New literacies for the Transmedia Generation

In my last blog post I made light of the notion that we will be able to teach the generation of digital natives anything about social media and Internet use. On a more serious note though, there are important things to be said on the subject, which has resulted in this terribly lengthy blog post. It is highly interesting stuff though, so hang in there!

Many of these important things are being said very eloquently by Henry Jenkins. Henry Jenkins is an American media scholar and much can be read about him on Wikipedia. He deals with such thrilling issues as the use and combination of different media sources, and this media convergence understood as a cultural process, rather than a technological end-point. He also does a lot of work with games, interactivity and learning and so, naturally, I find him a riveting fellow!

One of the things he talks about is the Transmedia Generation. This term really seems a lot more useful now, than the idea of digital natives versus digital immigrants. We may now be such hybrids that the digital is indeed as an extended nervous system, but the participatory culture, engagement and media production has a flow that spans more than the digital, which it generally may not make sense to focus on as an entity in and of itself anymore. Jenkins points out that all of this cultural production and consumption taking place is through any media necessary, and THIS is the mark of the transmedia generation. Interesting isn't it?

And there are certainly a lot of new things that the transmedia generation must learn about themselves and the participatory media culture they are part of. Jenkins has, with the aid of a few others, written a brilliant paper on this, that I highly recommend.

To summarize what the paper mainly explores, I've included these descriptions from the paper below:

Some key elements of participatory culture:


Affiliations — memberships, formal and informal, in online communities centered around various forms of media, such as Friendster, Facebook, message boards, metagaming, game clans, or MySpace).
Expressions — producing new creative forms, such as digital sampling, skinning and modding, fan videomaking, fan fiction writing, zines, mash-ups).
Collaborative Problem-solving — working together in teams, formal and informal, to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (such as through Wikipedia, alternative reality gaming, spoiling).
Circulations — Shaping the flow of media (such as podcasting, blogging).

And more importantly, the issues that we can and should focus on when teaching the transmedia generation:


The Participation Gap — the unequal access to the opportunities, experiences, skills, and knowledge that will prepare youth for full participation in the world of tomorrow.
The Transparency Problem — The challenges young people face in learning to see clearly the ways that media shape perceptions of the world.
The Ethics Challenge — The breakdown of traditional forms of professional training and socialization that might prepare young people for their increasingly public roles as media makers and community participants.

What especially struck me as interesting is the transparency problem. This largely deals with the issue that although the kid that is able to navigate an iPad from age 1 will have great proficiency with new media, it may not have the ability to examine and understand this media critically. 

This is where the social anthropologist inside me is lured out of its cave to sniff at an alluring phenomenological breeze. Reality emerges at the intersection of all things. Jenkins writes in his paper:

"It matters what tools are available to a culture, but it matters more what that culture chooses to do with those tools. Culture shapes technology use, technology shapes use."

Here I would say simply: We shape technology and technology shapes us. Some anthropologists feel that we have really been hybrids, or cyborgs if you will, since we picked up a stone and used it for a tool for the very first time. As we develop tools, our perception of ourselves and the world are changed as our agency in the world is changed. We experience the world as a taskscape, navigating in it and understanding as we give it meaning according to the interactions that are available to us within it. Thus the reality we experience continuously emerges as we act and perceive, not only the reality we are surrounded by, but the reality of ourselves. And so really, technology is part of us, part of what we are.

...now this is all a bit hairy, but if you feel the inexplicable urge to delve deeper and, if freakishly, the thought: "Oh but this is ever so fascinating and I must know more about this phenomenology/technology stuff!" pops into your mind, then I shamelessly recommend my masters thesis where much geekery on this subject is to be endured. Link can be found in the right side of this blog.

But now, back to the 1 year old with the iPad. 

The iPad is part of what the kid is. Growing up thus, the kid may not be able to really see the iPad and the content it gives access to as something to be analyzed in and of itself. That is basically what Jenkins names, the transparency problem. Part of this is to be critical of information and its sources. One of the core concerns is the ability to distinguish commercial content from noncommercial content and knowing how commercial interests shape what we see. Games, quizzes, contests and entertainment are permeated with stealthy branding and marketing, but kids might not notice this, growing up with these platforms as a naturalized environment. 

This, and also the Ethics issue brought up by Jenkins, concerning how to behave and what to share and how in the social media culture are obviously important. So what we can and should teach the transmedia generation is perhaps the ability to take a step back and see the media as something apart, something that needs a critical eye and a detached awareness, which will require a different level of abstraction for them than it would for the slightly older generation, being so deeply embedded within it.

This is all part of what we call the New Literacies. The things that must be learned in order to navigate the world of new media. Jenkins lists these as the central skills required:


Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation
and discovery
Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world
processes
Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient
details.
Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand
mental capacities
Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with 
others toward a common goal
Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information
sources
Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information
across multiple modalities
Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting
multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

His general comments on the new literacies is this:


"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."

Now lets look at an example of such things actually being taught right now. At Stanford University a course on social media literacies is being taught in the winter quarter of 2013 by another completely interesting fellow, Howard Rheingold, who's homepage by the way, is very much worth a look.

These are the course aims he has written for the students of this class:

• Cultivate an ability to discern, analyze, and exert control over the way they deploy their attention.

• Learn to use social media tools for collaborative work. 

• Understand the need for critical consumption of information.

• Hone their ability to find the answer to any question with the right kind of search.

• Train their thinking to assess the accuracy of the answers they find online. 

• Learn the modes, consequences, some of the responsibilities and dangers of different kinds of digital participation, from curation to blogging.

• Distinguish the characteristics and methods, advantages and pitfalls, of virtual communities, smart mobs, collective intelligence, crowdsourcing, social production, collaborative consumption and wiki collaboration.

• Recognize the ways the structure and dynamics of networks affect the behaviors of populations, the elements of applying of social network analysis to online culture, the steps necessary to cultivate personal learning networks.

• Become familiar with competing perspectives on social media practices and their effects; learn how to make analytic arguments regarding key debates around the use of social media.

Having read Jenkins' excellent paper I think Rheingold's 2013 course is a pretty good example of what the new media literacies are and what it really is we can and should teach the transmedia generation. So basically, my last blog post on how we can't teach them anything was plain silly and you really shouldn't listen to me. Although if you've actually reached the end of this blog post it would seem that you do.