial. I hadn't thought too far beyond that to the *purpose* of youth creations (other than the inherent benefits within creation) and the *who* of the intended audience. I need to do a bit more thinking before I can come to a conclusion on ways to implement these ideas within the kinds of programming I have done and am doing with young people, but I am both slightly astonished and extremely pleased to see that meaningful civic engagement has been linked to such positive outcomes among at-risk youth. I am particularly intrigued in the idea of envisioning local youth affinity groups as communities, whether schools, clubs, etc.
Eli Neiburger has spoken on the topics of gaming tournaments and civic engagement--particularly how video game tournaments can teach youth how to be good competitors, find a place within an affinity group, and effect change. I found this article [Libraries, Videogames and Civic Engagement] that expresses some of his ideas, as well as thoughts from Jenny Levine and others.
And I will continue mulling over the question of whether production in and of itself is enough, or whether it needs to be meaningful and situated within an audience, and how that can be done.
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One of the big reasons kids say they like making videos, writing, or producing some other content and putting it up on the web is because other people can see/read it. They feel like only having the teacher read it and provide little, if any, feedback is just not sufficient - at least not when they are trying to find something to motivate them to produce the work. I don’t think that many of them truly understand, however, that not many people will in fact stumble upon their work even if it’s placed on sites like Youtube. I think there is a misconception about the idea that everything can be found from search engines, which isn’t the case, and that everyone will be privy to all information posted online. Nevertheless, maybe just the possibility of someone finding their content is enough for students. When they simply turn in term papers to their teacher, there is not much of a chance that anyone else will read it aside from the teacher and perhaps parents and friends, but if it’s online, someone could find it, right? Someone could mangle a URL and visit the webpage with their content on it unintentionally, or they could manually ask Google’s crawlers to add my webpage to Google’s index. They could email the URL out to those that they would like to view the content so that search engines wouldn’t have to be relied upon. The content could be viewed, so does it matter that it probably won’t - at least not by a significant amount of people? And if it is going to be viewed by others, should the way the content is presented change? Should they write differently for Joe Blow than they would for their teacher and other people that know them personally? I think so, but this would probably be dependent on the situation. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I agree with you. These are important questions to think about when we ask kids to create digital media. Who’s benefiting? Why are we doing this? What are the kids’ expectations and assumptions about both the production and publishing of this content?
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