Youth and New Media

For the past two years, I've contemplated starting a blog about children and teens' use of new media in their lives, and the task has literally been so overwhelming that I did not know where to start. (In fact, I recently started another blog about girls and media that looks at the media representation of girls as well as how girls represent themselves through media, and I still let this blog essentially gather dust.) Why so overwhelming? Frankly, there are so many angles and so many things to discuss. Every day, a story runs in the news media that relates to kids and the Internet or gaming or cell phones, and in general, these aren't particularly interesting or truthful pieces, in my opinion. You have the stories about "Gee whiz! What will the kids start doing next?", the ones about sexual predators tracking them down through whatever social networking site is hot at the moment or before MySpace and Facebook were hot topics of discussion, through chatrooms and IM. You get tons of stories about personal disclosure -- from sending friends naked photos of themselves on their cell phones to posting pictures of themselves drinking beer on their Facebook pages to unwittingly (is this possible?) giving their address to a stranger ... We don't really hear about young people using new media communication technology for good very often, and there is probably something wrong with that. Is it really all bad?

Let me start off with giving you my perspective here, though, because it will obviously color and shape any discussion on this blog: I am a college journalism professor who studies how youth use new media and analyzes how the media cover youth and communication technology. In most cases, I focus specifically on how gender comes in to play in this, and I pay specific attention to girls not only because I'm a feminist but because I believe they have not been fairly represented or studied (again, though, that's the subject of my other blog). As you can tell from the previous paragraph, I believe the media files so many ridiculous stories that prey on their audience's fears about new technology, very literally to pander to paranoid (mostly) parents who don't necessarily understand the Internet, cell phones and video games well enough to critically evaluate whether the story has merit. And I used to be a journalist myself, so I also have that perspective. I'm not sure that reporters intentionally mislead audiences about youth and technology, but I do believe that they aren't given the physical space in a newspaper or the air time during a newscast to tell complete stories that give the full nuances of what is going on.

There are some good stories out there about youth and new media, though, and one that aired this year that told a number of fairly complete stories about youth and technology was "Frontline: Growing Up Online." Watch it if you haven't. It touches on all the sort of hot button issues about kids, teens and new media, and does so in a way that shows the kids as active producers of media rather than passive receptacles of it -- or at least in most of the examples, not as victims of it.

I view this blog as a space to showcase the good and the bad, however, and I'll throw in my own two cents fairly often. I would also be interested in hearing from you, even if you fully disagree with my perspective. Let the discussion begin, I guess.