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75
excluded from much of civic life as defined by traditional notions of citizenship.
However, defining participation and citizenship through the market presents a variety
of conflicts to prevailing notions of who is a citizen and what citizens should do. For
this reason, consumer citizenship is highly contested, particularly when it comes to
young people, who are (as I have discussed in the previous chapter) frequently
constructed as needing protection from commercial interests.
Michael Schudson has written that consumer citizenship is frequently
criticized because of "the basic assumption…that buying in the marketplace is an
inferior form of human activity compared to voting at the polling place or otherwise
exercising citizenship.”8 Schudson goes on to observe that much of the conflict
between consumption and citizenship comes from the belief that consuming is "self-centered"
and "unvirtuous because it seeks the individual's own pleasures," while
political involvement is "public regarding or public oriented," and therefore
superior.9 In her investigation of the children’s cable network Nickelodeon, Sarah
Banet-Weiser acknowledges the longstanding distinction between consumption and
political involvement, writing that “maintaining the distinction between
consumerism and citizenship has performed important cultural work in terms of
buttressing and understanding democracy.”10
Consumer identities are intrinsically linked to consumer citizenship. Like
other aspects of identity, consumers are created through relationships to various
subject positions. As Juliet Schor notes, previous theorizing on consumer behavior,
agency, and identity has positioned the individual agent as separate from the market
Object Description
| Title | Kids as cultural producers: consumption, literacy, and participation |
| Author | Stephenson, Rebecca Herr |
| Author email | rherr@usc.edu; bhs@hri.uci.edu |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | Communication |
| School | Annenberg School for Communication |
| Date defended/completed | 2008-08-25 |
| Date submitted | 2008 |
| Restricted until | Unrestricted |
| Date published | 2008-10-17 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | Banet-Weiser, Sarah |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Gross, Larry Seiter, Ellen |
| Abstract | This dissertation looks closely at the practice of digital media production within a group of special education students and their teachers. Using ethnographic methods of extended participant observation and semi-structured interviews with students, teachers, and parents, along with textual analysis of students' media projects, this work examines the types of learning that emerge from making media at school and the ways in which that learning relates to media and technology use in everyday life. Over the course of one school year (2005-2006), the students who are the focus of this dissertation undertook eight different multimedia production projects, ranging from designing PowerPoint presentations to digital video production and stop-motion animation. Through media production, the students found opportunities to practice traditional and digital literacy skills as well as to explore issues of identity and self-expression.; This dissertation provides empirical support for recommendations made by several media literacy scholars to include media production as part of critical media literacy curricula and contributes a unique case study -- one situated in special education -- to a growing body of work on digital literacy. Three interdisciplinary themes--consumption, literacy, and participation -- are used to organize the description and analysis of the students' media production activities. These themes connect the specific production that took place in the classroom to larger discourses about youth, media, technology, education, and access, working to complicate existing constructions of young people as either helpless victims of manipulative media or naturally savvy media and technology users. Instead, this research emphasizes that the relationships kids have with media and technology are complex, dynamic, intrinsically linked to their identities as consumers and participants in society. Media literacy is thus theorized as a tool for understanding and controlling consumption, participation, and the construction of young people as both current and future citizens. |
| Keyword | media literacy; media production; special education; middle school; digital media |
| Geographic subject (city or populated place) | Los Angeles |
| Coverage date | 2005/2006 |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Provenance | Electronically uploaded by the author |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m1674 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Rights | Stephenson, Rebecca Herr |
| Repository name | Libraries, University of Southern California |
| Repository address | Los Angeles, California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Filename | etd-Stephenson-2393 |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume29/etd-Stephenson-2393.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 80 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Full text | 75 excluded from much of civic life as defined by traditional notions of citizenship. However, defining participation and citizenship through the market presents a variety of conflicts to prevailing notions of who is a citizen and what citizens should do. For this reason, consumer citizenship is highly contested, particularly when it comes to young people, who are (as I have discussed in the previous chapter) frequently constructed as needing protection from commercial interests. Michael Schudson has written that consumer citizenship is frequently criticized because of "the basic assumption…that buying in the marketplace is an inferior form of human activity compared to voting at the polling place or otherwise exercising citizenship.”8 Schudson goes on to observe that much of the conflict between consumption and citizenship comes from the belief that consuming is "self-centered" and "unvirtuous because it seeks the individual's own pleasures," while political involvement is "public regarding or public oriented," and therefore superior.9 In her investigation of the children’s cable network Nickelodeon, Sarah Banet-Weiser acknowledges the longstanding distinction between consumption and political involvement, writing that “maintaining the distinction between consumerism and citizenship has performed important cultural work in terms of buttressing and understanding democracy.”10 Consumer identities are intrinsically linked to consumer citizenship. Like other aspects of identity, consumers are created through relationships to various subject positions. As Juliet Schor notes, previous theorizing on consumer behavior, agency, and identity has positioned the individual agent as separate from the market |
