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Kids as cultural producers: consumption, literacy, and participation

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Kids as cultural producers: consumption, literacy, and participation

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KIDS AS CULTURAL PRODUCERS:
CONSUMPTION, LITERACY AND PARTICIPATION

by

Rebecca Herr Stephenson

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)

December 2008

Copyright 2008 Rebecca Herr Stephenson

ii
Table of Contents
 
Abstract iv

Chapter 1: Introduction 1
Special Education and the Problem of Accountability 4
Kids and Technology 7
Cultural Production 11
Themes 12
Methods and Sites 18
Professional Development and the Digital Youth Project 22
Chapter descriptions 23
Chapter 1 Endnotes 26

Chapter 2: Media Literacy, Production, and Critical Consumption 29
Children as consumers and audiences 34
Popular culture and issues of taste and class 42
Schools, popular culture, and discipline 47
Media literacy and media education: Questioning and controlling consumption 51
Chapter 2 Endnotes 63

Chapter 3: Consumer Citizens, Producer Citizens 68
Producing consumer citizens 74
New Literacies 82
New Media Literacies 88
Tools for consumer citizens 98
Chapter 3 Endnotes 102

Chapter 4: Media Production and Identity 107
The social construction of identity 107
Remix, rehearse, resist: new media and identity projects 114
I Poems 125
Muchos Somos/We are Many 136
Chapter 4 Endnotes 142

iii

Chapter 5: From Digital Divide to Participation Gap 146
Investigating digital inequality 148
From digital divide to participation gap 157
Educational capital, participation, and technology 170
Chapter 5 Endnotes 179

Chapter 6: Conclusion 181
Teaching Media Production 186
Chapter 6 Endnotes 196

References 197

iv
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

v
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.

1
Chapter 1: Introduction

Students in K-12 public schools throughout the United States regularly face
challenges and inequities that threaten their ability to learn. From crumbling
buildings and under-resourced classrooms to overwhelmed teachers and punitive
national educational policies, a great number of obstacles stand in the way of
providing students with a safe and functional learning environment, particularly for
large, urban schools. Within this context, media and technology have been proposed
as tools for addressing inequality—through access to a wider array of resources,
technical skills training, or individualization and remediation of curricula, for
example. As such, a variety of media and technology has been introduced to schools
and used in classrooms with varying degrees of success, sometimes contributing to
greater equity and school success, and sometimes exacerbating the differences in
resources that exist between schools.
As a way of contributing to these larger conversations about media,
technology, education and equality, this dissertation looks closely at the use of a
particular set of technologies for media production by a group of special education
students and their teachers. Over the course of one school year, this group of students
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.

2
The chapters that follow employ three interdisciplinary themes—
consumption, literacy, and participation—in the description and analysis of the
students’ media production activities. The themes, defined in detail in the next
section of this introduction, connect the specific production that took place in the
classroom to larger discourses about kids, media, and technology. Approaching
production through these thematic lenses complicates existing assumptions about
kids, media, and technology, which tend to construct young people as either helpless
victims of manipulative media or naturally savvy media and technology users.
1

Instead, my research indicates that the relationships kids have with media and
technology are complex, dynamic, and intrinsically linked to their identities as
consumers and participants in society. Media literacy and, increasingly, new media
literacies, both of which are ways of understanding and controlling consumption, are
essential forces in shaping the way young people are constructed and understood as
both current and future citizens. In turn, these significant relationships between
media literacy/new media literacy and participation/citizenship bring increased
urgency to exploring and understanding issues of access—issues that are variously
called “the digital divide” and “the participation gap”.
The students I profile in the chapters that follow were enrolled in sixth,
seventh, and eighth grades at Cameron Middle School (CMS),
2
a large public middle
school in the Los Angeles area, during the 2005-2006 school year. The students were
members of two multi-grade special education classes. Most of the students had been
assigned to special education primarily due to reading difficulties. Some had

3
additional emotional/behavioral issues that factored into their placement in special
education. Language was an issue for some students as well; all but one of the
students I profile in this dissertation were Latino/a, most second-generation
immigrants from Mexico or Central America. At the start of the school year, most of
the students read at a first or second grade level. One student could not read at all.
In addition to the students, I profile here two teachers, Ms. Abel and Mr.
Davidson.
3
Both teachers had been working at CMS for several years at the time of
my fieldwork. As experienced special education teachers, they understood the
challenges of teaching students with learning disabilities and emotional/behavioral
issues, and utilized a cadre of pedagogical techniques to reach students in meaningful
ways. Teaching through media production, however, was a completely new activity
for both teachers. Ms. Abel and Mr. Davidson facilitated eight multimedia
production projects with their students over the course of the school year. These
projects increased in difficulty throughout the year and required students to develop
a variety of different research and production skills.
In an interview prior to the start of the school year, Ms. Abel discussed the
status of special education students at CMS in terms of opportunities to participate in
innovative projects:
…sometimes our students get lost in the shuffle. Special ed. students aren’t
the ones that are usually considered first for this kind of project [media
production]. It’s usually the gifted students, or the regular ed. students, so I’m
very excited that they have this opportunity…because if they don’t learn
anything else in the whole school year, I know that this project is going to be
one that they remember…

4
Ms. Abel’s statement points to one of the challenges faced everyday by students and
teachers—limited resources. Despite efforts to “wire” schools in the 1990s, working,
up-to-date technology and resources to support its use are often in short supply in
schools.
4
Admittedly, Ms. Abel and Mr. Davidson had more resources available to
them than teachers at many other schools, in large part due to the fact that CMS was
organized into Small Learning Communities (SLC)
5
and the special education
programs were situated within a community focused on communication and
technology. In addition to resources in the form of hardware and software, the school
employed a full-time administrator in charge of acquiring and maintaining
technology for the school. In the classroom, this meant that the teachers had access
to a laptop cart for media production projects, and could call upon the administrator
for technical assistance as necessary. Resources such as these are not available in all
schools, and, as Ms. Abel notes, are often tied to specific programs (such as
enrichment or gifted and talented programs) rather than given to special education
classes. Ms. Abel’s statement also points to an unfortunate reality for many students
when she notes that even “if they don’t learn anything else in the whole school year”
she has hope that her students will learn from the media production projects. While it
is unlikely that students go through an entire school year without learning anything,
it is, unfortunately, the case that school is not motivating or salient to many of the
students enrolled.

Special Education and the Problem of Accountability
As special education students, each of the kids in Ms. Abel and Mr.

5
Davidson’s classes had an Individual Education Plan (IEP) detailing the
accommodations that would be made to help the student achieve in school. Students’
families had regular meetings with the teachers and school administration (including
school psychologists) to keep tabs on their child’s progress, behavior, and challenges
in school. Being referred to special education and preparing a student’s IEP can be
long and convoluted processes; for the families of the students with whom I worked,
language barriers added to the challenge. Although the school provided Spanish
translations of all notices and paperwork and used a translator to mediate meetings
between parents and teachers, school psychologists, and administrators, several of
the parents I interviewed noted the challenge of participating in their child’s school
without speaking fluent English.
Communication between the school and the family is one form of
accountability; for most of the students with whom I worked at CMS, parental
expectations and associated rewards and sanctions were significant motivators for
school achievement. These rewards and sanctions nearly always related to media or
technology. In their interviews, several of the students discussed anticipated rewards
for good grades or graduation gifts (such as a cell phone, iPod, or video game). In
addition, several students noted that if they did not receive good grades, certain types
of media and technology (e.g. Internet access or phone privileges) would be taken
away by their parents. On the scale of family negotiations, this system of rewards
and sanctions seemed to work well for the families I met. However, the application
of similar theory on a much larger scale—that of national education policy—presents

6
a number of problems, particularly for students in special education.
The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), authorized in 2001 and put into
effect July 1, 2002,
6
dictates school accountability by measuring “Adequate Yearly
Progress” (AYP), based in large part on high-stakes, standardized tests.
7
NCLB was
enacted in an effort to address inequality in education by implementing standards for
curricula and instruction, thus “close[ing] the achievement gap and mak[ing] sure all
students, including those who are disadvantaged, achieve academic proficiency.”
8

Despite its articulated goals related to achieving equity in education, the Act has
been criticized as idealistic and as having the paradoxical effect of contributing to
greater inequality in schools by penalizing already-struggling schools, which are
often schools with large and diverse student bodies.
Standardized methods of assessment become particularly problematic in
relation to special education students. Most special education students technically
are required to meet AYP targets and proficiency standards by 2014, although there
are a few accommodations allowed (e.g. modified achievement standards). However,
subjecting special education students to standardized assessments is in conflict with
the tenets of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA),
9
which
“…requires students with disabilities to be educated in accordance with individual
education plans that set academic goals in accordance with their particular schooling
needs and capabilities.”
10

In the classes I observed at CMS, the students took the standardized tests
required by NCLB, but their scores were not necessarily included in the school’s

7
accountability report, an allowable practice according to the law that involves
defining a threshold group size for including the test scores of specific subgroups of
students.
11
Their omission from the reporting gave the class flexibility that other
classes did not have. The students generally spent all but one or two periods per day
with either Ms. Abel or Mr. Davidson, which allowed them to spend long periods of
time working on their media production projects. When a deadline for a project came
close, the students often worked only on the media project for days at a time. Both
teachers went back and forth on the decision to foreground the media projects,
concerned about replacing direct instruction in phonics or decoding with this more
whole-language approach to reading and writing. Most of the time, the students’
progress was evident enough through their productions and through other school
work that the teachers were able to reassure themselves that it was the correct choice.
By the end of the school year, the teachers reported to me that almost every student
in their classes was reading at a significantly higher grade level than they had been at
the start of the year. Several students were close to reading at grade level, and several
would be transferred to a regular education classroom for the following school year.
In addition to the advances in their traditional literacy skills, the students had learned
a number of technical skills through the media production projects.

Kids and Technology
Describing the improvements in Ms. Abel and Mr. Davidson’s students as a
success story should not impede taking a critical view of both the production
activities themselves and of larger discourses about kids and technology. David

8
Buckingham has written about such discourses as positioning children within a
binary of passive victims and empowered users.
12
On the “passive victim” side of the
binary, which Buckingham calls the “death of childhood” paradigm, the loss of a
“natural” state of childhood innocence is attributed to variety of modern social
forces, the most insidious of which are the mass media. According to this viewpoint,
the mass media harm children by exposing them to adult information before they are
developmentally able to understand it, thus causing grave harm to their cognitive,
emotional, social, moral, and physical development. There is a conservative moral
undercurrent in much of the “death of childhood” literature, as well as an overt
critique of commercial culture. On the other side of the binary is what Buckingham
calls creators of “the electronic generation,” adults who take a utopian view of digital
media, extolling their virtues for empowering children. Buckingham’s critique of the
“electronic generation” paradigm is not of the idea of media empowering young
people, but of the uncritical acceptance of media as a kind of “savior” for children
and an equally uncritical bashing of older generations as technophobic or old-
fashioned. In addition, Buckingham notes that this type of utopian rhetoric fails to
recognize realities of the production, distribution, and use of technologies--for
example, the role of multinational capital in the software industry or issues of
access.
13

Schools have an interesting relationship to both the “death of childhood” and
“electronic generation” discourses. On the one hand, schools go to great lengths to
separate themselves from popular culture, including media and technology used for

9
entertainment. As I will discuss in greater depth in the next chapter, schools
frequently are understood as separate (and, at times, in opposition to) the market.
The media and technology that are used in school environments, therefore, are
generally policed carefully to ensure that only certain media—educational videos,
specific websites or “edutainment” games, for example—are used at school. At the
same time, however, media--especially technology such as computers and the
internet--are constructed as essential tools for schools to provide for their students in
order to properly prepare them for adult life.
NCLB contains various provisions for funding schools’ technology needs.
Text from section 2402, in which the goals of the Act are defined, appears below:
(1) PRIMARY GOAL- The primary goal of this part is to improve student
academic achievement through the use of technology in elementary schools
and secondary schools.

(2) ADDITIONAL GOALS- The additional goals of this part are the
following:

(A) To assist every student in crossing the digital divide by ensuring that
every student is technologically literate by the time the student finishes
the eighth grade, regardless of the student's race, ethnicity, gender, family
income, geographic location, or disability.

(B) To encourage the effective integration of technology resources and
systems with teacher training and curriculum development to establish
research-based instructional methods that can be widely implemented as
best practices by State educational agencies and local educational
agencies
14
.

In these goal statements, the construction of technology as a “savior” for children is
evident. Technology is cited as a tool for improving student academic achievement
as well as in “assist[ing] every student in crossing the digital divide…” by the time

10
they enter high school. Given the complex economic and social factors that influence
access to technology, it is a tall order for a few classroom computers to solve deep
seeded inequalities that contribute to the digital divide.
As special education students in a Title I school, the students with whom I
worked faced challenges everyday at school that extended beyond those presented to
them as learning opportunities. However, for these students, the opportunity to make
media in their classes was a reprieve from the low expectations they had previously
encountered in other classrooms. For some students, production was a great
motivator; they tended to describe it as fun and more interesting than “regular”
school work. Making media helped students experience real-life applications of
reading, writing, and digital literacy skills such as online research and video
production. This is not to say that what went on in the classroom was always perfect;
often times the projects did not turn out as planned. Sometimes they were abandoned
partway through. And although the students did have opportunities to learn about
themselves, to practice self-expression, and to develop a voice, most of the time, they
were just kids doing class projects. They complained about the amount of work,
about doing revisions to projects, and about working in groups with their classmates.
They went “off task,” played mini-games in class, and fought with one another
regularly. This is the reality of doing media production with young people. It is a
constant negotiation. It is messy. It is complicated. It certainly does not, when you
look at it closely, make sense in terms of a binary of victims or savvy users.

11
Cultural Production
I have chosen the title of this dissertation, Kids as Cultural Producers, as a
reflection of Bourdieu’s concept of the field of cultural production.
15
Bourdieu’s idea
of fields is a spatial metaphor for arenas of struggle over the accumulation and
legitimation of different kinds of capital. He writes:
The space of literary or artistic position-takings, i.e. the structured set of the
manifestations of the social agents involved in the field—literary or artistic
works, of course, but also political acts or pronouncements, manifestos or
polemics, etc.--is inseparable from the space of literary or artistic positions
(defined by possession of a determinate quantity of specific capital
(recognition and, at the same time, by occupation of a determinate position in
the structure of the distribution of this specific capital. The literary or artistic
field is a field of forces, but it is also a field of struggle tending to transform
or conserve this field of forces.
16

As both the space of positions and position-takings, fields both structure activity and
are structured by activity that takes place within the arena of struggle they define.
The idea of the field of cultural production as a space where conflicts over
meaning making happen is salient to this investigation of kids’ media production. As
I will argue, media production can be a valuable site and tool for learning. However,
kids’ media production is understood and controlled through the structuring forces of
various institutions—some physical, like schools, and some conceptual, like literacy
and participation. The interaction of various structuring influences, as well as the
tensions that arise between them, are what makes kids’ media production both an
interesting and significant object of study. Although the focus of the description in
this dissertation is clearly on the students’ media production process, the analysis and
thematic organization works to extend the close readings of the student-produced

12
texts into the realm of cultural production by relating the activities of the classroom
to larger discourses about production, consumption, literacy, and participation.

Themes
As I have mentioned previously in this introduction, I will use three
theoretical constructs as themes to organize the interdisciplinary investigation of the
CMS students’ media production projects. These three constructs—consumption,
literacy, and participation—have been explored in a variety of other contexts,
including media/cultural studies, communication studies, sociology, and education.
The themes are intentionally broad and overlap significantly. Like childhood itself,
children’s media use is complicated and defined through the influence of a variety of
institutions. As such, the interdisciplinary approach allows a more thorough
investigation of children’s relationships with media and technology and changes to
the constitution of childhood within particular social institutions (such as schools and
consumer society) than could be achieved were the topic approached from a single
theoretical position.
Consumption
My definition of consumption is informed by both economic and cultural
theories of consumption and theories of audience reception. This definition
acknowledges the material contexts of consumption, and the creation,
communication, and satisfaction of manufactured needs necessary to capitalism.
17
In
addition to literature on economic and political aspects of consumption, I draw from

13
media studies and cultural studies to understand the ways in which goods are imbued
with symbolic value and ideological power, and the processes through which such
power is leveraged.
18
This definition acknowledges the constructed nature of the
meanings assigned to goods and written into texts, and acknowledges that media
texts are polysemic. Polysemy creates the possibility for audiences to decode texts in
a variety of ways; polysemy also allows audiences to re-encode texts in ways that
highlight alternative readings.
Of particular importance to this dissertation is the relationship between
consumption, education, and cultural capital. Bourdieu points to education as a
marker of class, and describes educational capital as “the guaranteed product of the
combined effects of cultural transmission by the family and cultural transmission by
the school.”
19
Thus, educational capital is a necessary element in the accrual of
cultural capital. This places the educational system in a position in which it must
protect high culture (and its status as a purveyor of high culture) by imbuing students
with an appreciation for legitimate tastes. It does this through canonization of texts
and the exclusion of popular culture texts.
Consumption becomes particularly contentious when children are the
consumers. However, for children growing up in a media-saturated, brand-obsessed
society, consumption (for better or for worse) is a fact of life. At the heart of these
conflicts is the assumption of childhood innocence, an assumption that came about,
in part, as the result of a cultural shift from valuing children financially--for their
potential as labor for the family--to attributing sentimental value to children.
20
Adults

14
invested in childhood innocence like to think that children are naive about money
and protected from knowledge of economics and commerce, as though childhood
were a stage of life separate from the capitalist system in which children mature.
The innocent child of our national imagination stands in opposition to the
realities of contemporary childhood. For marketers, children a valuable three-in-one
market. As consumers with their own money and opportunities for purchasing
products, they are a primary market; they are in influence market, as they influence
purchases within the family; and, children are a future market that will continue to
grow in power and value as children become adults.
21
Childhood innocence also
conflicts with the construction of children as autonomous, savvy citizens within
networked society. As media producers in a production environment based on
reappropriation and “poaching”,
22
young people must be savvy consumers of media
in order to collect, remix, and share assets and completed productions.
While it is premature to declare the boundary between producer and
consumer destroyed, it certainly has become more porous, allowing people to define
themselves as “media users” in complex and varied ways. What I am most interested
in analyzing through this theme is how children are constructed as consumers within
a rapidly changing media landscape. Even at this early stage of online and interactive
media, multiplatform distribution, amateur digital media production, we have seen
myriad challenges to traditional channels of distribution and consumption. Reactions
from cultural institutions, ranging from the imposition of ratings systems and age
restrictions on video games to the regulation of children’s access to online spaces

15
through legislation, software, and site-specific policies in schools and libraries, have
attempted to protect the notion of childhood innocence as well as traditional
hierarchies of media consumption.
Literacy
Literacy encompasses much more than just reading and writing printed texts.
As James Paul Gee describes, “meaning in language is tied to people’s experience of
situated action in the material world
23
.” Literacy is more than a set of cognitive
skills. It also involves the acquisition and mobilization of social languages, or
Discourses, that connect speech to action and context. Gee goes on to write:
Discourses always involve language…but they always involve more than
language as well…A Discourse integrates ways of talking, listening, writing,
reading, acting, interacting, believing, valuing, and feeling (and using various
objects, symbols, images, tools and technologies) in the service of enacting
meaningful socially situated identities and activities.
24

The expanded definition of literacy used in this dissertation also incorporates
a variety of texts—audio, visual, and interactive texts in addition to printed texts. I
draw upon a variety of traditions in understanding literacy: for example, media
literacy, information literacy, new literacy studies, and new media literacy.
Sonia Livingstone has questioned the use of “literacy” (as opposed to
“reception” or “interpretation”) to understand digital media and has written that “the
terms ‘audience’ and ‘reception’ do not work so well for media which are socially
diversified (rather than mass), technologically converged (rather than distinct) and
interactive (rather than one-to-many, with producer and receiver separate).”
25
Within
a diverse multi-media environment, engagement with media is cross-platform rather

16
than medium-specific. Livingstone notes that understanding the contemporary media
environment requires a broad conceptual framework, such as that related to literacy.
She writes:
[Literacy] is pan-media in that it covers the interpretation of all complex,
mediated symbolic texts broadcast or published in electronic communications
networks; at the same time, because historically it has been tied to particular
media forms and technologies, literacy foregrounds the technological,
cultural, and historical specificity of particular media as used in particular
times and places.
26

The analysis presented in this project moves beyond the understanding of literacy as
a set of skills toward literacy as a way of being. As such, an essential part of the
theme of literacy is the recognition of the roles race, class, gender, and ability play in
the definition of literacy. Literacy is an important determinant of cultural capital, and
is inextricably linked from the issues of consumption, access, and production
outlined above. Becoming literate requires the development of complex set of skills
and dispositions within (or, in some cases, despite of) the context of one’s cultural
and educational environment. Becoming literate is neither a natural nor an instructed
process. It needs to be cultivated as a normal part of childhood for all children,
regardless of socioeconomic status or ability.
Participation
As I use it here, the theme of Participation encompasses production, access,
and citizenship. Access is an essential part of the theme of participation. Despite the
increase in youth media production, important questions regarding access remain. In
addition to technical constraints on access, media production takes a great deal of

17
time, a premium commodity for kids who have only public access to technology
through schools, libraries, or community centers, and specialized skills. Ellen Seiter
writes,
On first glance, it appears that the Internet is everywhere in children’s
lives…On closer look, however, it becomes clear that the children of elites
and urban professionals experience new technologies in a qualitatively
different way from poor children. Far from being a leveler of class
differences by opening access to information, adoption and dispersal of the
internet has deepened social divisions along the lines of class, race, and
ethnicity…
27

Access issues are a core area of investigation in this dissertation. Chapter five in
particular aims to unpack claims of a narrowing digital divide and a growing
participation gap, the development of skills and dispositions to utilize new
communications technologies to participate in networked society. In addition to
questions of access, this dissertation focuses on the role of institutions such as
family, schools, and media in structuring the type and scope of young people’s media
productions.
The theme of participation also addresses citizenship. A central claim of this
project is that media education is a key pedagogical tool for reinforcing ideas about
citizenship. Traditionally, media literacy interventions have focused on political
citizenship, encouraging rational, critical assessment of media messages. Civic
engagement in the political sense remains a topic of interest in the fields of media
literacy and digital learning; however, more recent turns in media education have
started to consider the value of cultural or consumer citizenship, which emphasizes
participation through shared cultural (and/or commercial) experiences.
28

18

Methods and Sites
This project has been researched using qualitative, ethnographic methods,
including participant observation and semi-structured interviews. Clifford Geertz
describes the focus of ethnography as the observation and analysis of culture through
“thick description.”
29
Thick description seeks to uncover “a stratified hierarchy of
meaningful structures in terms of which [signs] …are produced, perceived, and
interpreted, and without which they would not…in fact exist.
30
Thick description
involves more extensive observation that allows the researcher to dig deeper into the
underlying structures of the sign, with the hopes of revealing why the sign is
meaningful, rather than just what the sign is. In this dissertation, I have focused my
thick description on media production done by nine students and two teachers in two
classrooms. However, my description extends beyond the walls of the classroom in
various parts of the chapters that follow to include the context of the home through
observations and interviews with the students’ parents.
In addition to observing and interviewing, I have also used textual analysis
techniques to examine the students’ media productions. Understanding kids’ media
productions as complex and meaningful texts is essential to the arguments made in
this dissertation and is related to larger arguments about the contemporary nature of
participation and the value of children’s culture.
The use of observation, interview, and textual analysis in conjunction
provides description of the production practices and the context of production, as
well as critical analysis of the described practices and policies affecting kids’

19
participation in media production. I have analyzed interview transcripts, field notes
from participant observation on and offline, and various media projects and artifacts.
Fetterman points to the importance of breadth in conducting ethnographic research.
It is not enough to look at a particular action in isolation. One must take into account
the context in which that action is performed. Fetterman writes, “[A]n ethnography
attempts to be holistic—covering as much territory as possible about a culture,
subculture, or program—but it necessarily falls far short of the whole.”
31
In my data
collection and analysis, I have attempted to take on this suggested holistic approach.
This dissertation intervenes in current discourse about the role of media and
technology in the lives of American youth, provides rich description and analysis of
various types of media production undertaken by young people, and speaks to issues
of access to media and technology. The research fills a gap in empirical research on
children’s digital media production noted by David Buckingham in his recent
literature review of media literacy prepared for Ofcom.
32
Further, it contributes to
research on media and technology use in special education, which has, to date
focused on assistive technologies rather than everyday technology use or media
production. Further, as a multi-sited ethnography that included classroom
observation as well as home visits, this research contributes to understanding how
media literacy is embedded in everyday media practices.

Cameron Middle School
I conducted participant observation between August 2005-June 2006 at
Cameron Middle School. Cameron Middle School (CMS) is located in the Los

20
Angeles area of southern California. The school is situated a few blocks away from a
major street full of strip malls and fast food chains and a few blocks north of a large
public recreation area. The school is designated as a Title I school, which indicates
that most of the students it serves come from low-income families. In order to
accommodate the large student body of more than two thousand students, the school
is divided into small learning communities (SLCs). The teachers who with whom I
worked were faculty members of the Communication and Technology House, a SLC
with a focus on supporting student achievement through the use of technology.
Through extended participant observation, I have been able to understand the
context in which the students with whom I worked developed literacy and production
skills in a way that would be impossible with short-term exposure or different
methods. My extended participation in the school community, as well as my
relationships with the students and teachers in the classrooms in which I observed,
have yielded rich information about the political, cultural, and social aspects of
teaching media literacy—what Buckingham and Sefton-Green describe as the
“messiness” of the classroom setting.
33
The description and analysis yielded by this
data allows me to present a more complex picture of teaching and learning through
media education at this particular historical moment to complicate the binary of
technological determinism and cultural populism that exists in much of the existing
media literacy literature.

21
Home visits
In May and June of 2006, I conducted semi-structured interviews with eight
students and ten parents (seven mothers and three fathers) recruited from Ms. Abel
and Mr. Davidson’s classes. The interviews were intended to gather in-depth
information about the students’ media use at home within the context of the family.
I partnered with a fellow researcher on the Digital Youth Project, Lisa
Tripp,
34
to conduct the home interviews. As Lisa is fluent in Spanish, she conducted
most of the parent interviews. Only three of the ten parents who participated were
interviewed in English, and in those cases, we conducted the interview together. In
most cases, we interviewed the parent(s) and students separately, unless the parent
wished to participate (or observe) their child’s interview. We followed a semi-
structured interview format developed for use in the digital youth project and
compensated students and parents forty dollars each for their interviews. Most
interview meetings lasted three to four hours, during which we talked with the
student, their parent(s), and any other family members who wanted to participate. In
most cases, we also were given a tour of the students’ home, which focused on the
types and placement of various media and technology. Several of the families
allowed us to take photographs to document the visit and to better capture the
arrangement of media and technology within the home.
After going through the informed consent process with the student and the
parent(s), we generally began with the student’s interview. While Lisa conducted the
parent interviews, I had the opportunity to hang out with the student (and sometimes

22
with siblings and other family members.) During this informal observation time, I
played video games, read books, watched television and movies, and talked about
school and the media the student used, liked, and/or wanted.

Professional Development and the Digital Youth Project
The research described in this dissertation was conducted in conjunction with
two larger projects. The first was a professional development program for middle
school teachers that aimed to bridge media arts education and subject matter content
through media production. The professional development program was a team effort
designed by university media educators and administrators from the Arts Education
Branch at the school district. Teachers attended a week-long professional
development retreat at the university during the summer of 2005 and participated in
follow-up workshops throughout the school year. The research component of the
professional development program served three purposes: first, as a participant
observer, I was able to provide ongoing support for the teachers and students as they
designed and implemented media projects; second, in conjunction with a team of
external evaluators, I conducted program evaluation tasks intended to provide
formative and summative feedback on the effectiveness of the professional
development program; finally, the research was intended for analysis and publication
in academic venues in order to provide empirical evidence related to various claims
about media production and media literacy.
This research was also conducted as a part of the Digital Youth Project, a
three-year ethnographic study of kids’ use of digital media sponsored by the

23
MacArthur Foundation. The Digital Youth Project primarily supported the home
interviews through the use of a shared interview protocol. It also provided
compensation for the interviewees. Although the focus of the Digital Youth Project
was on informal learning, which generally is defined as happening outside of formal
educational contexts such as schools, we have found that classroom-based
observations provide a number of salient examples of the informal learning that goes
on “behind the scenes” within a formal learning environment. The data from this
study has been shared within the Digital Youth Project for cross-project analysis that
appears in the project report (Ito et al., forthcoming). As such, some examples appear
in both this dissertation and the Digital Youth Report.

Chapter descriptions
Chapter two, Media Literacy, Production, and Critical Consumption,
addresses the theme of consumption. This chapter explores the tensions between the
construction of children as consumers and media audiences and the understanding of
schools as spaces separate from consumption and responsible for cultivating literacy
and traditional forms of citizenship. Implicit in these tensions are assumptions about
popular culture and issues of taste and class. I focus on one media production project
in this chapter, a video documentary on obesity and junk food bans in schools
produced by students in Ms. Abel’s science/health classes. This media arts-based
project aimed to facilitate students’ critical thinking about nutrition and junk food in
schools. The project was successful in providing an alternative form of expression
for students who would not have been able to complete the assignment in the form of

24
a written essay. However, the project was not without its challenges. Different values
related to popular culture and junk food as well as different approaches to web
research challenged the assignment’s success as a media literacy project and call
attention to the need for media literacy to accommodate new forms of participation
and citizenship.
Chapter three, Consumer citizens, Producer citizens, examines the concept of
new media literacies as an extension of sociocultural theories of literacy and media
literacy to accommodate new forms of expression in participatory culture. This
chapter begins with the story of a web design project undertaken by Mr. Davidson’s
language arts classes. The topic of the website, the American dream, aimed to
address traditional elements of citizenship, while the format of the production, a
website, gave students an opportunity to participate (peripherally) in online,
networked culture. The blending of these two types of subjectivity is quite different
from the way kids participate online in their everyday lives. In contrast to the
construction of students as future citizens-in-training that was embraced by this
project, new media and online environments, like many other commercial entities,
address kids as consumer citizens who are empowered to participate through their
consumption activities. The latter half of this chapter investigates the concept of new
media literacies, highlighting the connection between the skills and subjectivities
they emphasize and the concept of consumer citizenship.
Chapter four, Media Production and Identity, investigates the role of media
production in the formation of identity. Production has been posited by youth media

25
advocates and organizations as a space where kids can explore, express, and perform
identity. This chapter begins with an examination of various sociocultural theories of
identity formation. I then turn to two poetry-based media production projects
completed by students in Mr. Davidson’s classes to uncover some of the processes
involved in identity formation and expression through media production.
Chapter five, From Digital Divide to Participation Gap, draws extensively
from the home visits and interviews with students and parents to investigate the
access issues they face in relation to the digital divide and the participation gap. This
chapter questions claims that declare the digital divide “closed,” and examines
participation and production by kids without computer and internet access at home,
looking specifically at the ways in which they “make do” with the technology and
media to which they do have access to maintain (and sometimes feign) participation.
Further, this chapter extends the concept of the participation gap to include
participation in offline, micropolitical contexts such as schools.
Chapter six revisits the issue of constructing children within a binary of savvy
users or victims of media and technology before turning attention from learning to
teaching, considering the pedagogical techniques that were used in the classrooms in
which I observed and the value of teaching media production in the service of
developing critical media literacy.

26
Chapter 1 Endnotes

1
David Buckingham, After the Death of Childhood : Growing up in the Age of
Electronic Media (Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2000).
2
All location names are pseudonyms unless otherwise noted.
3
All participant names are pseudonyms unless otherwise noted.
4
Ellen Seiter, The Internet Playground : Children's Access, Entertainment, and Mis-
Education, Popular Culture & Everyday Life ; (New York: Peter Lang, 2005),
Jennifer Light, "Rethinking the Digital Divide," Harvard Educational Review 71, no.
4 (2001).
5
Smaller learning communities (SLC) are a way of organizing large schools into
smaller groups. Often called academies, houses, or magnets, SLC generally have a
specific focus that drives the program (such as a focus on communication and
technology). For more information on SLC, see http://slcprogram.ed.gov
6
See http://www.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/index.html for full text of the NCLB
Act.
7
Michael A. Rebell and Jessica R. Wolff, Moving Every Child Ahead : From NCLB
Hype to Meaningful Educational Opportunity (New York: Teachers College Press,
2008).
8
http://www.ed.gov/nclb/overview/intro/4pillars.html
9
For additional information on IDEA and full text of the law, see: http://idea.ed.gov/
10
Rebell and Wolff, Moving Every Child Ahead : From NCLB Hype to Meaningful
Educational Opportunity, 126.
11
Ibid.
12
Buckingham, After the Death of Childhood : Growing up in the Age of Electronic
Media.
13
Ibid.
14
Full text of the NCLB Act is available at:
http://www.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/index.html
15
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature,
European Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

27

16
Ibid., 30.
17
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment:
Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
18
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), Stuart Hall, "The Problem of
Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees " in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in
Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and K-H Chen (New York: Routledge,
1986/2003), Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge,
1981).
19
Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, 23.
20
Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of
Children (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
21
James U. McNeal, Kids as Customers : A Handbook of Marketing to Children
(New York: Lexington Books 1992).
22
Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers : Television Fans & Participatory Culture,
Studies in Culture and Communication (New York: Routledge, 1992).
23
James Paul Gee, Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional
Schooling (New York: Routledge, 2004), 15.
24
Ibid., 19.
25
Sonia Livingstone, "Media Literacy and the Challenge of New Information and
Communication Technologies," The Communication Review 7 (2004): 4-5.
26
Ibid.: 5.
27
Seiter, The Internet Playground : Children's Access, Entertainment, and Mis-
Education, 13-14.
28
Sarah Banet-Weiser, Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2007), Henry Jenkins et al., "Confronting the Challenges
of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century," (The John D. and
Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, 2006).
29
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 6.
30
Ibid., 7.

28

31
David M. Fetterman, Ethnography: Step by Step (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage,
1998), 11.
32
David Buckingham, "The Media Literacy of Children and Young People: A
Review of the Research Literature on Behalf of Ofcom," (Ofcom, 2005).
33
David Buckingham and Julian Sefton-Green, Cultural Studies Goes to School :
Reading and Teaching Popular Media, Critical Perspectives on Literacy and
Education (London ; Bristol, PA: Taylor & Francis, 1994).
34
Not a pseudonym.

29
Chapter 2: Media Literacy, Production, and Critical Consumption

In each of the interviews with students from CMS, we asked about money.
We usually began by asking the student if he or she received an allowance. Those
who did, we asked what s/he spent it on. The answer was usually the same: “junk
food.” The following excerpt comes from my interview with Justin, a twelve-year-
old African-American sixth grader, and his mother, Christina:
Becky: And so how do you spend your allowance?
Christina: Yes, Justin [how do you spend your allowance?]
Justin: Oh I go buy chips.
Christina: Speak up!
Justin: I go buy junk food.
Christina: Yep. Junk food.
Becky: Let me guess, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos?
Justin: Yeah.
Christina: How’d you know?
Becky: All of the kids [in Justin's class] are obsessed.
Christina: Really? Oh my Gosh, I thought it was just him.

It was the truth that the kids in Justin’s class (and, in fact, most of the students at
CMS) were “obsessed” with Hot Cheetos. As Justin put it later in his interview,
"Those Cheetos are famous! Everybody likes ‘em." Justin was absolutely correct;
during the time of my fieldwork, Hot Cheetos were not only the snack food of choice
at CMS, but also became a larger “kid food” phenomenon (possibly even rivaling the
popularity of the tater tot). In May of 2006, National Public Radio reported on the
popularity of the snack food, enthusiasm for which was particularly high in
California and Texas schools. Calling Hot Cheetos a new “red menace sweeping the
nation” in its introduction, the package featured interviews with a Southern

30
California elementary school principal and several students from her school, as well
as commentary from a food psychology expert and an executive from Frito Lay, the
company that makes and distributes Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.
1

The NPR package focused on tension over junk food in schools that had, at
the time, escalted due to the wild popularity of Hot Cheetos. In her interview, the
Principal focused on the nutritional value (or lack thereof) of the food; and other
school officials called the snack a “janitorial nightmare” because of the red cheese
dust often left on kids’ hands (and clothes) after eating Hot Cheetos, the kids raved
about the taste—although they did warn the reporter of the repercussions of
overindulgence. “Your booty will be burnin’,” one of the kids stated.
2
Hot Cheetos
were not sold at CMS, but they were also not banned on campus, as they had been at
other schools. Students often brought bags with them to supplement the lunch
choices offered by the cafeteria, and after school, it was common to see groups of
kids gathered at nearby convenience stores, sharing bags of the snacks with friends.
Hot Cheetos are not the first food to become a phenomenon of childhood
diets. Indeed, food has long been a distinguishing element of children’s culture. In
her investigation of children’s penny candy in Britain, Allison James describes
‘kets’, cheap candies that are favorites of children, but disliked by adults. She writes
that the division between ‘kets’ and sweets preferred by adults (such as chocolate),
as well as conflicts over appropriate times and places for eating such treats, is
symptomatic of a larger struggle over power and identity that is an important part of
defining childhood and adulthood. She writes:

31
‘Kets’, therefore, are the antithesis of the adult conception of ‘real’ food
while, for adults, sweets are metonymic meals. ‘Kets’ involve a rejection of
the series of rituals and symbols surrounding the concept of the meal and are
regarded as rubbish by adults. Because they are despised by the adult world,
they are prized y the child’s and become the metaphoric meals of childhood.
Although children will consume sweets of any kind, it is ‘kets’ which the
child will most often buy. Adults never buy them. The child’s private funds,
which are not controlled by adults, are appropriately spent on those sweets
symbolic of his world. ‘Kets’ deemed by the adult world to be rubbish are
under the child’s control.
3

‘Kets’ are distinguished from adult sweets in several ways. The candies are often
named after nonfood items or have nonsensical, silly names; they are often brightly
colored and oddly shaped; they are also consumed differently from ‘real’ food, as
they often have unique tastes, textures, or characteristics (such as making the mouth
tingle, making noise, or requiring that the child remove the candy from his/her mouth
repeatedly to see it change.) In the contemporary US food market, similar “kid
foods” abound, ranging from Fruit Roll Ups with temporary tongue tattoos to Pop
Tarts printed with images of Barbie, Hot Wheels, and Indiana Jones.
Food is just one of many commodities that distinguish children as a consumer
group with particular needs, wants, and tastes; often those tastes are at odds with
those of adults, who feel responsible for children’s well being (including the
cultivation of “proper” tastes). Both of these elements are evident in food
advertisements directed at children. Ellen Seiter has written about children’s
commercials as presenting a utopian image of the world—if the child can acquire the
product being advertised, she can break out of whatever boring or oppressive
conditions she finds herself in. Within the utopian world of commercials, food
products (cereal and candy in particular) are advertised as not only delicious, but also

32
fun and liberating.
4
Such advertisements have been of great concern to children’s
media activists since the 1960s, when Action for Children’s Television began
fighting cereal manufacturers to be responsible in their advertising to children.
5

Many of the students' favorite foods came under scrutiny during my
fieldwork because of California's “junk food ban.” In August, 2005 California
became the first state to ban the sale of high-fat, high-sugar “junk foods” on public
school campuses through the passage of the Senate Bill 12. Shortly thereafter, Senate
Bill 965 expanded existing regulations regarding beverage sales on school campuses
to include high schools as well as middle and elementary schools. Together, the
passage of these two bills limits the snack foods sold on campuses to a list of
approved items, and restricts beverage sales at all K-12 schools to fruit and
vegetable-based drinks that are at least 50% fruit or vegetable juice and contain no
added sweeteners, water, milk, and sports drinks. This action follows years of state
and nation-wide lobbying for a change in standards regarding the foods sold in
schools. Following California’s adoption of new standards for food sales in schools,
many schools and districts across the country reassessed and amended their own
food vending policies. Banning junk food in schools across the country can be
understood as a reaction to the moral panic over childhood obesity. It is also a
reaction to the larger issue of school commercialization—the advertisement and sale
of commercial products in public schools. Thus, removing junk food from schools is
done not only in the service of public health, but also in order to protect innocent
children from the corrupting forces of commercialization. Upon passage of SB 12,

33
Senator Martha M. Escutia, author of both SB 12 and SB 965 was quoted as saying:
“after five years of hard work to rid California schools of junk food, finally our
children will be protected.”
6

The politics of food in childhood and in school became the topic of the CMS
students' first multimedia assignment for Ms. Abel's health class. This assignment
tasked students with producing a documentary on childhood obesity and the recent
legislation passed in California to ban “junk food” from schools. In essence, the
project required students to write a persuasive essay about obesity and the sale of
junk food on campus. Rather than creating a written essay, however, students would
use iMovie to put together images, text, and video to argue their points. Despite
using a different medium, the assignment was structured very much like a written
essay and was intended to teach skills that students could later apply to written work.
The guidelines distributed by the teacher at the start of the project broke the essay
into six parts:
1. introduction;
2. definition of obesity;
3. effects of obesity;
4. the Los Angeles School District (LAUSD) junk food ban;
5. pros and cons of junk food sales on campus; and
6. conclusion.

Students were instructed to represent both sides of the debate over junk food in
schools before expressing their own opinions on the issue. In order to research and
write the text of the “script” for the iMovies, students were given a series of prompts
or questions to which they were asked to respond. Students used their health

34
textbooks, online resources and library resources to research the issues. The students’
answers then formed outline and script of the documentary.
The Junk food documentaries were designed to scaffold the development of a
particular type of media literacy as well as to encourage (literally) particular tastes.
However, gaining the critical distance needed to analyze a coveted object of popular
culture (junk food) proved difficult for many of the students. In addition, students
struggled with research, learning to use the computer and the media they found in a
way quite different from their previous experiences with media and technology. Part
of the challenge appeared to come from the students’ individual difficulties in
reading and writing, however, the context of production and the underlying
relationships between schools, media, and consumption were also important
influences on the project.
In the subsequent sections of this chapter, I first address some of the general
assumptions about kids as consumers of commodities and of media. Next, I turn to a
discussion of popular culture and issues of taste and class in relation to consumption
in and out of school. Finally, I return to the Junk Food Documentary project as an
example of how media literacy is used to guide the students’ consumption practices.

Children as consumers and audiences
I understand kids’ consumption activities as two different but related
practices. The first is the purchase, acquisition, and accumulation of products—
physical things like Hot Cheetos, toys, clothing, and technology hardware. The

35
second is watching, listening to, and using media as an active audience. Here I use a
broad definition of media that encompasses print, music, radio, television, films,
online and interactive media, and games, as well as the licensed characters and
branded images associated with kids’ media franchises. These two types of
consumption are, of course, closely related, as children’s media culture has long been
a complex network of texts and products—for example, licensed characters that
appear as toys, on kids’ (and adults’) apparel and in multiple media texts (such as
books based on a television series.)
7

Just as in the lives of adults, kids’ consumption practices at this historical
moment are highly influenced by the products and policies of multinational
corporations. Of particular visibility is the influence of media conglomerates, which
have a hand in nearly every aspect of children’s culture, from media itself to material
products to discourses of citizenship. Indeed, when we talk about the
“commercialization” or “corporatization” of childhood, we are primarily talking
about the influence of media on childhood. In this chapter, I look specifically at the
construction of children as consumers and audiences, and at the outcomes of such
construction.
Children have not always been understood as consumers. However, Lisa
Jacobson notes that the practice of advertising to children as a way of shaping future
consumption habits began as early as the 1890s.
8
She traces this practice to the
greater availability of mass produced consumer goods, including children’s toys and
clothing, writing:

36
Before 1890, few American children owned enough toys to stock a tiny toy
chest and most of those would have been homemade. Even well-to-do
families considered manufactured toys a luxury. A few department stores sold
toys, but they regarded children’s playthings as a seasonal business and
mounted toy displays only during the Christmas holidays. By the 1910s,
however, department stores were dedicating entire floors to toys and year-
round toy departments had become customary.
9

As Jyotsna Kapur describes, “Since post-World War II in the United States,
there has been an active effort on the part of industry to transform the twentieth-
century notion of children as innocents in need of protection to one of children as
sovereign, playful, thinking consumers.”
10
Kapur’s analysis points to the ideological
and discursive aspect of children’s construction as a commercial market. The market
was created not just by making products available to children, but also by shaping
discourse about childhood to include consumption as a positive activity.
Children have been understood as a particular type of audience from the early
days of mass media. From the 1920 and 1930s, film and radio addressed children as
a special and valuable audience. For example, the Saturday matinee was established
to draw in a young audience for short films and newsreels. As it became evident that
children were a lucrative audience for films, studios began to produce feature length
family films, beginning with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, released by Disney
in 1937.
11
The single-sponsor advertising model of radio also recognized children as
an important audience, often addressing children directly and instructing them to
encourage their mothers’ purchase of a particular product. This sponsorship model
carried over to early television programming, which from the outset addressed
children as a specific and powerful audience, not only through advertising, but also

37
through programming designed specifically for them. Early children’s television had
a distinct pedagogical philosophy that has carried over into much contemporary
programming. The idea that children’s television should not only be safe but
instructive continues to have currency in our contemporary media climate.
As media has expanded in reach and scope, the construction of kids as
audiences and consumers has become more complex and pervasive. Advertising in
particular has long been scrutinized for its “effects” on young people’s consumption
habits and for its address of kids not as innocent and naïve, but empowered through
their abilities to make choices related to consumption.
Indeed, children’s consumption challenges established notions of childhood
innocence and the related constructions of adults, parents, and family. As Paul
Ringel describes:
These institutional responses [throughout the 20th century] to children’s
consumption [efforts to curtail spending, to block access to certain goods, or
to redirect consumption], however, have yielded at best mixed results. In fact,
two of the most significant developments in the history of American
childhood in the twentieth century have been the expanding access of young
people to the consumer marketplace and the continuing efforts of marketers,
advertisers, and manufacturers to subdivide the nation’s children into
increasingly narrow age groups to sell even more products. Consumer culture
has not only changed the experience of being a child in the United States, it
has also redefined what many Americans perceive to be the natural
progression of the maturation process.
12

This change in maturation process has been discussed as a “hurrying” of childhood.
13

Rather than an extended period of development within the shelter of the nuclear
family, away from the influence of the market and the dangers of the adult worlds,
children are born into a brand conscious society and are, from a very early age,

38
interacting with consumer culture.
14
Clearly, the child consumer is a challenge to
traditional conceptions of childhood innocence, the construction and power
hierarchies of family and institutions like school and church, as well as the way
children are understood as future citizens. Such challenges are particularly difficult
for adults to bear because of the role childhood plays in defining adulthood. Without
a clearly defined notion of childhood, and without an understanding of childhood as
a stage subordinate to adulthood in terms of power, rights, and access to knowledge,
adulthood does not make sense. When children are understood as distinct from adults
and as lacking the skills necessary to act on their own behalf, it makes sense for
adults to be concerned with providing care and guidance, part of which is achieved
through the control of information. As Lynn Spigel writes, “childhood—as a moment
of purity and innocence—exists only so long as the young are protected from certain
types of knowledge.”
15
This protection is precisely what is removed by kids’
participation in consumer and media culture.
Hurried, media saturated, commercialized childhoods are indicted as a
contributing factor to a variety of problems, from increased incidences of depression
and anxiety in children and teens to school failure, declining moral standards in
relation to sexual activity and drug use, to an epidemic of childhood obesity.
16
In all
these cases, it is clear that there is a concern about consumption outside the realm of
media. However, media consumption is frequently positioned as a cause of such
problems, or at least as a contributing factor.

39
For example, in his recent book The Dumbest Generation, Mark Bauerlein
distinguishes repeatedly between what he sees as the completely consumer-driven
world of youth and the “authentic” world of adults. He writes:
The clothes, merchandise, and e-aptitudes officiate in the social world of
teens and young adults, whose currency is pop styles and techno-skills.
Outside that heated habitat, however, in the workplace, grad school, and
politics, what glorifies youth among their peers, is, at best, a distraction and,
at worst, a disqualification.
17

According to Bauerlein, not only do young people waste their youth on meaningless
consumption and socialization with friends, they also jeopardize their futures through
consumption.
Dan Klindon situates the danger of consumption within the family as a whole,
focusing on what he calls “luxury fever,” a condition that comes from the
distribution of wealth in the United States and the fact that more people than ever
before (although still a small number of the general population) have more money
(or the illusion of having more money) than ever before. Klindon writes, “When so
many people can afford all the expensive symbols of the lush life—fast cars, exotic
vacations, and personal indulgences once available only to royalty—it raises the bar
for everyone….Keeping up with the Joneses has taken on a new meaning.”
18

Despite concerns about what, where, and how much they’re consuming,
children have excelled in meeting the demands of their roles as consumers. In the
role of consumer/purchaser, it is estimated that children aged four to twelve made
$30 billion in purchases in 2002.
19
As a media audience, recent research conducted
by the Kaiser Family Foundation
20
has estimated that children between the ages of

40
eight and eighteen spend an average of four and one quarter hours using “screen
media” (which they define as television, videos, and movies), and an average of one
hour using “interactive media” for recreational purposes (computers or video games).
This tally of "screen time" is, of course, a blunt instrument that does not account for
context or characteristics of such engagement with media. Interestingly, there is no
caveat specifying that respondents were asked to report only recreational use of
television and movies—there appears to be an assumption that these types of media
can never be used for school or work.
As both a powerful consumer market and a substantial and engaged audience,
children are extremely valuable to producers, marketers, and advertisers. Their value,
however, extends beyond their current buying power. Children’s marketing expert
James McNeal has characterized children as a three-in-one market.
21
Children are an
influence market, influencing family purchases, a direct market, making purchases
with their own money, and a future market, with potential for long term brand
loyalty. It is children’s valuable status as a market that prompts much of the efforts
around branding, as marketers feel pressure from market saturation and feel the need
to cultivate brand loyalty as early as possible.
Media corporations are major players in the branding of children's culture,
particularly due to the vertical integration of media conglomerates like Viacom,
which has media channels and properties for consumers of all age demographics.
The "cradle to grave" marketing strategy ensures that effort spent cultivating brand
loyalty will not be wasted when an audience member "grows out of" a particular

41
genre or channel. For example, Viacom may gain a viewer at age two with Nick
Junior programming. The viewer can enjoy Nick Junior until about age five, when
Nickelodeon and Noggin provide age appropriate programming, some years later,
the viewer can move on to MTV, BET, VH1, Comedy Central or one of Viacom's
many other holdings for programming appealing to tweens, teens, and adults. Further
branding is accomplished through licensed characters, which appear on consumer
goods from food to toys to bedding. Characters can also move across media with tie-
in media such as books, films, specials, spin off shows, CDs, and video games.
Within this context of children’s media and brand culture, particularly within
the last two decades, the expansion of media and technology and the globalization of
children’s culture has amplified the relationship between kid culture and
consumption. As Sonia Livingstone and Kirsten Drotner note in their introduction to
The International Handbook of Children, Media, and Culture, media and technology
have continued influence on the lives of children worldwide:
It seems undeniable that the global reach of many recent media technologies,
such as satellite television, the internet and mobile devices, has been
instrumental in recontextualising children’s media practices, not merely for
the prolific young blogger or texting enthusiast, but equally for children for
whom these activities are beyond practical reach…More profoundly, it also
seems that few are unaffected by the shifting priorities in education, identity,
politics and commercial marketing strategies that the changing media and
information environment ushers in for today’s youth.
22

Livingstone and Drotner make two interesting points about the impact of media and
technology in this excerpt. First, they highlight the ways in which ubiquitious media
shape the experiences of even those children who do not participate in certain elite
media production activities (such as blogging and texting). Secondly, Livingstone

42
and Drotner call attention to various other structures and institutions that shape kids’
lives—in particular education, identity, and marketing. Current discourse about kids,
media, and technology tends to overlook the everyday impact of media use, instead
positioning kids within a binary of victims of technology or savvy users. This binary
makes it seem like kids are either using high-end technology at every turn, or are
threatened by the presence of media in their lives. In addition, the construction of
kids as victims or technical wizards tends to look at media and technology use in a
vacuum, ignoring the influences of essential structures such as family, school, and
the media and technology industries themselves on kids’ consumption and use of
media. As David Buckingham has written, this is a false binary that is quite
problematic in thinking about kids and technology. Kids’ relationships with media
are much more complex and dynamic than either of these categories expresses.
23

Popular culture and issues of taste and class
Concerns about kids’ participation as consumers can be understood in
relation to assumptions about popular culture more generally. Popular culture
occupies a denigrated position in our cultural hierarchy, and prior to the work of the
British cultural studies movement in the mid 20th century, the products of popular
culture were, by and large, dismissed as having no aesthetic or symbolic meaning.
The location of culture as part of everyday experience, rather than in products of the
elite class was a major factor in the founding of British cultural studies. Raymond
Williams is generally credited with redefining culture as the lived experiences of

43
ordinary people. His essay “Culture is Ordinary” offers a critique of the idea of
culture as “the best” of a civilization. Williams writes:
Culture is ordinary…Every human society has its own shape, its own
purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these in
institutions and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the finding of
common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and
amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing
themselves into the land.
24

According to Williams, even non-elite cultural products and practices have meaning
and should be considered in relations of power. This is a radical change from
traditional conceptions of culture, as well as a critique of literary theorists such as
F.R. Leavis and Dwight McDonald, who associated mass culture with chaos and
sought to educate people on ways to resist the lure of mass culture.
25

Disdain similar to that expressed about mass culture by Leavis and
McDonald, as well as by Horkheimer and Adorno
26
is regularly voiced about popular
culture—for example, the criticism that its content is insipid and tactless, that it
encourages or at least reinforces a loss of social graces, that it is a waste of time, etc.
In particular, popular culture that is associated with people of a low social status—
women, children, minorities, and poor people—is regularly criticized for its lack of
intellectual, moral, or cultural value and categorized as low culture. This criticism is
not only top-down; that is, criticism of low culture is likely to come from people who
are not a part of the social elite. As Jason Mittell
27
and Ien Ang
28
found in their
investigations of various television programs/genres that fell into the low culture
category (Dallas and daytime talk shows), concern about low culture is socially
pervasive. Even regular viewers of such programming express concern and disdain

44
about low culture. What is interesting is that these concerns are often expressed
simultaneously with statements about the pleasures a particular program or genre
provides.
Bourdieu’s Distinction provides two important ideas for the study of popular
culture.
29
The first is the connection illustrated between cultural tastes and class.
According to Bourdieu, taste is “a class culture turned into nature.”
30
Taste is defined
by educational, cultural, and financial capital, and is divided into three zones:
legitimate, middle brow, and popular, each of which is correlated to a social class.
However, taste is ideological and arbitrary. That is, the differences in cultural value
associated with “high” or “low” culture have nothing to do with the inherent qualities
of the object or practice; the value is constructed for the purpose of maintaining the
divisions between social classes. For example, some children’s toys are considered
low culture because they are (sometimes) inexpensive, made of plastic, and painted
bright and gaudy colors. However, this designation is purely ideological. There is
nothing essential about the toy that makes it low culture—the cultural capital
assigned to the object is socially constructed. (Evidence of this is the disconnect
between the lack of cultural capital parents associate with such “low culture” toys
and the high cultural capital kids associate with these prized possessions.) The
purpose of defining kids’ toys as low culture, then, is to designate them as an inferior
social group. In addition, the association of particular toys with low culture (an $8
Barbie) and other toys with high(er) culture ($100 wooden blocks from Germany)
positions them as markers of class—and parents’ good or bad taste.
31

45
A second, closely related idea of importance is that of the habitus. Habitus is
the enactment of the connection between taste and class. Bourdieu describes the
habitus as a “structured and structuring structure” that leads to “a system of classified
and classifying practices, i.e., distinctive signs (‘tastes’).”
32
Habitus is not a synonym
for social class, but instead is the enactment of practices associated with a particular
social class. Habitus is an invisible force that shapes one’s tastes based on what one’s
social position affords. In this way, it functions much like a subject position in
determining one’s framework for understanding the world and limiting the
possibilities for participation in discourse. Bourdieu describes the function of the
habitus in defining social class as follows:
Necessity imposes a taste for necessity which implies a form of adaptation to
and consequently acceptance of the necessary, a resignation to the
inevitable…Social class is not defined solely by a position in the means of
production, but by the class habitus which is ‘normally’ (i.e. with a high
statistical probability) associated with that position.
33

Taste and class, or what can also be called “objectified” capital, are only part of
Bourdieu’s conceptualization of cultural capital. In addition to objectified capital,
Bourdieu identifies two additional forms of capital—embodied and institutionalized.
Embodied capital refers to the consumption of particular cultural goods associated
with elite culture. He notes that high culture associations of these goods are dynamic,
not intrinsic to the goods themselves. However, as is evident in children’s culture as
well as in visual art and literature, a canon of works emerges over time as the
products that possess the most cultural capital. Through the three-pronged structure
of cultural capital put forth by Bourdieu, we can see that this feature, while

46
ultimately arbitrary, comes to be through complex negotiations and struggles for
power among individuals and institutions.
Institutionalized capital refers to educational credentials. Bourdieu describes
educational capital as “the guaranteed product of the combined effects of cultural
transmission by the family and cultural transmission by the school.”
34
In our current
historical moment, the “combined effects” of which Bourdieu writes could be
understood as parents’ abilities to use knowledge of the school system and to tap
their social networks to enroll their children in schools that they deem to be “the
best,” and children’s willingness and ability to “play the game” (exhibit desired
behaviors, appearances, and skills at school) in a way that will engender their success
at school.
35
The determination of what constitutes “the best” schools and
“appropriate” actions for students arises from a variety of arbitrary, but socially
agreed upon categories of assessment such as test scores, student-teacher ratios,
adherence to particular educational philosophies, the makeup of the student body,
etc.
Because educational capital is a necessary element in the accrual of cultural
capital, and because institutionalized, objectified, and embodied cultural capital work
in concert, it is important for educational institutions to protect legitimated or high
culture (and its status as a purveyor of culture) by imbuing students with an
appreciation for legitimate tastes. Two ways in which schools have accomplished
this task are through canonization of texts determined to be culturally valuable and
the exclusion of popular culture texts. The marginalization of children’s out of

47
school experiences and cultural knowledge is not a new practice in schools. In his
1915 lecture “Waste in Education,” John Dewey pointed out the faults of separating
school from children’s everyday experiences:
From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from his
inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school in any complete
and free way within the school itself; while, on the other hand, he is unable to
apply in daily life what he is learning at school. That is the isolation of the
school--its isolation from life. When the child gets into the schoolroom he has
to put out of his mind a large part of the ideas, interests, and activities that
predominate in his home and neighborhood. So, the school, being unable to
utilize this everyday experience, sets painfully to work, on another tack and
by a variety of means, to arouse in the child an interest in school studies.
36

Similar attention to the disconnect between children’s home and school
environments has been paid by educators and scholars committed to multicultural,
bi-lingual, and special education.
37

These tensions between popular culture and schools lead to an interesting and
contradictory understanding of consumption in relationship to schooling. On one
hand, school is all about consumption—of rules, of materials such as textbooks,
lesson plans, and exams, and of a canon of information/knowledge that has been
vetted and legitimated within a particular hierarchy of taste and class. At the same
time, school frequently is positioned in opposition to consumption through its
exclusion of popular culture and its focus on cultural capital.
38

Schools, popular culture, and discipline
In addition to the tensions between popular culture and schools based on
cultural capital, the role of schools in forming children into future citizens has played

48
an important part in the separation of schools and popular, commercial culture. The
purpose of public education in the United States historically has been understood as
the cultivation of citizens for participation in democratic society. Public schools, a
product of early 19
th
century concerns about the impact of industrialization,
immigration, and class stratification on community and national identity, aimed to
achieve this goal through standardized (or “common”) instruction for all children as
well as the provision of necessary social services to the community.
39
The type of
citizens schools aim to create are citizens in a traditional and political sense, a
definition which Sarah Banet-Weiser has described as “revolv[ing] around the
conventional notion that citizenship is a political category, represented and
constituted not within the world of commerce but rather in direct opposition to those
kinds of material interests”
40
such as those that are represented in popular culture.
Schools, of course, are assisted in the work of shaping students into future
citizens by a variety of other institutions, including civic organizations. For example,
Leslie Hahner describes the “Americanization project”
41
taken up by the Girl Scouts
and the Campfire Girls during the early 20
th
century. These organizations aimed to
teach immigrant girls gender-specific skills (such as cleaning, cooking, and
childcare) that were associated with a particular notion of American citizenship.
Through these training efforts, the Girl Scouts and Campfire girls not only
encouraged girls to be American, but also encouraged them to move away from the
customs associated with their ethnicities in the service of national unity.

49
In these efforts toward civic education and the development of national
identity, certain forms of discipline have become normalized. Disciplinary and
organizational systems change and evolve over time; however, some general
structures, such as curriculum and pedagogical techniques have experience great
longevity. Curriculum and teaching methods can be viewed as a type of discipline in
that they work to create, in Foucault’s terms, “docile bodies”.
42
For Foucault, a
docile body is a body “that may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved”.
43
A
variety of societal controls borne out of political, economic, and moral concerns are
involved in creating docile bodies, including individual disciplinary routines as well
as institutions such as schools, hospitals, and prisons. Institutions such as schools and
hospitals enact discipline by regulating the actions of particular groups of people
through the establishment of discursive categories—e.g. teacher and student, healthy
and ill, sane and insane--and by training people to be useful and obedient subjects
within their assigned category. For students in schools today, much of the
subjectivity offered by schools is dictated by the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act,
which employs standardized curricula and high-stakes assessment and ties student
performance to school funding and governance. In this way, NCLB is a disciplinary
structure, not just as a curriculum delivered to students, but for the entire school
community.
44

As schools have gotten larger, more diverse, and more anonymous, concerns
about safety have prompted increased disciplinary measures, such as zero tolerance
policies and school-wide uniforms.
45
Various techniques ensure constant surveillance

50
and control of student bodies, including separation of students by age, bell schedules,
the organization of students in lines when moving en masse in, out, or around the
school.
46
Homework regulates students’ time outside of school, and the
communication system put in place by the school (e.g. newsletters, progress reports,
report cards) controls parents’ involvement in the school. Some responsibility for
disciplining students is left up to individual teachers, structured and supported by
curriculum, classroom, school and district rules for behavior and participation, and
various “classroom management” techniques--plans for establishing classroom rules
and routines, from designs seating plans that will eliminate behavior problems to
strategies for curtailing excessive pencil-sharpening during lectures.
47
For the
average student, practically every action during the school day is regulated, from the
uniform or dress code to the location his/her seat within the classroom, to when he or
she may use the restroom.
Introducing popular culture presents a challenge to classroom discipline. In
addition to physical changes in the classroom, such as moving desks to allow
collaborative work, allowing students to talk freely during class rather than focusing
on silent, individual work or discussions strictly moderated by the teacher, or playing
music or other media during work periods, using popular culture in a meaningful
way in the classroom requires a reorientation of expertise. Students’ valued popular
culture does not “belong” to the teacher in the same way that the information in a
textbook or teacher’s guide does. Further, engaging with popular culture in the
classroom challenges the construction of schools as a space outside of consumption,

51
thereby threatening the ability of the school to shape students into proper (political)
citizens.
Despite the difficulties it may present to teachers and administrators, media
and popular culture offer great opportunity for fostering student-centeredness,
making connections between curricula and students’ everyday lives, and reorienting
expertise in order to make schooling a more salient, participatory experience for
young people. One way in which the tensions between schools and popular culture
can be bridged is through media literacy.

Media literacy and media education: Questioning and controlling consumption
The 1992 Aspen Media Literacy Leadership Institute, which brought together
U.S.-based scholars concerned with media literacy to discuss changes within the
movement, can be seen as an origin point for the current media literacy and media
education movement in the United States. At this institute, the participants developed
the following definition for media literacy: “Media literacy is the ability to access,
analyze, evaluate, and communicate messages in a wide variety of forms.”
48
James
A. Brown has elaborated this definition, writing that “in the past half-century, it
[media literacy] has come to include the ability to analyze competently and to utilize
skillfully print journalism, cinematic productions, radio and television programming,
and even computer-mediated information and exchange.”
49
Media literacy, according
to these definitions, is a skill people can use to understand and respond to media
messages in a way similar to how readers interpret and respond to written texts.

52
The history of media literacy stretches back much further than 1992 and is
hardly specific to the United States. Len Masterman
50
and David Buckingham
51
have
described shifts in media education from protection toward critical autonomy and
preparation. Buckingham identifies efforts in the United Kingdom during the 1930s
through the late 1950s that aimed to teach students appropriate disdain for mass
culture. Media education was to provide a type of inoculation against the moral and
cultural shortcomings of popular culture artifacts and rituals in the service of
preserving Britain’s literary heritage. Later efforts in the 1950s and 1960s in the
U.K. and elsewhere moved slightly away from the inoculatory paradigm and worked
to teach people to distinguish between “good” and “bad” popular culture rather than
dismissing it altogether.
The 1970s and 1980s introduced “screen theory” to schools. Screen theory is
an approach to media analysis that works to “reveal the constructed nature of media
texts, and thereby to show how media representations reinforce the ideologies of
dominant groups within society.”
52
Screen theory brings concepts of representation
and political economy into the forefront of analysis. As Justin Lewis and Sut Jhally
note, these two elements are inseparable. They write:
…an analysis of political economy should not be restricted to a narrow set of
economic relations. The media are determined by a set of social and
economic conditions that involve the key dividing lines of our culture,
whether they be race, class, gender, sexuality, age, or mobility…
53

The ideological analysis characteristic of screen theory has carried over to a branch
of media education called critical media literacy, although contemporary approaches
tend to take a more nuanced approach to understanding ideology.

53
Buckingham identifies more recent phase of media education in the UK as
“democratization and defensiveness” and notes that it is an extension of progressive
educational movements that became institutionalized in the 1960s and 1970s.
54
This
approach, as Buckingham’s name for it implies, has two contradictory components.
The democratization of media education (and, indeed, education as a whole), has
worked to legitimize popular culture as an object of study. At the same time,
however, schools have adopted a defensive stance towards the media, so although
popular culture is present in schools, students are taught to resist the influence of
media and become rational consumers of media.
Finally, Buckingham describes an emergent approach to media education
based on preparation. This approach is less defensive toward the media,
acknowledges the polysemy of media messages and moves away from the idea of
media as culture industry or one way flow of (potentially dangerous/incorrect)
information. The new paradigm addresses children as an autonomous yet critical
audience, and seeks to build upon the repertoire of skills for understanding media
that kids develop through informal exposure. Importantly, this new paradigm
recognizes the pleasures of media and the sense of ownership of popular culture and
new technology felt by young people. As Buckingham writes:
Media education is now no longer so automatically opposed to students’
experiences of the media. It does not begin from the view that the media are
necessarily and inevitably harmful, or that young people are simply passive
victims of media influence. On the contrary, it adopts a more student-centered
perspective, which begins from young people’s existing knowledge and
experience of media, rather than from the instructional imperatives of the
teacher. It does not aim to shield young people from the influence of the
media, and thereby to lead them on to ‘better things’, but to enable them to

54
make informed decisions on their own behalf. Media education is seen here
not as a form of protection, but as a form of preparation.
55

The preparatory paradigm for media education indicates a move away from some of
the established protectionist methods that have been employed in the past, as well as
shifts to the hierarchies of taste and class related to media. Further, through its
recognition of the pleasures involved in media consumption, preparatory models
recognize the social embeddedness of media consumption.
In the United States, media education has been much less widely adopted.
The Center for Media Literacy identifies the mid-1960s as an origin point for an
organized media literacy movement in the United States. Linked specifically to the
popularization of Marshall McLuhan’s work on media ecology, media literacy
efforts aimed teaching people (primarily educators) about the power of electronic
media in shaping society and encouraged people to learn to interpret media messages
(regardless of the content). John Culkin, S.J., a Jesuit priest and associate of
McLuhan’s has been cited as another of the founders of the U.S. media literacy
movement, and specifically with efforts to bring media education to schools. After
several years of working closely with McLuhan at Fordham University, Culkin
founded the Center for Understanding Media, an organization dedicated to training
teachers to use media in the classroom. Although the Center was successful in
training some teachers in a local school district, it did not have much reach beyond
its immediate community.
56

The fragmentation of media literacy efforts is one of seven obstacles Robert
Kubey identified in 1998 as impediments to the expansion of media education in the

55
United States.
57
Written in response to the question of why the U.S. lags behind other
countries in the implementation of media literacy, this article highlighted features of
the country—size, diversity of population, cultural isolation—as some of the
challenges media education faces. Kubey also points to the disconnect between
media literacy advocacy groups and schools, a lack of governmental support for
media education, and stratification in access to media literacy curricula as major
factors in its slow adoption in the U.S. Sadly, some ten years after the publication of
Kubey’s article, the institutional challenges he names still prevent the widespread
adoption of media literacy curricula.
Media literacy in the United States has predominantly taken a “deficit
approach” to media literacy, addressing media as a problematic influence and media
consumers as lacking the skills necessary to defend themselves against its influence.
Douglas Kellner and Jeff Share describe this protectionist impulse of media literacy,
as one that "emerges from fear of media and aims to protect or inoculate people
against the dangers of media manipulation and addiction.”
58
From this point of view,
media are viewed as a cause moral depravity and violence, reinforcing racism and
sexism, and encouraging unchecked consumerism. The concerns addressed by the
deficit model of media literacy have primarily focused on the impact of television
because of its pervasiveness as a broadcast medium and its placement within the
home. These factors, combined with its widespread appeal for information and
entertainment make it a major threat to traditional education and civil society. Roger
Desmond identifies decreased academic skills (reading, concentration, and attention),

56
increased aggression, exposure to stereotypes, and the development of poor
consumer habits as the key concerns of the deficit model of media literacy.
59

Regardless of the phase of media education, one of the key assumptions
behind media literacy and media education is that texts (of various types, including
printed and electronic) carry meaning that requires decoding or interpretation by
readers (a.k.a. viewers, users). Further, media education rests upon the assumption
that there are identifiable skills for media literacy that can be taught and learned.
However, what those skills are is up for interpretation. Within each phase or model
of media literacy, different skills have been emphasized; it is therefore impossible to
give a definitive list of media literacy skills.
For example, W. James Potter lists “The Seven Skills of Media Literacy” as
analysis, evaluation, grouping, induction, deduction, synthesis, and abstracting.
60

Silverblatt, Ferry, and Finan detail five approaches to media literacy—ideological
analysis, autobiographical analysis, nonverbal communication analysis, mythic
analysis and analysis of production elements—each with a set of skills for
interpreting different types of media.
61
In his recent review of youth media literacy,
David Buckingham uses three dimensions proposed by Ofcom (the regulatory body
for communications in the UK) to categorize media literacy skills—access,
understand, and create. As I will describe in the next chapter, new media literacies
build upon these foundations to define eleven skills specific to media literacy in new
media environments.
62

57
The professional development initiative in which Mr. Davidson and Ms. Abel
were participating was designed to encourage the integration of media arts across the
curriculum. “Media arts,” in this situation refers to projects that incorporate both
analysis and production, with a focus on student self-expression and creativity. Thus,
in this case, the anticipated outcomes in terms of the development of media literacy
were related more to expression than analysis, although analysis was an important
part of various projects. The incorporation of content-area specific learning
objectives into media arts projects was intended to broaden the reach of the
intervention beyond art and language classes to include subject areas such as science
or math that may not appear to be an appropriate place for media arts. While the
incorporation of some subjects proved to be challenging (and at times detrimental) to
the media production element of the initiative, the interdisciplinary and cross-
curricular aims of the initiative was one place in which access was addressed.
The key media literacy skill in the junk food documentary project could be
categorized as evaluation (according to Potter) or access (using Buckingham’s
organization). As students with (generally) very low reading and writing skills, the
challenge of doing internet research to find information and images for their projects
was particularly daunting. In The Internet Playground, Ellen Seiter describes the
experience of finding information online as “more like a mall than a library”
63
for
people without specialized resources and practiced research skills. In the case of the
junk food documentaries, I would extend Seiter’s metaphor and place the students in

58
the mall food court, where they were faced with limited options, made their choices
based on their own personal tastes, and spent a lot of time just hanging out.
The first part of each student’s documentary was a slide show consisting of
images taken from various Internet sites and text slides with blocks of text
communicating the student’s argument about junk food. When we began the internet
research portion of the project, it became very apparent that the physical access
students had in the classroom was not enough to compensate for their lack
experience doing research and critically evaluating information they find online.
Students searched to find pictures of obese people that emphasized the health
impacts of obesity and frequently shared the ones they found the most grotesque with
the rest of the class. Similarly, they searched for images of healthier foods and
happy, thin people eating healthy foods to provide a visual counterpoint. Although
most students had an idea of what they wanted in terms of images, many struggled
with thinking of and spelling the correct keywords to pull up the images. For
example, one student I assisted with the research started her image search with the
phrase “fat lady eating a greasy hamburger.” Although this phrase accurately
described the image she wished to find, the search produced few usable results. I
tried to explain to the student that using a specific and carefully chosen keyword
would likely yield better search results than the phrase she had used. She listed
keywords that she thought might work: “hamburger,” “fast food,” and “obese
woman.” When we tried the first two keywords, we waded through images from
corporate websites (which, obviously were not a “fat lady eating a greasy

59
hamburger”) and were unable to find suitable images. The keyword phrase “obese
woman” yielded better results, but still required sifting through images to find
higher-resolution images not already printed with (advertising) text. Several times
during this process, the student wanted to give up on the research because she was
not finding the information she wanted. Unlike the library research that students may
have been familiar with (which frequently is taught to be a painstaking—and
painful—process involving note cards and card catalogs in middle schools), looking
up information online had been, up until the start of the multimedia projects, a task
students had done infrequently, and had done primarily for entertainment driven by
their own interests.
The junk food documentary project was a media literacy project aimed at
helping students understand and express facts and opinions through media
production. In this way, it is a project aligned more with media arts efforts, which
focus on self expression, than with critical media literacy, which focuses on
decoding messages from commercial media. In the section on obesity, the
documentaries frequently employed statistics about the rates of obesity in the United
States and related conditions to obesity in order to frame the problem in the same
way that television news packages would. However, in talking to the students about
their projects, it was clear that they did not often base their own food choices on
statistics about future health problems or desired body image; for most of the
students in the class, the decision to consume (or not to consume) junk food was first
and foremost an economic issue, as such snacks fit within their limited allowances.

60
Further, consuming junk food was not viewed by students as problematic in terms of
taste—they did not understand junk food as lacking cultural capital because of its
low nutritional value, the ways in which it is marketed, or its pervasive presence as a
mass consumer good. Generally, in fact, their opinions on junk food were quite the
opposite—they loved it; they bought it whenever possible; they wished the school
would continue to sell it.
I point out this disconnect not to indicate that the assignment was somehow
disingenuous, but to illustrate an often unspoken challenge related to media
education. Schools have a commitment to protecting and reproducing cultural
capital. However, as empowered consumers, students’ own values do not always
align with those of the school. The impulse to protect schools’ privileged positions as
gatekeepers of cultural capital is just one part of the tension between schools and
popular culture. Another, related factor is the challenge popular culture presents to
various disciplinary and control systems in place in schools.
The junk food documentary project was not a popular assignment among Ms.
Abel’s students. As Michelle, a twelve-year-old seventh grader, told me in her
interview,
…none of us liked it. Sara didn’t like it. I didn’t like it. No one liked it.
Because we had to do research about that [topic], and then we had to go
interview and stuff like that. I liked the interviewing part, though.

Many of the students working on this project did not get to the “interviewing part” of
the assignment for various reasons. Some began the project late; others spent too
much time on earlier parts of the assignment and ran out of time before the class

61
needed to move on to the next unit. Using the video camera (for the first time for
many students) was an exciting new skill, particularly in comparison to the
“grueling” work of research.
The documentary project was successful in that several students composed a
video essay that they would not have been able to write on paper. However, it was a
challenging project in several respects. The first, as I have mentioned earlier in this
chapter, was the disconnect between one of the curricular goals of the project—to
understand (and, ultimately, support) the reasons behind the junk food bans in
California schools—and kids’ own values regarding the food products in question. A
second challenge, also related to consumption, that arose during production is has to
do with the web-based research that was required to gather assets for the video. The
difficulties students experienced in doing research had much to do with their
inexperience using the internet and their individual difficulties with reading and
writing. However, it also had to do with a disconnect between the way students were
expected (by the teacher and by virtue of the context of doing the research in school)
to participate in online spaces and the way in which students were accustomed to
participating in such spaces.
This project is an excellent example of the challenges of media education in
schools given the current historical, social, and cultural context. Schools are in the
difficult position of reinforcing a notion of citizenship and values around
consumption that are, by and large, not relevant to students because of their own
personal culture and values, because of the structures that regulate citizenship and

62
participation in traditional civic life, and because of the nature of the current media
environment. Schools are constructed as separate from the market and practices of
consumption; at the same time, however, consumption is an essential part of
schooling as well as an important practice for the students who make up the school
community. In this context, in which consumption is a political and contradictory
force, assignments such as the junk food documentary can be difficult to pull off.
The task becomes particularly difficult when students are avid and enthusiastic
consumers of the products schools have discouraged in order to protect them. In this
instance, they are not the “docile bodies” the school has hoped to produce; they
resemble less the rational, critical, and political citizens imagined by the school and
more the empowered consumer citizen envisioned by the market.
The next chapter investigates the concept of consumer citizenship and its
relationship to media literacy in the twenty-first century. It examines in depth a
media education movement called new media literacies
64
, which focus on the skills
necessary to participate in new media environments. While new media literacies
encompass practices that are unique to online and interactive media, it is important to
remember that they do not represent a clean break from other media literacy and
media education efforts; many of the principles regarding critical readings of media
apply. What is different is the way that citizens and consumers are constructed and
addressed by new media literacies.

63
Chapter 2 Endnotes

1
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5394069
2
Ibid.
3
Allison James, "Confections, Concoctions, and Conceptions," in The Children's
Culture Reader, ed. Henry Jenkins (New York: NYU Press, 2000), 402.
4
Ellen Seiter, Sold Separately : Children and Parents in Consumer Culture, Rutgers
Series in Communications, Media, and Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 1993).
5
Heather Hendershot, Nickelodeon Nation : The History, Politics, and Economics of
America's Only Tv Channel for Kids (New York: New York University Press, 2004).
6
A Semuels, "Bigger Waistlines, Shorter Lifespans: Obesity A "Threatening
Storm"," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 17 2005.
7
Juliet Schor, Born to Buy : The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer
Culture (New York: Scribner, 2004), Seiter, Sold Separately : Children and Parents
in Consumer Culture.
8
Lisa Jacobson, "Advertising, Mass Merchandising, and the Creation of Children's
Consumer Culture," in Children and Consumer Culture in American Society: A
Historical Handbook and Guide, ed. Lisa Jacobson (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008).
9
Ibid., 4-5.
10
Jyotsna Kapur, "Out of Control: Television and the Transformation of Childhood
in Late Capitalism," in Kids' Media Culture, ed. Marsha Kinder, Console-Ing
Passions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).
11
Haejung Paik, "The History of Children's Use of Electronic Media," in Handbook
of Children and the Media, ed. Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer (Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001).
12
Paul Ringel, "Reforming the Delinquent Child Consumer: Institutional Responses
to Children's Consumption from the Late Nineteenth Cenutry to the Present," in
Children and Consumer Culture in American Society: A Historical Handbook and
Guide, ed. Lisa Jacobson (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008), 43.
13
David Elkind, The Hurried Child : Growing up Too Fast Too Soon, 3rd ed.
(Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Pub., 2001).

64

14
See, for example, Susan E. Linn, Consuming Kids : The Hostile Takeover of
Childhood (New York: New Press, 2004), Schor, Born to Buy : The Commercialized
Child and the New Consumer Culture.
15
Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse : Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs,
Console-Ing Passions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 114.
16
See, for example, Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age
Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (or, Don't Trust Anyone
under 30) (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2008), Linn, Consuming Kids :
The Hostile Takeover of Childhood. Schor, Born to Buy : The Commercialized Child
and the New Consumer Culture.
17
Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young
Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (or, Don't Trust Anyone under 30), 35.
18
Dan Kindlon, Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in a
Permissive Culture (New York, NY: Hyperion, 2001), 29.
19
Schor, Born to Buy : The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture.
20
Donald F. Roberts, Ulla G. Foehr, and Victoria Rideout, "Generation M: Media in
the Lives of 8-18 Year Olds," (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2005).
21
McNeal, Kids as Customers : A Handbook of Marketing to Children.
22
Sonia Livingstone and Kirsten Drotner, "Editors' Introduction," in The
International Handbook of Children, Media, and Culture, ed. Kirsten Drotner and
Sonia Livingstone (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008), 1.
23
Buckingham, After the Death of Childhood : Growing up in the Age of Electronic
Media.
24
Raymond Williams, "Culture Is Ordinary," in Schooling the Symbolic Animal: The
Social and Cultural Dimensions of Education, ed. Bradley A.U. Levinson et al.
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1958/2000), 32.
25
See, for example, F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (New York, NYU Press,
1963), Dwight Macdonald, Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of
Mass Culture (New York: Vintage, 1962).
26
Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments.
27
Jason Mittell, Genre and Television : From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American
Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004).

65

28
Ien Ang, Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination
(London ; New York: Methuen, 1985).
29
Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.
30
Ibid., 190.
31
Seiter, Sold Separately : Children and Parents in Consumer Culture.
32
Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, 171.
33
Ibid., 372.
34
Ibid., 23.
35
Erin McNamara Horvat, Elliot B. Weininger, and Annette Lareau, "From Social
Ties to Social Capital: Class Differences in the Relations between Schools and
Parent Networks," American Educational Research Journal 40, no. 2 (2003).
36
John Dewey, The School and Society & the Child and the Curriculum (Mineola,
NY: Dover, 2001), 46.
37
See, for example, James A. Banks and Cherry A. McGee Banks, eds., Handbook
of Research on Multicultural Education, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003).
38
Buckingham and Sefton-Green, Cultural Studies Goes to School : Reading and
Teaching Popular Media.
39
William J. Reese, America's Public Schools: From the Common School To "No
Child Left Behind" (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
40
Banet-Weiser, Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship, 7.
41
Leslie Hahner, "Practical Patriotism: Camp Fire Girls, Girl Scouts, and
Americanization," Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 5, no. 2 (2008):
116.
42
Michel Foucault, "Docile Bodies," in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow
(New York: Pantheon, 1977/1984).
43
Ibid., 180.
44
Deborah Meier and George Wood, eds., Many Children Left Behind (Boston:
Beacon Press, 2004).

66

45
Louis Rosen, School Discipline: Best Practices for Administrators, 2nd ed.
(Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 2005).
46
Barrie Thorne, Gender Play Girls and Boys in School (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press,, 1993).
47
Jill A. Lindberg, Diane Evans Kelley, and April M. Swick, Common-Sense
Classroom Management for Middle and High School Teachers (Thousand Oaks, CA:
Corwin Press, 2005).
48
Renee Hobbs, "The Seven Great Debates in the Media Literacy Movement," The
Journal of Communication 48, no. 1 (1998): 16.
49
James A. Brown, "Media Literacy Perspectives," The Journal of Communication
48, no. 1 (1998): 44.
50
Len Masterman, Teaching the Media, Comedia Series ; (London ; New York:
Routledge, 1992).
51
———, "A Rationale for Media Education," in Media Literacy in the Information
Age: Current Perspectives, ed. Robert Kubey, Information and Behavior (New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1997), David Buckingham, Media Education: Literacy,
Learning, and Contemporary Culture (London Polity, 2003).
52
Buckingham, Media Education: Literacy, Learning, and Contemporary Culture, 8.
53
Justin Lewis and Sut Jhally, "The Struggle over Media Literacy," The Journal of
Communication 48, no. 1 (1998): 112.
54
Buckingham, Media Education: Literacy, Learning, and Contemporary Culture.
55
Ibid., 13.
56
History of Media Literacy in the USA—Decade By Decade,
http://www.medialit.org/reading_room/rr2.php
57
Robert Kubey, "Obstacles to the Development of Media Education in the United
States," The Journal of Communication 48, no. 1 (1998).
58
Douglas Kellner and Jeff Share, "Toward Critical Media Literacy: Core Concepts,
Debates, Organizations, and Policy," Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of
Education 26, no. 3 (2005): 6.
59
Roger Desmond, "Media Literacy in the Home: Acquisition and Deficit Models,"
in Media Literacy in the Information Age: Current Perspectives, ed. Robert Kubey,

67

Information and Behavior (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1997).
60
W. James Potter, Media Literacy, 4th ed. (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications,
2008), 15.
61
Art Silverblatt, Jane Ferry, and Barbara Finan, Approaches to Media Literacy: A
Handbook (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1999).
62
Buckingham, "The Media Literacy of Children and Young People: A Review of
the Research Literature on Behalf of Ofcom."
63
Seiter, The Internet Playground : Children's Access, Entertainment, and Mis-
Education, 37.
64
Jenkins et al., "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media
Education for the 21st Century."

68
Chapter 3: Consumer Citizens, Producer Citizens

A few weeks prior to the end of the school year, Mr. Davidson’s class began
a new media production project. By this point, the students were comfortable with
basic video production as well as designing slides in PowerPoint, as they had
completed several projects using these tools. This final media production project was
intended to combine students’ skills in video production with a new kind of
production--web design. Designing web pages draws on several of the technical
skills the students had developed in earlier production projects, such as formatting
text and inserting pictures. The laptops students used for their production projects did
not have web authoring software on them, so we planned to use Microsoft Word for
the bulk of the page design, another benefit to the students because they were
familiar with the software. None of the students had ever designed a webpage before,
and through our informal discussions of the sites they visited, it seemed clear that
they were not aware of new formats for web-based production, such as blogs or even
youth-targeted sites like LiveJournal.
As I will discuss in more detail in chapter five, the students in the class had
varying amounts of access to the internet. Some had DSL or dialup connections at
home; others accessed the web only at school. Some students had pieced together
access at friends’ and family members’ houses and public spaces. Despite the various
ways they accessed online media, almost every student named the same website as
his or her favorite, a site called studentfreestuff.com, which featured offers for trials

69
and samples of various products and (if you could find them among the huge amount
of advertisements on the site) free flash-based casual games. Their online “ant trail”
was similar to what Ellen Seiter describes as typical of non-elite (child) users:
One large group, the mass market, is targeted as consumers of publicity and
potential audiences in the expanding global entertainment market, or as
purchasers of small-ticket branded goods such as soft drinks, candy, and
chips. This type of marketing strives to reach those with disposable income
regardless of whether they live in India, the Czech Republic, or Brazil. A
different kind of marketing targets affluent families and school districts with
expensive high-end products, such as online courses, educational software,
and subscription-based Web content. Mass marketers of junk food and
entertainment properties strive to entice poorer children with free videos and
music, with sweepstakes and contests, and with fan promotions.
1

Although students did have access to educational software at school (specifically, a
standardized test prep “game” called “Study Island”), whenever they had free time
and access to the computers, they tended to head directly to studentfreestuff.com.
Given the context of their previous and regular internet use, the idea of creating a
website was, unsurprisingly, foreign to students.
The websites were intended to analyze Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a
dream” speech. Students were instructed to create a speech similar in form and
content to King’s about their dreams for the future. The initial idea for the project
proposed that students would record video of themselves reading their speech and
intercut it with the video of King’s speech. However, it quickly became apparent that
the video editing portion of the assignment would take too much time, so we settled
for students writing and recording their speeches, and embedding the compressed
video (in its entirety, not remixed) to the site.
We began the assignment by watching video (from an online archive) of

70
King delivering his speech, and followed the screening with a class discussion about
the content of the speech. Mr. Davidson distributed copies of an excerpt of the
speech he had copied from another website and the class read through the text line by
line and discussed its meaning. We began with this line: “And so even though we
face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply
rooted in the American dream.”
The class had discussed figurative language only once or twice before
beginning this assignment, so decoding the language of the speech was Mr.
Davidson’s initial concern. For example, he asked students what it means that King’s
dream was “deeply rooted in the American dream.” They understood the use of
“rooted” to refer to foundational beliefs or knowledge, but had no idea what is meant
by “The American Dream.” I think both Mr. Davidson and I found this surprising, as
so many of the students’ families have immigrated to the US. So, we worked on
defining the American dream.
Mr. Davidson first asked the students “who were the first Americans?” The
answers ranged from the Native Americans (technically correct, but not what he was
looking for) to Abraham Lincoln, George Bush, Gabriel’s Grandma, and God. At
this point, Mr. Davidson, frustrated by the students’ flippant answers, changed his
method. Instead of asking the students to define the American dream, he first told the
story of how his family came to the US from another country, and then asked if they
had any ideas about what the American dream could be based on the story. He
acknowledged that most of the students’ parents had come to the US from another

71
place and asked if the students knew why their parents had immigrated. Aside from
one student who was obviously not listening and interjected “parents!” most of them
got it, and responded with answers such as “freedom,” “independence,” “a better
life,” “money,” “work,” “happiness,” etc.
The class then talked a bit about the struggles for civil rights and equality. I
brought up the practice of segregating schools, which seemed to click with them.
One student offered the example of the immigration protests that had been going on
in the previous weeks, and we talked about immigration as a right. All of the students
who spoke during the discussion talked about immigration in a de-personalized way,
not articulating a connection between the circumstances under which their own
families had come to the US to the struggles of other people in similar situations.
The American dream and the closely related concept of citizenship can be
difficult to define for a variety of reasons. One reason is that citizenship has become
a more slippery term due to competing discourses such as cultural citizenship or
transnationalism.
2
Citizenship and equality are defined in relation to different criteria
now than they were in King’s time. Particularly for children and other people who
are excluded from civic participation because of age, country of origin, disability, or
any number of other reasons, citizenship may be defined outside of politics,
geographic community, or national identity. Instead, citizenship is frequently defined
in relation to the market, as a form of consumer citizenship.
Consumer citizenship has been theorized as a type of citizenship that is
defined within the market and only makes sense in relationship to the market. That

72
is, it does not resemble the “public sphere” versions of citizenship, nor is it directly
transferable to such situations. Although children are prohibited by law and social
norms from participating in politics, they are empowered by the market to act as
citizens and exercise power and choice within that sphere. As consumer citizens,
children are viewed, not in a traditional way as citizens-in-training, or blank slates in
need of guidance and education in order to participate in society, but as already
empowered citizens. Sarah Banet-Weiser writes, “consumer citizenship is not
simply indicated in the way that advertisers and corporations appropriate political
rhetoric in order to sell products. Rather, it is increasingly the case that people
understand political rhetoric precisely because of their identities as consumers.”
3

What Banet-Weiser refers to as "political rhetoric" can be understood within a broad
definition of politics; it does not necessarily mean Presidential elections or foreign
policy, but also includes micro-political issues such as negotiating institutional
structures (such as schools) or politics related to representation in media or within
communities.
The commodification of information (including digital media) is an essential
part of redefining citizenship in terms of consumption at this particular moment in
history. Understood as a commodity instead of a resource, information takes on
additional symbolic value. As Dan Schiller writes,
A resource is something of actual or potential use. That is all. The soil the
sea, and the spectrum are resources. But all resources are not commodities.
Only under particular conditions can they be transformed into commodities.
A resource is anything of use, anytime, anywhere, to anyone; but a
commodity bears the stamp of society and history in its very core.
4

73
Schiller continues his definition of information as a commodity, noting that “a
commodity is a resource that is produced for the market by wage labor.”
5
When
information is understood as a commodity produced by and for the market, it
becomes important to reproduce the need for the commodity at the same time as
producing labor for the market. Consumer citizenship, a way of understanding civic
participation through one’s identity and practices as a consumer, and new media
literacies, a set of skills for navigating new media environments,
6
are two ways of
understanding and structuring participation that fulfill both of these needs.
Following a brief discussion of the concept of consumer citizenship, I turn to
the themes of consumption, literacy, and participation to look at new media literacies
as a “toolkit” for consumer citizenship. New media literacies shift the emphasis of
media education from protectionism or defensiveness toward mass media in the
service of training rational and literate citizens (in a political sense) to
communication and expression through commercial media (mass media and niche
media/technology) in order to train consumer citizens. Whereas previous models of
media literacy education have employed an understanding of kids as future citizens,
new media literacies begin from the assumption that kids are both already
empowered citizens through their use of media and technology and future citizens in
need of guidance and training to ensure their future success. Through its emphasis on
everyday practices of consumption and production in new media spaces, new media
literacies construct young users as a kind of “digital consumer citizen” who is able to
navigate and create digital media, participate in communities as a producer and a

74
consumer, and accumulate real, virtual, and social capital.
Producing consumer citizens

Discourses of consumer citizenship construct individuals as empowered
participants in a community or society; however, this empowerment does not come
from rights and responsibilities traditionally associated with citizenship, but through
one’s identity as a consumer. In this way, the market defines the parameters of
citizenship rather than political discourse or government entities. Consumer
citizenship can be understood as a type of cultural citizenship, whereby the shared
cultural context forms the basis of affiliation and shared knowledge. While not
completely opposed to notions of political citizenship, cultural citizenship is
generally valued less by institutions such as schools, which, as Kathleen Knight
Abowitz and Jason Harnish have discussed, foreground civic republican and political
liberal notions of citizenship. In their analysis of citizenship discourse in K-12 civic
education curricula and text books, Knight Abowitz and Harnish identified cultural
citizenship as one of five "critical discourses" apparent in the materials. The five
critical discourses of citizenship--feminist, reconstructionist, cultural, queer, and
transnational--appear less often (if at all) in civic education texts and curricula, and
are frequently omitted from discussions of citizenship in schools. However, as
Knight Abowitz and Harnish note, they represent important counterpoints to
dominant discourses of citizenship.
7

Within the contextually-specific parameters of consumer citizenship,
opportunities for participation are widened to include people, like children, who are

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

76
and in conflict with the dominating and manipulative forces of the market. In
contemporary consumer culture, however, “agency (or more properly subjectivity) is
increasingly constructed by producers, rather than being deployed against them.”
11

Schor continues,
…in the contemporary period, consuming has become the privileged form (or
site) of identity construction. If we accept the view that individual agency is
now central to the operation of consumer society (in contrast to an earlier era
in which there was more overt social conformity), it is the companies who
figure out how to successfully sell agency to consumers that thrive. In this
formulation, subjectivity does not exist prior to the market (à la neoclassical
economics) but is a product of it. This does not make subjectivity “false” as
in earlier critiques, but it does imply that subjectivity is constrained and
market driven. After all, only certain forms of subjectivity are profitable. So
while consumers have gained one kind of power (market innovations begin
with them), they have lost the power to reject consumption as a way of life…
it becomes nearly impossible to construct identity outside the consumer
marketplace.
12

Various institutions related to the market--for example, advertisers, television
networks, or websites—offer consumers subject positions. Consumption practices
and consumer identity form a part of one’s habitus, and thereby influence and are
influenced by other activities and structures.
One aspect of consumer citizenship is the idea that everyday acts of
consumption can be politically motivated. Lizabeth Cohen describes this type of
participation as associated with the subject position of the “purchaser consumer,”
which was solidified in American culture during the early part of the 20
th
century,
motivated by the Great Depression and New Deal reforms. She also identifies a
category of consumers she calls “citizen consumers,” which also emerged in the New
Deal Era. She writes:

77
While many different conceptions of the proper role for consumers circulated
in the experimental air of the New Deal era…the citizen consumer and the
purchaser consumer predominated. The citizen consumer ideal was embraced
by New Deal policymakers in Washington and consumer activists at the grass
roots, both of whom sought consumer representation in government and new
legislation and regulation to protect consumers better in the marketplace. In
contrast, the purchaser consumer perspective saw consumers as the potential
source of expanded demand that could pull the United States out of severe
depression. Although advocates of these two viewpoints usually favored one
over the other, it was possible for policymakers to embrace both.
13

Many current initiatives meld the purchaser consumer and citizen consumer
viewpoints, positing that through specific consumer choices, individuals can
participate (or at least express an opinion) on larger political and social issues. For
example, fundraising efforts such as Box Tops for Education or (Product) Red,
which donate a percentage of profits to various causes, are examples of practices
valued within consumer citizenship. By buying particular products (and sometimes
saving the lids or UPCs) and mailing them in, people participate in a political effort--
they make a statement of their support of a cause and take action to contribute.
Similarly, not consuming certain products in support of a cause is a common form of
political action. Vegetarianism is one example, as is the practice of boycotting
products to protest labor practices or other political issues.
The current attention to "green living" is another example of consumer
citizenship.
14
By purchasing products designated as "eco friendly" (even when they
are made by the same companies that make the eco-unfriendly products), consumers
feel that they are doing their part to protect environmental health of the earth. This is
not to say that consumer citizenship is inherently inauthentic or false; buying organic
produce or sustainable wood products likely do contribute to the health of the

78
environment. What is problematic about consumer citizenship in this case (and what
has been criticized) is that consumption often takes the place of other interventions
that are more aligned with traditional notions of citizenship. If citizens believe that
they are participating adequately by purchasing certain products or donating a dollar
at the checkout to the cause of the month, it removes some of the urgency from other
forms of civic participation--voting, debate, or protest, for example.
For kids, this instantiation of consumer citizenship builds upon the existing
understanding of kids as a powerful three-in-one (current, future, and influence)
market.
15
Whereas kids cannot vote or participate in much of traditional civic life,
they can make choices regarding consumption; they can also influence the
purchasing decisions of others (like family members). Moreover, they will continue
to make consumption choices throughout their lives, making them important targets
for cultivating brand loyalty.
Commercial media is another important force in constituting consumer
citizenship. Particularly within the contemporary media landscape of participatory
culture and media saturation, marketing and branding practices can be powerful
ways of defining a “community” around a particular product or brand with which
consumers can affiliate and identify. Other times, it is the media itself that forms the
basis of the community. Such is the case of the children’s cable network
Nickelodeon, as Sarah Banet-Weiser describes. Nickelodeon, like many other media
entities has built its brand around certain notions of citizenship and empowerment
that are unique to the network. The kind of rights offered to citizens of Nickelodeon

79
has to do primarily with self-expression and pleasure. Participation, citizenship, and
brand loyalty are interconnected and in many ways synonymous.
16

As a part of its network brand, Nickelodeon has adopted a kind of
“generational warfare” discourse that posits kids as active and savvy consumers in
charge of their worlds and adults as old-fashioned, boring, and powerless.
17
Similar
generational discourse can be seen in relation to digital media, technology, and the
internet, as kids are constructed as “digital natives,”
18
or “Generation M,”
19
who,
unlike earlier generations (including their parents) have a kind of “natural” acuity
with technology and unlimited opportunities for participation. Through such
generational discourse, kids are constructed as empowered consumers with particular
tastes and rights that are developed and displayed through consumption; identifying
oneself as a part of a media-based community (whether it is a Nickelodeon viewer or
a “digital native”), then, indicates not only affiliation but also identity.
20

Citizenship in digital media environments is sometimes quite literal. For
example, in the Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMO) Neopets,
21
users
become citizens of the virtual world by creating an avatar who lives, works, and
plays in Neopia. Everyday activity in Neopia looks very much like everyday activity
elsewhere—players complete various tasks in exchange for currency, which they can
spend on necessities (like food) or luxuries (like toys). As Mizuko Ito and Heather
Horst have observed in their study of Neopets, the site relies on banner ads and
immersive advertising (product placement) to generate income rather than charging
users a subscription fee, a practice seen in other MMOs such as World of Warcraft
22

80
or Club Penguin
23
. The amount and integration of advertising is not so different from
other children’s media, which relies on toys, apparel, books, and to an increasing
extent, online content to advertise properties. What is significant about Neopets and
similar online communities is the ways in which consumption, branding, and
advertising are inseparable from participation and citizenship in the space. As Ito and
Horst write,
Engagement with consumer culture on Neopets is more central to the play
mechanic than exposure to ads, even of the immersive variety. On Neopets,
consumer products are not simply something that is generated by adults and
“marketed” to gullible children. Kids participate themselves in the
construction of capitalist and consumer activity.
24

Ito and Horst emphasize the multiple layers of consumption that go on in Neopets
play. Players consume various advertisements, ranging from viewing actual banner
ads on the site to playing branded games or feeding their avatar branded food (such
as McDonald’s hamburgers). At the same time, consumption, in various forms, is the
point of playing the game and is the part of the game in which players have the most
agency.
Neopets focuses on opportunities for consumption (aside from the production
and customization of one’s avatar); however, other sites blend consumption and
production more fluidly. For example, another web community within the Viacom
empire is Quizilla,
25
recently acquired by the online arm of Nickelodeon’s teen
network, The N. Quizilla is a site that traffics in user generated content. When the
site launched, this content consisted exclusively of quizzes; it has since expanded to
include other types of user generated content, such as journals. However, quizzes

81
remain a major focus of the site. Much like the quizzes found in teen girls’
magazines, Quizilla quizzes mainly focus on identity, personality, or relationships
and are frequently linked to specific pieces of popular culture. For example, one can
take a quiz called “What genre of music are you?”
26
or “What anime stereotype are
you?”
27
The results of the quiz are presented on the website along with the html code
for displaying one’s results on her profile on various social network sites.
While Quizilla content is free and available to anyone visiting the site,
participating in the site means producing content for free and turning it over to the
site (which is making money on every visit.) In exchange, one takes on the identity
of a producer and a participant in the community—in many ways, a fully vested
citizen in the community, an identity that is not available to young people in many
other spaces. Websites directed at young people interpellate citizens in the same
ways that Nickelodeon does--by addressing them as already empowered citizens.
Social network sites like MySpace and Facebook operate on a similar principle by
offering autonomy to communicate with friends in a way that constructed as
“foreign” to adults. The site benefits from participation through advertising revenue,
and users become “citizens” of the site.
Just as skills for decoding and participating in mass media culture have been
thought of in terms of literacy, practices and skills relevant to participation in new
media are constructed as literacy skills. Both media literacy and new media literacies
require an expanded understanding of the meaning of literacy beyond reading and
writing. The next sections of this chapter investigate some of the influences shaping

82
the literacy aspect of new media literacies.
New Literacies

New media literacies can be linked to a branch of literacy research and theory
called New Literacy Studies, a key feature of which is a paradigmatic shift from
conceptualizing literacy as an individual/isolated practice (in the head of an
individual) to understanding literacy as a socially-situated practice within
communities. Barton and Hamilton have described situated literacy practices as "the
general cultural ways of utilising written language which people draw upon in their
lives." Literacy practices are more than just activities; they are patterns of interaction
with texts that incorporate "values, attitudes, feelings, and social relationships”
28

because they are embedded in social life and culture. Barton and Hamilton
distinguish literacy practices from literacy events, a term used by Shirley Bryce
Heath to describe activities in which a person performs literacy by reading, writing,
or talking about texts.
29

Related to its focus on the social dimensions of literacy, New Literacy
Studies (NLS) has advocated a move away from what Brian Street has called the
"autonomous model" of literacy.
30
He describes this model as the type of literacy
valued by traditional educational and development frameworks and problematizes its
central assumption that literacy as an autonomous force can fix social inequalities,
regardless of the political, economic, or social conditions that contributed to the
problems. He writes, "[T]he model, I suggest, disguises the cultural and ideological
assumptions that underpin it so that it can then be presented as though they are

83
neutral and universal and that literacy as such will have these benign effects.”
31

Adherence to the autonomous model of literacy is evident in standardized reading
curricula as well as in many media literacy programs and curricula to date. As an
alternative to the autonomous model, Street proposes what he calls the "ideological
model" of literacy, which "forces one to be wary of grand generalizations and
cherished assumptions about literacy 'in itself'" by focusing on specific literacy
practices. He writes that educators and researchers who adopt the ideological model
of literacy "recognize the ideological and therefore culturally embedded nature of
such practices [reading and writing].”
32
Thus, the ideological model of literacy calls
attention to and questions various assumptions about literacy—for example, the
control of definitions and discourses about literacy by politically and socially
dominant groups.
A complimentary concept to the work of New Literacy Studies is that of
Multiliteracies, which is a pedagogical philosophy that addresses both “the
multiplicity of communications channels and media, and the increasing saliency of
cultural and linguistic diversity” within a rapidly changing cultural, political, and
economic context. The concept of Multiliteracies was developed collaboratively by a
group of literacy scholars and the resultant articles and book about the concept were
collaboratively authored by the New London Group. As the authors explain:
The notion of multiliteracies supplements traditional literacy pedagogy by
addressing these two related aspects of textual multiplicity. What we might
term "mere literacy" remains centered on language only, and usually on a
singular national form of language at that, which is conceived as a stable
system based on rules such as mastering sound-letter correspondence. … A
pedagogy of multiliteracies, by contrast, focuses on modes of representation

84
much broader than language alone. These differ according to culture and
context, and have specific cognitive, cultural, and social effects. …
Multiliteracies also creates a different kind of pedagogy, one in which
language and other modes of meaning are dynamic representational
resources, constantly being remade by their users as they work to achieve
their various cultural purposes.
33

The expansion of tools for learning, participation, and production with digital media
in the past decade have reinforced the need to prepare students for “textual
multiplicity.” It is essential to remember that New Literacy Studies foregrounds an
understanding of literacy as a social practice. Just as literacy cannot be understood as
a purely individual, cognitive practice, neither can it be understood as a purely
technical or technology-driven practice.
Michelle Knobel and Colin Lankshear distinguish “new” literacies related to
digital media as having “new ‘technical stuff and new ‘ethos stuff.”
34
“Technical
stuff” refers to digital tools, applications, and hardware. “Ethos stuff,” on he other
hand, refers to new mindsets toward literacy that emphasize the social, participatory,
and collaborative nature of literacy and a postmodern, post-industrial understanding
of the world that eschews hierarchical organization. Knobel and Lankshear further
distinguish between paradigm and peripheral cases of new literacies, noting that
“paradigm cases of new literacies have both new ‘technical stuff’ (digitality) and
new ‘ethos stuff’. Peripheral cases of new literacies have new ‘ethos stuff’ but not
new ‘technical stuff’
35
”. Knobel and Lankshear’s work again underscores the
importance of the social construction and cultural embeddedness of literacy, as they
emphasize that new literacies cannot be defined solely on the basis of “technical
stuff.”

85
Current research and popular writing on new literacies tend to focus on
highly visible practices, particularly online participation and production. Because of
the problematic relationships between popular culture, technology, and schools,
much of the research in the area of New Literacies has been focused on informal
learning environments such as after school programs, online communities, and
subcultures such as media fandoms (or what goes on behind the scenes in a
classroom).
36
David Buckingham has described the discrepancies between kids’
experiences of technology at home and at school as a "second digital divide.”
37

Gaming has been a focus of a great deal of research on new literacies and has
been proposed by Jim Gee and others as an ideal paradigm for literacy learning in
our current cultural and educational climate.
38
Indeed, videogames provide
opportunities for innovative play, experimentation, and learning.
39

For example, in my visit to Gabriel Soto’s home to interview him and his
mother, I had a chance to play Grand Theft Auto (GTA) with Gabriel and his
younger brother, Ernesto. When the boys began playing the game, Gabriel first
pulled a well-worn sheet of folded notebook paper from his pocket. On the paper
were written about a half-dozen cheat codes for the game.
40
He glanced at it quickly
and decided that his first action was to “get the cops off [his] back.” This code he
knew by heart. He quickly entered the series of keystrokes that made his character
invisible to the police officers in the game. Now safe from opposition, he tried one of
the new codes from his cheat sheet and was visibly thrilled when his bank balance
jumped up about $1000. Gameplay in GTA revolves around stealing and driving

86
cars, which was Gabriel’s next action. When he crashed the car he was driving,
before I could ask him what happened when a player crashes a car, he jumped out of
the car and entered a string of keystrokes from memory. This cheat instantly restored
the car to perfect condition.
I asked Gabriel how he learned the codes he had memorized and where he
got the list of new codes. He told me that he obtained the codes from older kids who
live in his apartment complex and his older (high-school age) cousins. When I asked
him if he thought using the codes is cheating, he seemed confused and said no.
Despite calling them “cheat codes,” it appeared that Gabriel did not understand that
this type of play is subversive and would be considered by some other players to be
inappropriate. Perhaps he had never played a game without having cheat codes
because of his social network of older kids who scaffold his gameplay by sharing the
codes with him. If Gabriel’s friends agree that cheat codes are a normal part of
gameplay, it makes sense that he would not have viewed them as problematic or
subversive. Using cheat codes is not necessarily an example of literacy in and of
itself. What is significant about the cheat codes in Gabriel’s play is that they are an
embedded and social practice of participation.
Later in my observation of Gabriel and Ernesto, Gabriel offered to show me
his favorite in-game car. When I agreed, he took off (in a different car) to the street
where he said his favorite car was usually parked. I was expecting him to show me a
sports car or low rider (he had told me in the past that when he turns 16 he is going
to buy a low rider); instead, he hopped into a woody station wagon. When I asked

87
him why that particular car was his favorite, he told me that it is because of one of
the songs that plays on the car’s radio. I was surprised when I heard the song-- the
oldie tune “I Love a Rainy Night,” and dually surprised when Gabriel and Ernesto
began to sing along (and knew all the words) as they drove through San Andreas to
find another vehicle to steal.
Just as I view Gabriel’s use of cheat codes was a social, embedded practice of
literacy, I consider his appropriation of this game feature to be a demonstration of
literacy. In terms of skills, he needed to have great familiarity with the game map in
order to find the car quickly and easily. His choice of the car (which was not the
flashiest nor the fastest option in the game) demonstrates his understanding of the
game as a text that he can manipulate to optimize the pleasure he derives from it.
Whereas a “straightforward reading” of the game would encourage players to
complete missions quickly and to regard certain interactive features (like the songs
played on the car radios) as bonus content and not a driving force within the game,
Gabriel’s negotiated reading foregrounded the music and led him to play the game in
a less mission-focused (and less violent) way.
As I mentioned earlier, Gabriel did not view cheat codes as subversive play
because they were embedded parts of his experience of gameplay. However, I do
believe that he understood that his choice of the car based on the music was a way of
challenging the way the game mechanics encourage players to play as well as the
way his group of friends play the game. The number of codes scrawled on the paper
Gabriel had acquired from his neighbors indicated to me that codes are an essential

88
part of gameplay for his friends and that rapid advancement and accumulating a large
amount of in-game cash were key goals. In contrast, Gabriel’s way of playing
(during my observation, at least) slowed down game play, as he and Ernesto drove
around in the Woody until they heard the entire song, and then went on to the next
task. The act of appropriation, therefore, not only requires an understanding of the
goals and rules of the game, but of the game as a specific kind of media which,
unlike television or movies, the player can control (to an extent.) It is for this reason
that I would characterize Gabriel’s play with GTA as a display of new media
literacy.
New Media Literacies

New media literacies, a concept articulated by Jenkins et al. through Project
NML at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
41
extend the critical aspects of
media literacy to new media and in particular, online media. At the same time, new
media literacies adopt an understanding of literacy as social and contextual that is
similar to new literacy studies. New media literacies are competencies for
participating in participatory culture; however, they are not intended as replacements
for alphabetic literacy nor for previously articulated skills of media literacy. As
Jenkins et al write:
Before students can engage with the new participatory culture, they must be
able to read and write. Just as the emergence of written language changed
oral traditions and the emergence of printed texts changed our relationship to
written language, the emergence of new digital modes of expression changes
our relationship to printed texts....Even traditional literacies must change to
reflect the media change taking place. Youth must expand their required
competencies, not push aside old skills to make room for the new.”
42

89

New media literacies address the concerns of media education in 21st century,
focusing on three key issues: the participation gap, which refers to unequal
participation with digital media; the transparency problem, which deals with
assessing credibility of information; and the ethics challenge, which addresses the
challenges that arise from the breakdown in traditional forms of socialization and
traditional understandings of citizenship. In order to address these issues,
pedagogical strategies and curricular interventions designed to take a critical
approach to new media are necessary.
In addition to the work of Project NML in articulating the concept of new
media literacies, attention to techno-social skills has come from within the K-12
community. Early in 2008, The National Council of Teachers of English developed a
preliminary definition of what they have called “21st century literacies.”
43
The
definition recommends that readers and writers “develop proficiency with the tools
of technology; build relationships with others to pose and solve problems
collaboratively and cross culturally; design and share information for global
communities to meet a variety of purposes; manage, analyze and synthesize multiple
streams of simultaneous information; create critique, analyze and evaluate multi-
media texts; and attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex
environments.” Each of these recommendations bridges the technical and the social,
emphasizing technological literacy as linked to diverse forms of literacy in a
globalized society.
New Media Literacies are frequently identified within out-of-school practices

90
and skills, due largely to the amount of time and equipment media production can
require. Additionally, New Media Literacies are often developed most keenly within
spaces structured around what we have identified in the Digital Youth Project as
“interest-driven” practices,
44
or what James Paul Gee has called “affinity spaces.”
45

As I have discussed in chapter two, the culture of schooling presents a distinct
challenge to media literacy in its positioning as separate from or in opposition to
popular culture. This disconnect is, unfortunately, exacerbated in the digital media
environment, which is built on commercial media such as websites, video games,
and various digital production tools. However, following Jenkins et al., I do not
believe that schools are a lost cause for teaching and learning New Media Literacies
and agree that pedagogical and curricular change is necessary to intervene in the
participation gap that has already begun to stratify communication, labor, and
educational practices.
46

In its account of literacy for the 21
st
century, Project NML outlines eleven
key new media literacy skills—play, simulation, performance, appropriation,
multitasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia
navigation, networking, and negotiation—all of which are fundamentally embedded
in social contexts and practices. These skills encompass various practices of reading
and writing, consuming and producing, emphasizing the opportunities that
networked media and participatory culture offer for “hypersocial” social practice.
47

Play, simulation, and performance can be loosely grouped together as ways
of experimenting with texts and expressions of identity. As Jenkins et al. note, play

91
long has been theorized as a way for children to explore and learn about the world.
Digital and networked media, for example video games or online communities, offer
additional opportunities and sites for play. Simulation—either participating in
simulated “real world activities” or designing them—is one way in which digital
play extends the possibilities of experience. Performance
48
is another way of
extending play by allowing opportunities for young people to assume what Gee has
called “projective identities,” and assume fictitious or manipulated versions of
identity. Jenkins et al have described play as a valuable skill because “it lowers the
emotional stakes of failing: players are encouraged to suspend some of the real world
consequences of the represented actions, to take risks and learn through trial and
error.”
49
Both simulation and performance have similar “cushions” for
experimentation.
Appropriation is described as “a process by which students learn by taking
culture apart and putting it back together.”
50
Appropriation is often used to describe
remix projects such as fan videos (vids) or fan fiction, in which the producer
repurposes parts of an existing piece of media (whether it is video or
characters/settings) into a derivative product. Appropriation is often distilled to
plagiarism or theft, but is actually a complex process of decoding and re-encoding
media or objects with meaning. For the kids I worked with at MMS, appropriation
was less likely to come in the form of fan fiction, and more likely to be a way of
substituting the media or technology they had for other resources they desired. For
example, James Ramos, a fourteen-year-old eighth-grader, created what I would call

92
a “hardware remix” using a digital camera and his television. James was anticipating
receiving an iPod as a graduation gift. This anticipation was not without anxiety that
his parents would change their minds if he did not achieve satisfactory grades or if
they decided it was too big of an expense. In the meantime, James figured out a way
to substitute a piece of technology he did have for the iPod he was hoping to get.
When Lisa and I arrived at the Ramos’s apartment, we rang the doorbell, knocked,
and called several times without any answer. After many attempts, James finally
answered the door, and explained why he hadn’t heard us ringing, knocking, or
calling. Had been in his bedroom with the door shut and the volume on the television
cranked trying to record music videos from BET on a digital camera he had
borrowed from his Aunt. The camera’s memory card could hold two or three songs,
and the camera had a headphone jack and fit in his pocket, so no one had to know it
was not an iPod.
Multitasking, like appropriation, is a new media literacy that is at odds with
existing standards of schools. Multitasking is regularly lamented by teachers,
parents, and other adults who believe young people are distracted and hampered by
short attention spans. Indeed, in schools, where being “on task” is the name of the
game, multitasking is not a highly rewarded skill. However, in a media and
information saturated environment, multitasking can be viewed as a strategic effort
to deal with the barrage of information. As Jenkins et al write, “multi-tasking and
attention should not be seen as oppositional forces. Rather, we should think of them
as two complementary skills, both strategically employed by the brain to intelligently

93
manage constraints on short-term memory.”
51

Some of the most salient examples of new media literacies I can draw from
my observations at MMS and other schools combine skills in appropriation (or what
I might call “making do,”) with multitasking skills. Multitasking is a skill that I very
much take for granted because it is easy for me to access the sites and programs I
wish to use. For the students I observed, these activities were not nearly as seamless.
First of all, they were all forbidden by the classroom rules. The classroom setup,
however, made it possible at times to pull off these activities in covert ways.
Technical restrictions presented a bit more of a challenge, but students amazed me in
their persistence and ability to get around filters and blocked sites, as well as in their
efforts to hide what they were doing from the teachers. For example, students knew
to watch videos on Google Video rather than YouTube because Google Video was
not blocked by the school’s filtering software, but YouTube was. The preferred
video genre was skateboarding demonstrations, which did not require audio. Once
the technical issues were addressed, a quick use of Command+Tab allowed students
to watch videos while the teacher circulated on the other side of the room and
quickly switch back to the PowerPoint they were expected to be working on as he
approached their desks. In another classroom, the students did not have
administrative privileges to install software on the laptops, so they could not install
instant messenger software. However, the old PCs in the back of the classroom were
not set up in the same way as the laptops, so the students installed the software there
and arranged for one student to act as a lookout while the other chatted. (The big

94
downfall of this activity was, of course, that the majority of the people the students
hoped to chat with were in other classrooms working on computers on which they
could not chat.) In both of these examples, it is clear that the social skills necessary
to achieve the task are as (if not more) important than the technical skills.
Distributed cognition relates to the navigation of structures and institutions I
discussed in relation to schools in the previous chapter. As Jenkins et al describe
distributed cognition as “about tapping social institutions and practices or remote
experts whose knowledge may be useful in solving a particular problem.”
52
(p. 37).
Distributed cognition highlights the value of social capital in solving problems or
obtaining necessary information. Similarly, collective intelligence focuses on
collaborative problem solving, operating on the principle that no one knows
everything, but everyone knows something. Again, like appropriation and
multitasking, collective intelligence is not a highly rewarded skill in most
educational environments, which are focused on individual achievement. Jenkins et
al write: “Unfortunately, most contemporary education focuses on training
autonomous problem solvers and is not well suited to equip students with these
skills. Whereas a collective intelligence community encourages ownership of work
as a group, schools grade individuals
53
.”
Similarly, networking refers to the ability to find resources—be they
information, media, or human resources. In the classroom, collective intelligence and
networking often took the form of troubleshooting technology and software during
production projects. Because the teachers were just a few steps ahead of the students

95
in technical skills, they often worked with the students to fix problems with the
media projects, such as dropped audio or playback issues. Students also worked
collaboratively with their classmates to figure out how to complete assignments and
address technical issues. When a student figured out a particularly difficult problem,
he or she was sometimes called upon to demonstrate for the class or to assist the
teacher in helping other students. Many of the kids I observed and spoke with in the
Harry Potter fandom were experts in harnessing collective intelligence and
networking. In the months and weeks leading up to the release of the seventh book,
fans worked together to come up with theories about the plot of the book, scoured
the internet, magazines, news programs, and other books for clues that might help
them figure out some of the remaining mysteries of the series. Theorizing and
spoiling were two of the most compelling fandom activities during my fieldwork and
continue to a great extent despite the “close” of the canon.
Judgment is the new media literacy that most closely resembles “traditional”
media literacy skills. Judgment is the ability to assess the credibility of information
presented in media. Understanding credibility and bias are essential decoding skills
for all media. In the new media environment, judgment becomes particularly
important because of the abundance of resources and because traditional gatekeepers
(markers of credibility) are not always available or valid. Negotiation is related to
judgment in that it is the ability to move between communities, understand multiple
perspectives, and treat people with diverse experiences/opinions/ways of seeing the
world respectfully. In order to do this, young people need to have dependable

96
judgment skills, which will not only help them assess the information they
encounter, but their existing beliefs.
Finally, transmedia navigation addresses the intertextual nature of
contemporary media properties as well as the role of amateur production in
extending media franchises. As I discussed in chapter four, intertextuality is a
longtime feature of children’s media. What has changed in the new media
environment is the extent to which intertextuality is built into every media property,
and the ways in which readers are encouraged to participate in building the property
through their own production.
It is important to remember that new media literacies, like all forms of
literacy, are not ideologically neutral skills. New media literacies have been framed
in terms of a particular set of skills necessary for current and future citizenship and
participation, thereby contributing to the definition and reinforcement of assumptions
about who may participate and in what ways. New media literacies are socially and
culturally embedded within the specific context of the participatory culture of the
web and make sense only within this particular historical, social, cultural, and
technological context. The ideological underpinnings of new media literacy are a
large part of the difficulty of translating them to curricula, particularly within our
current educational policy climate of standardization and “accountability.”
Jenkins et al have noted that new media literacies have become a new kind of
hidden curriculum in schools. Hidden curriculum has been described as "the tacit
teaching of social and economic norms and expectations to students in schools
54
"

97
(Apple, 42). However, Apple notes that the hidden curriculum may not be as hidden
to students as educators may believe. As a hidden curriculum, new media literacies
continue to reinforce some of the same ideological assumptions that have been a part
of digital divide discourse for fifteen-plus years. Some of these assumptions are
related to the value of learning to use technology and the importance of particular
skills to future employment; others are assumptions about the types of people--in
terms of gender, race, age, socioeconomic status, ability--who are skilled with
technology and successful in a labor force highly dependent on technology.
New media literacy can also be understood as a kind of habitus
55
, actions that
are both structured and structuring for an individual’s participation with new media.
Looking at new media literacies as habitus (or part of habitus) emphasizes the
embedded nature of literacy as well as the institutions and discourses that structure
new media use. Because new media literacies are tied closely to everyday practices
of media consumption and production, communication, and self-expression, it makes
sense that they would be habitual (and to some extent, “naturalized”), tied to access
and status, and fluid across different types of media. These characteristics make new
media literacies more of a “way of being
56
.” than a set of competencies or resources.
In our report on the Digital Youth project
57
, we have proposed three “genres
of participation” as an alternative way of understanding kids’ participation with new
media—hanging out, messing around, and geeking out (Horst, Herr-Stephenson, and
Robinson, in press). As Mizuko Ito noted in the introduction to the report, genres of
participation address the question of the relationship between agency and structure in

98
a similar way to habitus
58
or structuration
59
. Genres of participation is different in its
specificity to media content; as Ito writes: “…closely allied with humanistic analysis,
a notion of genre, however, foregrounds the interpretive dimensions of human
orderliness…We recognize certain patterns of representation (textual genres) and in
turn engage with them in social, routinized ways (participation genres)
60
.” (p. 13).
Genres of participation are another way of understanding participation; however,
they do not foreground structure, class, and taste in the same way as habitus.
Tools for consumer citizens

New media literacies are linked to consumer citizenship through specific
constructions of kids as current and future citizens. One of the features of online
media and communities that is often highlighted in discussions of new media
literacies is that they open up opportunities for participation in interest-driven
groups. These groups may or may not be directly related to civic participation, but
offer opportunities to be a part of a group or a team that might not be otherwise open
to young people. Through these opportunities for participation, kids are constructed
as currently empowered citizens. Much of the time, opportunities for participation
are related to consumer culture in some way, and empowerment means participation
through consumption or activities tangential to consumption.
In addition to constructing kids as current consumer citizens, new media
literacies gesture toward their value in creating future citizens. One way in which
future citizenship is discussed in discourses about new media literacies is in relation
to labor. For example, consider again NCTE’s proficiencies for readers and writers

99
in the 21
st
century: proficiency with technology, collaborative problem solving,
designing and sharing information for global communities, manage multiple streams
of information, analysis and creation of multimedia texts, and attention to ethics
within new media environments. All of the skills described as essential to literacy by
NCTE have real consequences for students’ future work—if they work within the
sphere of knowledge production. The technological and computer skills that are
emphasized by new media literacies and NCTE’s 21
st
century literacies are
associated with what have been called “creative class” jobs (Florida) that traffic in
knowledge instead of physical commodities.
The future-orientation of new media literacies is also evident in discourses
about future civic participation. Whereas new media literacies provide opportunities
for kids to participate now in some communities and in particular ways, new media
literacies are also constructed as empowering future participation within the sphere
of politics. As Jenkins et al. write,
Empowerment comes from making meaningful decisions within a real civic
context: we learn the skills of citizenship by becoming political actors and
gradually coming to understand the choices we make in political terms.
Today’s children learn through play the skills they will apply to more serious
tasks later. The challenge is how to connect decisions in the context of our
everyday lives with the decisions made at local, state, or national levels. The
step from watching television news and acting politically seems greater than
the transition from being a political actor in a game world to acting politically
in the “real world
61
.

The idea that consumer citizenship can “transfer” to political citizenship is viewed
with some skepticism. For example, as Livingstone, Bober, and Helsper write:
It seems to be widely assumed that the Internet can facilitate participation
precisely because of its interactivity, encouraging its users to ‘sit forward’,

100
click on the options, find the opportunities exciting, begin to contribute
content, come to feel part of a community and so, perhaps by gradual steps,
shift from acting as a consumer to increasingly (or in addition) acting as a
citizen
62
.

However, some organizations have expertly blended consumer citizenship and
political participation. For example, MTV’s Rock the Vote
63
is an organization with
a strong online presence that is linked to both consumer citizenship and political
notions of citizenship. Through popular culture, young voters are introduced to
voting, encouraged to register to vote, and pointed toward resources to help them
become informed on various political issues. At the same time, participating in Rock
the Vote activities (online or by attending events) means participating in a space
constructed by MTV and ultimately for the benefit of the network.
As has been the case in children’s news programming, certain topics
addressed in new media formats have been “marked” as children’s issues. David
Buckingham has called particular attention to issues of ecology and animal rights as
covered in kids’ news programs
64
. Livingstone, Bober, and Helsper found that
similar topics were of interest to kids online. They write:
When it comes to actively seeking out information about political,
environmental, human rights or other participatory issues, over half (54 per
cent) of 12- to 19-year-olds who go online at least once a week have visited
at least one such website, with 27 per cent having visited a charity website,
22 per cent an environmental site, 21 per cent a government site, 18 per cent
a site concerned with human/gay/children’s rights and 14 per cent a site
concerned with improving conditions at school/work
65
. (294-295)

These authors propose three categories of young internet users: Interactors, the
Civic-Minded, and the Disengaged. In terms of new media literacies, Interactors can
be classified as being the most active in the practices valued by new media literacy,

101
including producing their own web pages. However, the authors note that despite
their intensive use of digital media, they are no more likely than other users to
participate in civic activities online. They further note that Interactors are most likely
to be male, middle class, and to have internet access in their homes. The second
category identified by these authors, the Civic-Minded, “are distinctive for being
much more likely to visit a range of types of civic websites and sites concerned with
human rights issues
66
.”They note that the civic minded tend to pursue already-
developed interests in their online use and are most often female, middle class, with
home access to the internet. The third category, the Disengaged, describes the
students I worked with at CMS. Disengaged users are unlikely to participate in civic
websites or production and frequently have limited access to online media.
Livingstone, Bober, and Helsper’s observation that the Civic-Minded tended
to move from offline to online in pursuit of specific interests indicates an opportunity
for intervention by “3D” institutions such as schools. It has been my experience, in
observing the students at CMS and in other fieldwork with youth in online
communities, that the interests that motivate participation generally do start offline,
whether it is music or sports or a particular piece of popular culture. Consumer
citizenship can be a powerful hook for civic participation, both on and offline.
Perhaps it is the case that if schools embrace media literacy and popular culture as
integral parts of the curriculum, they could tap into the momentum toward
participation prompted by consumer citizenship.

102
Chapter 3 Endnotes

1
Seiter, The Internet Playground : Children's Access, Entertainment, and Mis-
Education, 2.
2
Kathleen Knight Abowitz and Jason Harnish, "Contemporary Discourses of
Citizenship," Review of Educational Research 76, no. 4 (2006).
3
Banet-Weiser, Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship, 11.
4
Dan Schiller, How to Think About Information (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois
Press, 2006), 8.
5
Ibid., 21.
6
Jenkins et al., "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media
Education for the 21st Century."
7
Abowitz and Harnish, "Contemporary Discourses of Citizenship."
8
Michael Schudson, "Citizens, Consumers, and the Good Society," The ANNALS of
the American Academy of Political and Social Science 611, no. 1 (2007): 237.
9
Ibid.
10
Banet-Weiser, Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship, 6.
11
Juliet B. Schor, "In Defense of Consumer Critique: Revisiting the Consumption
Debates of the Twentieth Century," The ANNALS of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science 611, no. 1 (2007): 25.
12
Ibid.
13
Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer's Republic : The Politics of Mass Consumption in
Postwar America, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 2003), 27-28.
14
Schudson, "Citizens, Consumers, and the Good Society."
15
McNeal, Kids as Customers : A Handbook of Marketing to Children.
16
Banet-Weiser, Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship.
17
Ibid.
18
Marc Prensky, "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants," On the Horizon 9, no. 5

103

(2001), John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, Born Digital: Understanding the First
Generation of Digital Natives (New York: Basic Books, 2008).
19
Roberts, Foehr, and Rideout, "Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year
Olds."
20
Although the Digital Youth Project uses a similar phrase in its title, the research
aims to look at the specific practices of youth with digital media, rather than relying
on generational characteristics to assume that kids are naturally savvy with
technology.
21
http://www.neopets.com
22
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com
23
http://www.clubpenguin.com/
24
Mizuko Ito and Heather A. Horst, "Neopoints and Neoeconomies: Emergent
Regimes of Value in Kids Peer-to-Peer Networks," in Annual meeting of the
American Anthropological Association (San Jose, CA: 2006), 6.
25
http://www.quizilla.com/
26
http://www.quizilla.com/quizzes/7703985/what-genre-of-music-are-you
27
http://www.quizilla.com/quizzes/100259/which-anime-stereotype-are-you
28
David Barton and Mary Hamilton, "Literacy Practices," in Situated Literacies:
Reading and Writing in Context, ed. David Barton, Mary Hamilton, and Roz Ivanic
(London and New York: Routledge, 2000).
29
Shirley Brice Heath, Ways with Words : Language, Life, and Work in
Communities and Classrooms (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1983).
30
Brian Street, "What's "New" In New Literacy Studies? Critical Approaches to
Literacy in Theory and Practice " Current Issues in Comparative Education 5, no. 2
(1995).
31
Ibid.: 77.
32
Ibid.: 29.
33
Courtney Cazden et al., "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social
Futures," Harvard Educational Review 66, no. 1 (1996).

104

34
Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear, A New Literacies Sampler, New Literacies
and Digital Epistemologies, (New York: P. Lang, 2007), 7.
35
Ibid.
36
There is a large literature on after-school programs (some focused on media, some
not) and educational achievement that I have not reviewed in this chapter. Some
key texts include: Hull, Glynda and Katherine Schultz, eds. 2002b. School’s
Out!: Bridging Out-of-School Literacies with Classroom Practice. New York:
Teachers College Press. Mahiri, Jabari, ed. 2004. What They Don’t Learn in
School: Literacy in the Lives of Urban Youth. New York: Peter Lang. See
alsoIbid, Jenkins et al., "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture:
Media Education for the 21st Century.", Mizuko Ito et al., "Hanging out,
Messing around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media,"
(The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, forthcoming).
37
David Buckingham, "Media Education Goes Digital: An Introduction," Learning,
Media and Technology 32, no. 2 (2007): 96.
38
James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and
Literacy (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2003).
39
See, for example,Kurt Squire, "Open-Ended Video Games: A Model for
Developing Learning for the Interactive Age," in Ecology of Games, ed. Katie Salen
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), Reed Stevens, Tom Satwicz, and Laurie
McCarthy, "In-Game, in-Room, in-World: Reconnecting Video Game Play to the
Rest of Kids' Lives," in Ecology of Games, ed. Katie Salen (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2007).
40
Cheat codes are sequences of buttons or actions known to activate hidden content
(what is sometimes called and “Easter egg”) in the game. The hidden content is
programmed by the game designers, and it is up to game players to figure out the
correct codes. Cheat codes become a kind of cultural capital in among gamers. For
more on cheat codes, see Mia Consalvo, Cheating: Gaining Advantage in
Videogames (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).
41
Jenkins et al., "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media
Education for the 21st Century."
42
Ibid., 19.
43
http://www.ncte.org/about/gov/129117.htm
44
Ito et al., "Hanging out, Messing around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and
Learning with New Media."

105

45
Gee, Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling.
46
Jenkins et al., "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media
Education for the 21st Century."
47
Mizuko Ito, "Mobilizing the Imagination in Everyday Play: The Case of Japanese
Media Mixes," in The International Handbook of Children, Media, and Culture, ed.
Kirsten Drotner and Sonia Livingstone (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications,
2008).
48
It is important to note that performance (as a new media literacy) is different from
performativity, as articulated by Butler in that it refers to an active construction of a
particular version of identity—much like a costume or a role in a play.
Performativity, on the other hand, does not refer to an elective process of identity
articulation, but to the ways in which a person’s identity is shaped by subject
positions.
49
Jenkins et al., "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media
Education for the 21st Century," 23.
50
Ibid., 32.
51
Ibid., 35.
52
Ibid.
53
Ibid., 41.
54
Michael W. Apple, Ideology and Curriculum, 3rd ed. (New York:
Routledge/Falmer, 2004), 42.
55
Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.
56
Constance Steinkuehler and Rebekah Black, "Researching Literacy as Tool, Place,
and Way of Being," Reading Research Quarterly 40, no. 1 (2004).
57
Ito et al., "Hanging out, Messing around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and
Learning with New Media."
58
Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.
59
Ibid, Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory : Action, Structure,
and Contradiction in Social Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1979).
60
Ito et al., "Hanging out, Messing around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and

106

Learning with New Media," 13.
61
Jenkins et al., "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media
Education for the 21st Century," 10.
62
Livingstone, "Media Literacy and the Challenge of New Information and
Communication Technologies," 289.
63
http://www.rockthevote.com/
64
David Buckingham, The Making of Citizens : Young People, News, and Politics,
Media, Education and Culture (London ; New York: Routledge, 2000).
65
Sonia Livingstone, Magdalena Bober, and Ellen Helsper, "Active Participation or
Just More Information? Young People's Take up of Opportunities to Act and Interact
on the Internet," Information, Communication & Society 8, no. 3 (2005): 294-95.
66
Ibid.: 302.

107
Chapter 4: Media Production and Identity

In the previous two chapters, I have addressed media production as a form of
media education within differing contexts of participation and citizenship. As we
have seen through the examples of the junk food documentaries and the website
project, two of the goals of media literacy and new media literacies are the
production of a critical stance toward media and the provision of alternative spaces
for communication. A third goal, which I will examine in this chapter, is the
production of literate identities.
I begin this chapter with a general discussion of theories of identity and
subjectivity, focusing on the social construction of identity. I then look at two poetry-
based productions produced by the students in Mr. Davidson’s class at CMS,
examining the ways in which students were able to use media production tools to
explore and represent identity in meaningful ways.

The social construction of identity
In his introduction to the MacArthur volume on Youth, Identity and Digital
Media, David Buckingham notes that understanding identity is difficult in our
current historical moment because of a "fundamental paradox" in which identity
simultaneously means what is unique and consistent about us and how we identify
with broader collectives (such as gender, culture, or nation.) He writes:
Identity is not merely a matter of playful experimentation or 'personal
growth': it is also about the life-or-death struggles for self determination that

108
are currently being waged in so many parts of the world...Globalization, the
decline of the welfare state, increasing social mobility, greater flexibility in
employment, insecurity in personal relationships--all these developments are
contributing to a sense of fragmentation and uncertainty, in which the
traditional resources for identity formation are no longer so straightforward or
so easily available.
1

Sociocultural theories of identity formation posit identity as a social construction
rather than a fixed and predetermined characteristic of an individual. As a social
construction, identity is messy and never fully achieved. Understanding identity as
multiple, fluid, and hybrid is an important outcome of work in cultural studies,
particularly work related to understanding race, class, and gender. Indeed, identity is
often described as plural—identities—which are partial and negotiated. Hybridity
refers to the idea that people are all of these things at once.
2
In both sociocultural and
psychological/ developmental theories of identity development, identity work is
ascribed a particular importance to young people. Figuring out identity is often
considered part of the work of childhood and particularly important work during
adolescence.
3

Neo-Marxist theory has put forth the idea that identities are constructed in
relation to subject positions, which are created through discourse, mapped to
particular ideologies, and reinforced by various institutions (such as what Althusser
called “Ideological State Apparatuses” or what Bourdieu called “fields”).
4

Institutions such as education, religion, the fields of medicine and law, popular and
commercial culture, and economics (among many others) contribute to the subject
positions available to young people for identity formation. These institutions

109
interpellate individuals to subject positions within discourses, thereby producing
subjects. Stuart Hall describes the encompassing power of discourse as follows:
"The 'subject' is produced within the discourse. This subject of discourse
cannot be outside discourse, because it must be subjected to discourse. It
must submit to its rules and conventions, to its dispositions of
power/knowledge. The subject can become the bearer of the kind of
knowledge which discourse produces. It can become the object through
which power is relayed. But it cannot stand outside power/knowledge as its
source and author.”
5

Identity is both created and limited by the subject positions created by discourse. As
subjects, we are compelled toward particular viewpoints as a result of our occupation
of the subject position, and while we may resist particular subjectivities, we can
never step outside of discourse.
The development of identity, then, is the process of positioning oneself in
relation to subject positions. It is important to remember that subjectivity is made up
of a variety of factors—gender is intertwined with sexuality, race, and class, for
example—and that subjectivity and identity are flexible and dynamic. That is, in
order to get a clear picture of one’s identity, we must not only consider what it means
to be female, but what it means to be female, white, heterosexual, and middle class.
As Ien Ang writes, “Gender identity, in short, is both multiple and partial, ambiguous
and incoherent, permanently in the process of being articulated, disarticulated and
rearticulated.”
6
The same goes for other aspects of identity.
Judith Butler introduced the concept of performativity to her work on gender
identity as a way to understand the process by which subjects negotiate the demands
of various subjectivities.
7
Performativity does not, in this view, represent a voluntary

110
choice of identity or subjectivity; on the contrary, it represents a highly constrained
and hegemonic process. Angela McRobbie describes this disavowing of voluntarism
as one of the key aspects of Butler’s concept of performativity. She writes:
Butler insists on the absence of an ‘I’ who might ‘do’ or ‘can do’ gender in a
subversive way. Any indicator of an ‘active agent’ is antipathetic to her entire
analysis. She does argue however that the ‘iterability of performativity’ is a
‘theory of agency’ but without, of course, an agent. There is no stable subject
in this sense, nor can there be one…This allows for a very different, much
more theorized, psychoanalytically informed, and also more narrow,
‘entrapped’ and more rigorously delineated possibility for re-signification or
re-articulation.
8

In the absence of an agent, there can be no such thing as an “essential” or static
identity, even if such an identity is desired, because identity only exists within
discourse, which is not fixed. Butler describes the idea of an essential identity as a
fantasy and an impossibility. She writes:
“According to the understanding of identification as an enacted fantasy or
incorporation, however, it is clear that coherence is desired, wished for,
idealized, and that this idealization is an effect of a corporeal signification. In
other words, acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core
or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of
signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal the organizing principle of
identity as a cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are
performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise
purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through
corporeal signs and other discursive means.
9

Although performativity does not refer to a voluntary “trying on” of identities, this is
a practice that happens in media environments such as video games and virtual
worlds. However, Butler’s concept of performativity would account for the range of
possible ways to signify identity offered within a particular space as well as the tacit
and explicit restrictions, requirements and assumptions that structure the subject

111
positions available. For example, performativity would refer not to the choice of
playing a male or female character in a video game, but to the features, advantages,
and disadvantages that are built in to the game engine and influence play as a male or
female character.
Much of the work of identity formation for young people is framed in terms
of learning. Because children and teens are frequently understood as not-yet-fully-
formed beings, figuring out identity requires exploration and reflection. Schools,
classrooms, and informal learning communities can provide opportunities to do some
of this work; each context brings with it, of course, a different set of subject positions
and expectations within which participants must negotiate identity. In this way,
learning and identity formation are situated within a particular context. Jean Lave
and Etienne Wenger have written about “situated learning,” in which learning takes
place within a community of practice—that is, a group of learners whose interactions
are structured by shared knowledge and beliefs.
10
Situated learning is first and
foremost a theory of knowledge acquisition; focus on the embedded nature of
learning within particular contexts is presented as an alternative to the
decontextualized learning that takes place in many classrooms. However, some of
what is learned within communities of practice has to do with identity, in particular
how to understand one’s position in relation to the subject positions offered by a
community or context. Situated learning has focused on learning contexts such as
trade apprenticeships, in which the assessment of learning is clearly tied to identity—
one has successfully learned to be a tailor when he or she is recognized by others as a

112
master tailor. Moje and Lewis reiterate this point, noting that “deep, participatory
learning involves learning not only the stuff of a discipline--science content, for
example, but also how to think and act something like a scientist, even if one does
not enter the profession of science.”
11

Elaborating on the role of identity in educational contexts, James Paul Gee
proposes four ways of understanding identity: nature identity, institution identity,
discourse identity, and affinity identity.
12
Nature identity (or N-Identity) accounts for
identity as a function of biology. Gee uses the example of being an identical twin to
illustrate nature identity. He is not a twin because of any identity work he himself put
in—it is, in this way a “natural” occurrence—however, being a twin can be an
important influence on the way he comes to understand identity. Institution identity
(I-identity) is similar to the idea of subject position; I-Identity comes from the
structuring forces of institutions and refers to the ways in which an individual is
interpellated within particular structures and subject positions. Discourse Identity (D-
Identity), according to Gee, refers to the characteristics of identity that allow one to
be recognized by others as a particular “kind of person.”
13
D-Identity reflects the
successful assumption of a subject position; if one is able to be recognized by others
as a particular kind of person through his her behaviors, that person has successfully
learned to perform identity in the way that subject position dictates. Finally, Affinity
Identity (A-Identity) reflects a person’s identity as a part of a group. A-Identity is
most closely aligned with Lave and Wenger’s idea of community of practice, in that
it is through participation in an affinity group (a group of people with shared

113
interests, goals, and beliefs) that an individual develops and can be recognized as
having a particular identity. Gee notes that almost any identity trait can be
understood within any of these four interpretive systems, and that using them in
combination can help educators understand better the identity of their students.
Much current research on kids, technology, and identity has focused on what
Gee has termed “A-Identities.” It is assumed that by understanding what kids do with
technology, one can also understand what kind of person they are (or, more often,
what kind of person they will become.) This type of thinking is seen in the
discourses about the digital divide that I have discussed in the previous chapter. It is
also used in the discourses of exceptionality, which I will discuss in chapter five. A-
Identities may give a great deal of information about a child or teen’s identity, but
certainly cannot give the whole picture. Discourses about “Digital Natives,”
14

“Generation M,”
15
or the “The Net Generation”
16
rely on N-Identity to call attention
to what are assumed to be “natural” proclivities toward media and technology;
17

again, these discourses give only one piece of the whole story of identity.
For young people in the US at this particular historical moment, the
construction of identity requires attention to a great number of subject positions, such
as those related to gender, race, age class, sexuality, ability, and citizenship. Media
and technology reflect subject positions through representations, thus providing
important resources for constructing identity. Despite its denigrated position in
“official” hierarchies of cultural capital, media popular culture is frequently used to
“brand” oneself as a particular kind of person (what Gee describes as D-Identity). In

114
addition, media and technology offer spaces in which young people can explore,
construct, reflect upon, and resist identity. In the next section of this chapter, I will
give a (very) brief overview of some of the key work related to media production and
identity formation. It is in no way a complete literature review on youth media
production. Readers should note that much of the work cited here deals explicitly
with girls’ media production, as cultural production is an important site of inquiry
within the growing field of girls’ studies.
18

Remix, rehearse, resist: new media and identity projects
In their investigation of youth identity and digital media production, Weber
and Mitchell describe the “constructedness” of identity (and specifically
representations of identity) through digital media.
19
They use the analogy of
construction toys (like blocks or the much cooler K’Nex) to describe building
identity through media production. They write that when producing media or
identity, “you usually start out using the materials at hand, respecting or finding
ways to get around their limitations, working with others or alone. Suggested
blueprints or models may be included … but individual and collective uses and
interpretations of them may differ; negotiation, subversion, and adaptation are
commonplace.”
20

Demonstrating a similar focus on construction of identity, JoEllen
Fisherkeller describes adolescent identity formation as an “identity project[s],” a
term she borrows from Margaret Mead, to describe “the essential work in which a

115
self engages to make sense of her or his particular social positions and life
circumstances.”
21
Adolescents’ identity projects are never conducted in isolation.
The word “project” indicates the ongoing nature of the process, and gestures toward
an image of one constructing identity (as one would an art project.) Like Weber and
Mitchell, Fisherkeller notes that the materials for this work are diverse and include
the experiences, ideas, and encounters with different structures and types of power
that people encounter every day. This includes mediated experiences and ideas
transmitted through television and other media.
Because media is a shared element of peer relationships, it acts as an
important source of capital for identity projects. Fisherkeller describes the way
students “‘lift’ and ‘transport’”
22
into the school environment salient parts of the
media they consume. For example, quoting funny lines from sitcoms or reenacting
scenes, song lyrics, and dance moves from In Living Color, one of the most popular
shows with adolescents at the time Fisherkeller conducted her fieldwork (1991-
1992).
Although the circumstances of the individual students I got to know in my
school-based fieldwork varied, they shared a similar set of media resources for
representing identity. Almost all of the students watched television regularly; The
Simpsons and Southpark were favorite programs of both boys and girls in the class.
Several of the girls were also heavily invested in High School Musical and the
Spanish language program Rebelde at the time of my fieldwork. Television

116
references made their way into several of the students’ productions, often providing
needed levity to an otherwise didactic project.
Music, ranging from hip hop to pop (in English and in Spanish) was an
important shared resource. Some students decorated notebooks with stickers and
pictures of favorite bands. When I conducted home interviews, several of the
students showed me their MySpace pages, which always had a profile song and often
had pictures of bands or musical performers in addition to pictures of friends and
family. The use of music in the classroom was extremely interesting and important to
the context of the production projects. I will return to music in a later section of this
chapter.
Videogames were a third important category of shared resources. Early on in
my observations in the classroom, I began to talk regularly with the boys in the class
about gaming. The majority of them played console games exclusively. When I
visited Gabriel, Justin, and Carlos at home to conduct interviews, they proudly
showed me their gaming systems and games. A few of the girls played videogames,
but tended to be less vocal about it. The exception to this was Nina, who would call
across the classroom to interject into the conversations I was having about games
with other students.
While Fisherkeller uses “lift” and “transport” to describe students’ practices
of transposing media onto classroom practice,
23
one could substitute “appropriate” or
“remix.” Appropriation of media for one’s own representations or productions has a
long history within media fandoms, as Henry Jenkins describes in Textual

117
Poachers.
24
Fans are hyperactive consumers of media, creating new meanings in the
media they consume through negotiated and resistant readings of texts, and expertly
appropriating media for representations of identity. Jenkins notes that through
production such as writing fan fiction and vidding, fans “transform the experience of
media consumption into the production of new texts, indeed of a new culture and
new community”
25
thus marking their identity as fans not only with the source
material but with their own productions. Appropriation remains an important concept
in studies of fandom and subculture
26
but has also gone “mainstream,” largely due to
new forms of digital media that make appropriation less costly in terms of technical
needs and specialized knowledge.
Sometimes, what is appropriated is not the media itself, but the discourses
within a particular piece or genre of media. For example, print media such as teen
magazines have been noted as an important resource in the construction of identity
for teenage girls due to their roles as guides to femininity. In reading and talking
about the content of teen magazines, girls “rehearse” the scripts of femininity put
forth on their pages. In her study of the girls’ magazines Jackie and Just Seventeen,
Angela McRobbie described the magazines as guides for girls.
27
Also focused on
popular girls’ magazines, Margaret Finders discusses teen magazines as a way for
girls to mark boundaries of affiliation by reading magazines together at exclusive
social gatherings, to create status hierarchies within groups (sometimes literally
based on whose copy of the magazine arrives first in the mail, other times based on
how closely a girl can approximate an outfit modeled in the magazine), and to

118
“borrow authority”
28
as a woman by appropriating ways of talking about topics such
as appearance, relationships, sexuality, and other aspects of “womanhood” modeled
in the magazines. The ways in which girls in McRobbie’s and Finders’s studies use
the magazines to learn about the parameters of femininity and the expectations others
have for them as young women are excellent examples of the performative aspect of
gender identity Butler theorizes. The girls enact femininity in a particular and
recognizable way not by choice, but because messages about what it means to be
female are culturally pervasive, including in media that addresses them as
empowered social participants.
The girls I got to know at CMS were not avid magazine readers, likely due to
the cost of the periodicals and their individual reading difficulties. They were,
however, very interested in certain topics related to fashion and particular celebrities
such as Chris Brown and Zac Ephron. When the girls had free time and access to the
laptops in the classroom (or if they had Internet access at home), they put their
Google skills to work to find pictures and information—similar to that which they
would find in a teen magazine, but from free sources—that they could then use in
their own rehearsals of femininity and teenager-dom.
“Remix” is one term used to describe the process of appropriation. Originally
used in relation to hip hop and electronic music, use “remix” has expanded to include
all manner of digital assets. Practices such as writing fan fiction can also fall under
the umbrella of remix, as it is creative writing that uses “assets” from another piece
of media—namely characters and settings from existing books, films, television

119
shows, and games.
29
Appropriation and remixing of popular culture has been, for
some kids, amplified and facilitated by new media and networked forms of
communication (such as social network sites like MySpace or Facebook.) Mizuko Ito
describes current remix practices not as entirely new practices, but as an
“augmentation of these existing practices by media formats more explicitly designed
to allow for user-level reshuffling and reenactment.”
30
As appropriation and remix
have become more popular modes of production, particularly with young people who
circulate their productions in public (and semi-public) online forums, questions
regarding copyright and ownership have come into the spotlight, calling into
question the legal and moral implications of such practice.
Appropriating and remixing the “right” kinds of media knowledge is a valued
skill within adolescent peer groups, as it signals group membership as well as
personal identity. Indeed, appropriation and remix can be understood as a means of
distinction—of marking one’s tastes and demonstrating cultural capital through the
knowledge leveraged in the remix. The high exchange value of media knowledge
Fisherkeller observed in middle schoolers is also described by Anne Haas Dyson’s
work with elementary school students writing plays for a classroom “author’s
theater.”
31
Dyson describes the possession of valuable media knowledge as a “ticket”
that buys entry into play based on media texts. In this case, media knowledge carves
out a space in which children can continue the process of identity work through
creative projects. In both of these classroom-based examples, media was used to
signify students’ media ecologies and preferences—what kind of media they liked,

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what kind of stories they found compelling or funny, what kind of access they had to
media, and what kind of representations they found salient to their own sense of
identity—demonstrating through their appropriation and remix of popular culture
within their everyday communication and play that they were a particular kind of
person.
In addition to everyday practices of appropriating and referencing popular
culture texts in the construction of identity, media production can provide kids with
resources and spaces to engage with questions of identity and subjectivity and to
rehearse identity in a more intense, organized, and public way. For example,
Susannah Stern has written about personal websites produced by teens.
32
She takes a
developmental approach to adolescent identity formation, noting that for teens,
figuring out identity is as much a biological and cognitive process as it is a social
one. Developmental changes in adolescence, according to Stern, “provide a context
in which online content creation can take on special meaning.”
33
The value of
production in online spaces is in opportunities to learn to manage complex
negotiations between one’s own needs and desires and the expectations of others.
Stern notes that online production reflects a “highly conscious process of self-
inquiry” in which young people “consciously and conscientiously negotiate the
boundaries of public and private spheres as they deliberate about who they are and
who they want to be, within their local community and the larger culture.”
34
The
online presence teens create for themselves in personal webpages and profiles on
social network sites thus provide a space for rehearsing identity that is situated

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within a continual loop of feedback from peers (and sometimes a larger public) as
well as a particular cultural and developmental context.
A slightly different type of production is addressed by Shayla Marie Thiel in
her investigation of girls’ identity construction through the practice of instant
messaging (IM).
35
Thiel asserts that IM provides a private space for girls to hold
conversations with friends, a way to flirt with boys that feels safer than talking in
person, an extension of social hierarchies, and a journal or diary to record
conversations related to identity projects. Through IM conversations, girls are able to
produce texts/conversations that emphasize (and hide) parts of their identities. This
“trying on” of identity is not the same as performativity, but can be seen as related in
that IM conversations reflect instances in which girls resist expectations regarding
gender and age in favor of practices that would be taboo in most other
circumstances—for example talking to boys, talking about sexuality, and using
abbreviations (“IM speak”) rather than “proper” grammar.
Media production has also been theorized as a space for young people to
actively resist or subvert particular aspects of identity and subjectivity. For example,
Mary Celeste Kearney notes that particularly for girls, media production represents a
notable subversion of the “dominant ideologies of gendered and generational
subjectivities.”
36
One example of girls’ media production are ‘zines, reader-produced
publications that mix clippings from magazines, photocopies, photos, and other
found objects to create a newsletter for likeminded teens. ‘Zines are an excellent
example of a type of media production that encourages resistance because they not

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only contain non-mainstream stories or information, but because they also actively
work toward unpacking the issues of identity—race, sexuality, class, etc—that
intersect with gender identity.
Kearney’s attention to the subversive possibilities of ‘zine production
highlights a common theme in work on youth culture: resistance. Although cultural
studies has been criticized for overemphasizing resistance, the ways in which people
interpret and enact cultural practices against the grain provide interesting insight into
shifting ideological territory of our social existence.
37
For example, Dick Hebdige
examined spaces for resistance and the way in which young people enact resistance
symbolically. His studies of music subcultures used semiotic analysis to uncover the
ideology contained in the adoption of particular styles.
38
For example, Punks’ mix
and match clothing “all kept ‘in place’ and ‘out of time’ by the spectacular
adhesives: the safety pins and plastic clothes pegs, the bondage straps and bits of
string which attracted so much horrified and fascinated attention.”
39
Digital media
production can provide for some kids an opportunity to construct a style that signals
resistance to dominant ideologies, not with safety pins and tape, but with images,
video, and text.
In her recent book, Girls Make Media, Kearney looks at non-print media,
including film and web design, as possible sites for girls to enact the same kind of
resistance to dominant ideologies of femininity.
40
She argues in the book that girls’
media production can allow for the development of what she calls a “girl gaze,” a
style of representation that reflects the way girls see the world. Media projects that

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reflect the girl gaze present counterhegemonic critiques of issues salient to girls’
identity projects such as beauty standards, femininity, relationships, race, sexuality,
ability, and generation.
Kearney notes two important developments that have contributed to increased
opportunities for girls to make media (and thereby an expansion of possibilities for
the girl gaze): first, the availability of consumer-level production gear, specifically
the camcorder, has made production more available to girls. Camcorders themselves
are relatively inexpensive (compared to professional video equipment) and require
little peripheral support (such as lighting or microphones) to achieve a decent
product. While individual girls may not be able to afford their own production gear
(as was the case with students I worked with at CMS), the lower costs associated
consumer video production equipment can make it a viable purchase for schools and
after school programs. The second development Kearney highlights is the role of
media literacy interventions in introducing girls to the possibilities of making media.
Many media education programs, particularly after school programs in urban areas
are targeted at specific groups of kids—such as low income groups, ethnic minority
students, and girls. Media literacy programs may or may not teach actual production
skills; however, their attention to political economy and ideology in analysis-based
curricula may trigger in girls an interest in media as a mode of self-expression.
41

Elizabeth Soep points to a different way in which the conditions of
production can create spaces for resistance to naturalized expectations for gender
identity.
42
Her ethnographic study of a group of teenage boys engaged in amateur

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video production captured the ways in which the boys negotiated between what they
thought masculinity looked like (modeled from movies), their own beliefs as part of
the Hard Core movement, and the restrictions placed by their position within the
home and under parental supervision. Soep noticed that:
While the content of the producers’ story displayed the kind of magnified
masculinity familiar in both popular discourse and academic treatments of
young male heterosexuality, their moment-to-moment interactions revealed a
very different ideology—one coded in everyday life and scholarship as
“feminine,” characterized by intimacy, propriety, and intense
collaboration…This dimension of hard-core masculinity reveals the layering
of scripts at work when boys (close friends who bond in real life over their
pact to avoid drugs and alcohol) act like girls (modeling femininity produced
within academic literature and popular ideology) in order to portray men
(who swear, drink, and intimidate until they shoot each other to death.”
43

The opportunity to operate within these “layers” of identity was, in this case,
afforded by the production task. This is not to say that media production is a
feminine task. However, Soep’s analysis implies that if the boys were only
consuming media and not producing their own media project, they most likely would
not be able to break through the top layer—that of hypermasculinity—that is
normalized for them.
The media produced at school by the CMS students did not feature the kinds
of resistance described by Kearney and Soep. The context of production likely had
great influence on the ways in which students approached the representation of
identity. As a school project, ostensibly linked to a grade, playing with or resisting
normative expressions of identity could have real material consequences. In addition
to the context of production, the amount of experience a person has using media to
represent identity appears to be important to enacting resistance through production.

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In the next section, I look closely at two of the media projects the students in
Mr. Davidson’s class produced. Both projects began with the task of writing a poem.
Each project took place in a slightly different classroom context and at different
points in the school year. (The I Poem assignment was the first media production
assignment of the year; Muchos Somos was undertaken toward the middle of the
spring semester.) Although I present the work of three different students, the changes
in how the students (in general) understood and represented identity through their
media productions, I believe, are clear and profound.
I Poems

The students in Mr. Davidson’s language classes began their series of media
production projects early in the school year with a poetry assignment. Students were
given the following prompt of 10 statements:

I POEM
I am … I laugh …
I see … I cry …
I touch … I fear …
I feel … I need …
I hear … I am …

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Students were asked write about themselves by completing each of the ten
statements in the prompt with a single word or a longer phrase. Mr. Davidson had
begun the school year with this exercise for a number of years. In past years students
created a paper collage to illustrate their poems. During the time of my fieldwork,
the class was using iMovie to illustrate their poems using digital images and music
for the first time. This project was an ambitious way to start the year in terms of its
content as well as the technical skills it required. Although students interpreted the
prompts in a variety of ways, responding in ways that ranged from surface-level
representations of identity to extremely personal information about themselves and
their families, asking students to share information about identity and emotions at the
beginning of the school year with a group of students and a teacher who they may or
may not have known from previous years or schools, was a challenging request.
Students began the project on paper, copying the prompts down from a
whiteboard in the classroom. Several students struggled from the outset to fill in the
prompts and settled (in their first drafts, at least) on basic descriptors such as
completing the prompt “I am…” with their first names. In many ways, the difficulty
students experienced with this prompt reflects the social construction of identity; if
identity is constructed in relation to various subject positions and structures of
power, and if identity is dynamic, partial, and (as Hall says) slightly out of reach, the
statement “I am…” is difficult (if not impossible) to complete.
This initial part of the project is a good example of what Butler meant by
performativity, and what Gee calls I-Identities and D-Identities.
44
The students

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struggled to perform the roles asked of them—likely in part because of competing
subject positions—such as adolescent masculinity, which deems poetry writing an
inappropriate activity for boys and thereby “authorizes” resistance to the
assignment—enacted in sarcastic answers and a great deal of procrastination that
took place at the start of the project. The students who resisted the assignment (for
what ever reason, gender, shyness, lack of motivation) struggled with the
expectations for their identities as a student (primarily defined through behavior and
adherence to classroom rules) and the conflicting elements of identity. That made
NOT writing poetry, NOT being a “good” student, and thereby protecting the other
elements of identity, such as masculinity and class, important.
Once students had composed their poems on paper, they were assigned a
laptop from the Macbook cart and instructed to type the poem in Microsoft Word.
Because the students in this class were beginning readers and writers, repetition and
practice writing was an important part of every project. Once the poem was typed,
students began looking for images. Some students included scans of family photos in
their projects. However, the majority of images came from online sources.
Mr. Davidson gave the students a brief tutorial on iMovie early on in the
project, and encouraged the students to play with the software and figure it out. He
told me once during one of my visits to the classroom that he plans into many
projects a brief introduction followed by a few class periods in which students have
time to struggle a bit with an assignment and to try to figure it out on their own
before he gives them additional instructions. This technique gives his students a

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chance to practice important critical thinking and problem solving skills, and is
aligned with constructivist teaching methods, which emphasize student-driven
inquiry and experimentation.
When students finished searching for images and began laying them into the
iMovie timeline, they also began to think about music to accompany the images.
When music was introduced in the classroom, an important shift happened to the
environment of the classroom and to the ways students thought about representing
themselves in the project. Students brought CDs from home (mainly burned CDs that
they told me they got from friends) and played them in the computers’ DVD drives.
Because the laptop cart did not come with headphones and the students did not often
have their own headphones with them (few had portable music devices and the use
of such devices, like cell phones, was not allowed on campus), they played the tracks
through the speakers on the laptop. The volume level of the music was at times a
source of tension between the students and the teacher and classroom assistants, and
there were several times during my observations that the classroom soundtrack
suddenly went silent after a string of obscene lyrics caught the teacher’s attention.
However, most of the time, there was a constant bed of music accompanying the
activity in the room. At times, music played from several machines created a
cacophony of pop and hip hop songs. Other times, a track piqued the interest of all
the students in the room, and they listened intently to the single song.
Musical tastes are a means of distinction (in Bourdieu’s terms) in that they
reflect group affiliation as well as individual cultural capital (although this capital

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likely exists separately from the "official" cultural capital of adults, school, and
society.)
45
Music is therefore, an important resource for adolescents in developing
and marking identity because it facilitates distinctions between themselves and adults
as well as from each other.
46
Robert Sardiello writes that musical tastes frequently
become linked to cultural information and values; music becomes a defining
characteristic of a "subculture" when those tastes and/or values differ substantially
from mainstream or dominant tastes and values.
47
The role of music in identity
formation varies, providing resources for representing identity that stretch beyond
the music or lyrics themselves to areas such as fashion or politics. In my own
fieldwork, as well as the work of other researchers on the Digital Youth project,
music was a desired and coveted commodity. Respondents described the
technological struggles and moral debates involved in downloading music as well as
various techniques for finding and recommending music within friend groups and
online communities. Looking across the cases included in the Digital Youth project,
we noted two music-focused practices of high importance to the kids and teens in our
studies. The first was using MySpace to represent their own musical tastes and to get
recommendations for new music. MySpace profiles often displayed pictures,
information, and sample tracks from teens' favorite bands. The second was the use of
music as a backdrop for hanging out. Rather than downloading music from online
services, the young people we spoke with in our studies tended to swap music among
their friends by trading burned CDs or listening to music while they were together.
48

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Josh Kun has described the concept of “audiotopias,” which he defines as
“small, momentary, lived utopias built, imagined, and sustained through sound,
noise, and music.”
49
Audiotopias describe spaces (real, symbolic, and imaginary)
made through the practice of listening to music. In this way, music can provide an
opportunity for identity work that is shaped by different influences and subjectivities
than in other parts of everyday life. Kun theorizes audiotopias as a space for
preserving diversity and fighting back against political oppression and cultural
assimilation. He writes:
Music in American life is the story of racial and ethnic difference; it is the
story of both nation formation and de-formation, the audible soundtrack to a
nation as it continually packs and unpacks itself. The song of America is not
singular or pretty or triumphant, but endlessly hybrid, multiple,
heterogeneous, and enriching--an always available site of psychological
reward, nourishment, and survival for populations who have been taught over
and over again that their lives do not matter.
50

By expanding the range of possible subject positions and creating a space for safe
and enjoyable construction and reflection on identity, music can have a profound
influence on the formation of identity. Using Kun’s notion of audiotopia, the
importance of allowing the kids to play music during work periods in the classrooms
is highlighted. Playing music they chose, liked, and related to created a safe space for
undertaking challenging thinking about identity and difficult literacy and production
skills. Through music, students created a space in which they felt some ownership of
the project and the skills they were working to develop, as well comfort and power in
the form of reinforcing (or approving) other aspects of their identities.

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For most of the students in the classroom, video editing on a computer was a
completely new experience and a brand new set of skills. However, students had
used computers for a variety of other tasks at home an in school, so they were
somewhat familiar with the basic hardware. Having the laptops in the classroom was
a huge benefit throughout the school year, as students were able to work on the same
computer throughout a project (barring any problems with the hardware.) Local
storage for their projects and a feeling of (at least temporary) ownership of the laptop
were significant benefits for students in the class, and the benefits of knowing that
your project would be there when you went back to it the following day, or being
able to import CDs to create a music library for soundtracks (and for listening while
working), or being able to download wallpaper to customize the desktop is
undervalued in schools. It makes a difference; students felt ownership of the
computers, so they took good care of them. They also felt comfortable working on
projects over a long period of time because they knew it would be there when they
came back to it.
The importance of revision in media production projects should not be
overlooked. In addition to providing opportunities to rework the content of the
project to better express the ideas students wanted to convey or to correct errors,
revisiting and revising writing on identity reinforced the need for the students to
reflect carefully upon the representations they had chosen. Few students’ finished I
Poems were exactly what they had written on paper in their first draft of the poem.
Although they were frequently resistant to making changes suggested by the teacher

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or classroom assistants (which most often had to do with grammar or spelling),
students seemed to enjoy and benefit from self-motivated revision, such as playing
with different images or trying out different fonts and text animations.
Despite working from a standard prompt, the content of students' I Poems
varied greatly. One girl wrote about being shy and chose images of anime characters
to illustrate her poem. Another student used images of the Gulf Coast after Hurricane
Katrina and wrote about his fear and confusion related to the disaster, which had just
occurred a few weeks prior to starting this assignment. Some students, like Felix, a
seventh grader, focused the I Poem on one particular marker of identity. The text of
Felix's I Poem appears below:

I am a soccer player
I see the field
I touch the ball
I feel the anger of scoring a goal
I hear people yelling
I am a soccer god
I laugh when my family makes jokes
I cry when I feal [feel] bad. Things dip in my hart [heart]
I fear tall buildings
I need my uniform to play soccer
I am fan of englend [England]

The text of Felix's poem was accompanied primarily by images of famous soccer
players and advertisements for soccer gear and apparel. In addition, a pop song with
lyrics in Spanish played throughout the movie. These media representations were
appropriated by Felix to help display his own identity as a "soccer god” (that is, a
competent male athlete) and a Mexican-American teen. Felix’s poem was consistent
with other markers of identity as a soccer player. He frequently talked about his team

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and wore soccer jerseys on “no uniform” days. What is particularly interesting about
Felix’s I Poem is the way he addresses the entries that deal with feelings. These three
lines: I laugh when my family makes jokes/I cry when I feal [feel] bad. Things dip in
my hart [heart]/I fear tall buildings are the only parts of the poem not about soccer.
He did not carry the theme of identity as a soccer player through these lines; he does
not, for example write “I laugh when my teammates tell jokes/ I cry when I lose a
game/I fear losing a game.” Indeed, the things that he mentions in relation to these
emotions are completely unrelated to the image he has constructed as a “soccer god.”
This omission could be read as Felix’s performing masculine identity in his
representation of himself as an athlete—a player who is powerful, focused only on
the game, and “immune” from feeling sad, happy, or afraid. It could also be read as a
reflection of his construction of identity based on representations of soccer players in
media. The other “soccer gods” he has chosen to include in his video are not people
he knows personally; he knows them through what he sees of them on television and
in articles, interviews, and profiles. It is unlikely that he knows what makes his
favorite players cry or what their fears are. (Notably, this information is sometimes a
part of celebrity profiles in girls/women’s magazines.)
A related concept to identity in terms of literacy and production is the concept
of voice. In contrast to performativity, which is not a voluntary practice, voice refers
to the choices people make in self presentation. In literary analysis, voice is often
analyzed in relation to tone in order to uncover underlying meaning of a text. Felix’s
identity is obviously not captured in its entirety by his I Poem, and while the ways he

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comes to understand his identity are inflected by various structural influences, the
representations of himself that he features in his media productions are chosen and
crafted to present a particular “version” of himself, to express his identity using a
particular voice. Separately, Nicole Fleetwood and Elisabeth Soep caution against
romanticized notions of authentic youth voice and the assumption that self-
expression is automatically emancipatory, reinforcing the need to examine the
contexts of production and participation carefully in relation to youth media
initiatives.
51

A careful choice of voice is particularly evident in the I Poem written by
Sara, a 13-year-old seventh grade student. Sara wrote about an extremely personal
event in her life--her parents' separation, focusing on her feelings about the event.
The text of the poem, along with the images and music Sara chose to accompany it in
her iMovie feature a particular voice that presents Sara as troubled, traumatized, and
fearful. In our interview later in the school year, Sara told me that the I Poem project
was not only the first time that she had made a movie, but also the first time she had
used a laptop or the Internet.
I am lonely
I see my parents fight
I touch my feelings
I feel like screaming
I hear them fight every night
I am afraid
I laugh when I am with my friends
I cry when I hear my parents fight
I fear that my parents will never get back together
I need my parents together
I am lonely

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Later in the school year, Sara wrote the following poem for the “We are Many”
project (described below). She struggled with the assignment for many days before
composing the poem that appears below. First few tries were nearly identical to her
friends’ poems, so she had to rewrite. This assignment stretched literate identity. She
was a girl who could do formulaic production (like the iPoem) or could participate as
part of production team, but not someone who could easily express feelings in
original ways in writing. Eventually, drew on feminine identity (as in first poem) to
complete the assignment.

Friend

I'm a caring person
Like the caring person I am I will always be there for my friends.
When they have problem I will try to help them with the problem
I give them advice in things that are wrong or right
My friends and I are like peas in a pod
I tell them not to give up in their dreams.
I encourage them in school to do their best
I hope we will stand friends for the rest of our lives
Like a flower, I cheer up my friends when they are sad.

The voice in this poem is quite different from her I Poem; in “Friend,” Sara
deals explicitly with identity (I am a caring person/My friends and I are like peas in a
pod). The voice in the text is more positive and confident. The photograph Sara
paired with the text, however, appears to tell a different story—one closer to the
voice of her I Poem. The image is a photograph of her with her two best friends. She
is in the center of the three; the girl on either side of her is smiling. She stares at the

136
camera with a blank expression. The photograph has been tinted blue and placed
upon a blue background on her PowerPoint slide.

When I spoke with Sara about this poem, she noted:
Well that one was mostly about my friends and my brothers and sisters. The
one I started first were about my friends ‘cause mostly I never had that much
friends before. And I had them since second grade. I thought we were gonna
split up, like my first friend I had, and we have been friends since second
grade.

Rather than focusing on a particular aspect of identity or giving a specific
representation of herself (e.g. a soccer player) in her poems, Sara has focused on the
ways in which she understands herself in relation to other significant people in her
life. Throughout our conversations during the school year, it was clear that much of
Sara's identity rested on being perceived as a "caring person," a good daughter, and a
good friend. Her poetry-based media productions gave her an opportunity to reaffirm
those aspects of her identity publicly.
Muchos Somos/We are Many

Later in the school year, the students undertook a version of a project
presented to the teachers and administrators during one of their professional
development follow-up workshops. This project, presented by a media artist and
activist, also used poetry as a basis for the media production. The project started with
a poem by Pablo Neruda called Muchos Somos (We Are Many), in which Neruda
explores the idea that identity is fragmented, multiple, and not completely in our
control.

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The project modeled the sentiment of Neruda’s poem both in the words of the
poem and in the multimedia presentation of the poem. Teachers were asked to write
a similar poem about the various aspects of their identities. Then, they staged a self
portrait to accompany the poem, manipulated the image using the image editing tools
in PowerPoint, and recorded their own voices reading their poems. The finished
project represented their reflection on identity in three ways: through the content of
the poem, through their visual depiction of themselves, and through their narration.
Following the workshop in which this project was introduced, Mr. Davidson decided
to try it with his Language Arts class.
Although they skipped the discussion of Neruda’s original poem, the rest of
the project was carried out in a way very similar to the way the teachers did it at the
workshop. Students were asked to compose a poem about identity, to design a
PowerPoint slide featuring their text and digital photographs they took and
manipulated using the image editing tools in PowerPoint, to record themselves
reading their poems, and to embed the narration into the PowerPoint slide. Students
were encouraged to think about how to represent themselves through their text and
their photographs and how the photo editing tools could help them manipulate the
photographs to tell the story in a more interesting or powerful way. Before they
began writing their poems, Mr. Davidson showed them his project from the
workshop as a model.
What was particularly unique about this assignment was the context in which
it was produced. In this case, Mr. Davidson’s class worked in collaboration with one

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of the "gifted and talented" classes from another Small Learning Community on the
CMS campus. While Mr. Davidson’s students had been producing media and
working with technology for more than half of the school year at that point, the other
class had not done any media production projects in school. Several of Mr.
Davidson’s students told me in their interviews that they had been nervous about
working with the gifted and talented class because they assumed the students in that
class would be more proficient than they were with the laptops and with media
production. This, however, was not the case. Mr. Davidson’s students quickly
became the experts in the classroom, guiding the other students through the
assignment, giving tutorials on PowerPoint, and troubleshooting technology
problems.
One student who excelled in this project was Justin. His own project was
great, and he also assisted many of the “gifted” students in completing theirs. Justin’s
proficiencies as a producer and his understanding of identity became clear through
his project. His poem, “Puzzled Forever,” exemplifies the goals and tone of the
project and gives viewers/readers insight into his identity as an adolescent and as a
student with ADHD.
Puzzled Forever

I am puzzled,
confused,
dizzy and looking for the
pieces,
trying to put together
my puzzled mind.
To see my real self
to know what I really am,

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I have to gather all my pieces
and put them together.
I am a puzzled boy.

Justin produced his slide by pairing a digital photograph of himself that he has
altered to appear black and white and texturized with the text of his poem. A copy of
the same photograph, cropped into puzzle-piece shaped pieces is scattered around the
screen. Unlike several other students who used pictures that had been minimally
altered, Justin’s photograph obscures his identity through the effects he chose to
apply to it and his pose in the picture, in which his arm is covering most of his face.
Justin was quite different from the other students in the class. Unlike some of
the other students with large families and nearby extended families, Justin lived with
his mother and his little brother in an apartment near the school. Although he had
difficulties with attention, Justin was a very bright and artistic student. At the time of
this project, he had discovered an affinity for logic puzzles, which Mr. Davidson
gave him as supplementary work when Justin had finished other assignments or
needed to change his focus temporarily during class. Justin was one of the better
readers in the class and struggled more with sitting still to read than with decoding.
At home, he spent a great deal of time playing and researching console videogames
and computer games. When I visited his home to conduct interviews with him and
his mother, he displayed his collection of video game magazines for me by laying
them end to end in the hallway so I could see that they spanned the entire width of
the apartment.

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Justin was also the only African American student in Mr. Davidson’s class
and part of a small minority of African American students at CMS. In the classes I
observed, attention was rarely called to racial differences. Occasionally, I would
overhear talk about where students’ families had come from, usually in the context
of a student correcting a friend’s assumption that his/her family was from a particular
country (e.g. assuming a family was from Mexico when they were actually from El
Salvador.) Despite national differences, the majority of students identified with a
general, shared Latino culture marked by music, media, food, and events like
Quinceneras (which were in the near future to become a key element of most of the
students’ social lives.) Although race (and in particular, Justin’s racial identity) did
not come up during any of my observations at CMS, his mother, Christina, noted in
her interview that it is a salient question for the family:
…the cultural thing it can be a problem, and you know, just finding
somebody do identify with. ‘Cause Justin, he even asked me a couple of
times, “Why am I the only black kid in the classroom?” I mean how can I
explain that?...I don’t mind the different races, but I can’t explain really
explain why he’s the only black kid. It’s just that’s just the way things are
here in California.

Justin’s poem calls attention not only to the fragmented nature of his identity, but
also to the struggles he was undertaking to figure out his “real self”—“looking for
the pieces,” “gather[ing] all my pieces and put[ting] them together.” Through my
discussion with Christina, it is clear that race is one large missing piece of Justin’s
puzzle. Unlike Felix’s confident (with a few notable exceptions) assertion of his
identity as a “soccer god,” Justin’s poem is much less about asserting identity than it
is about struggling with and working toward understanding identity.

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Through the poetry projects produced in Mr. Davidson’s class, students
explored and expressed identity in diverse ways. Appropriation of representations
and discourses of identity were evident in the students’ productions, as was the social
construction of identity and the work students engaged in to negotiate their
understandings of self in relation to significant people in their lives. Importantly,
each of the production projects contributed to the students’ construction of
themselves as literate and capable of participation in a variety of discourses.

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Chapter 4 Endnotes

1
David Buckingham, "Introducing Identity," in Youth, Identity, and Digital Media,
ed. David Buckingham, The John D. And Catherine T. Macarthur Foundation Series
on Digital Media and Learning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 14.
2
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
3
Nina Huntemann and Michael Morgan, "Mass Media and Identity Development "
in Handbook of Children and the Media, ed. Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L.
Singer (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001).
4
Louis Althusser, "Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses," in Cultural
Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. J. Storey (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1971), Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.
5
Hall 1997, 55.
6
quoted in: Ellen Seiter, Television and New Media Audiences, Oxford Television
Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 23.
7
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble : Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Thinking
Gender (New York: Routledge, 1990).
8
Angela McRobbie, The Uses of Cultural Studies : A Textbook (Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage Publications, 2005), 86-87.
9
Butler, Gender Trouble : Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 136.
10
Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning : Legitimate Peripheral
Participation, Learning in Doing (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1991).
11
Elizabeth Birr Moje and Cynthia Lewis, "Examining Opportunities to Learn
Literacy: The Role of Critical Sociocultual Literacy Research," ed. Cynthia Lewis,
Patricia Enciso, and Elizabeth Birr Moje (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, 2007), 19.
12
James Paul Gee, "Identity as an Analytic Lens for Research in Education," Review
of Research in Education 25 (2000).
13
Ibid.: 109.
14
Prensky, "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants."

143

15
Roberts, Foehr, and Rideout, "Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year
Olds."
16
Don Tapscott, Growing up Digital : The Rise of the Net Generation (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1998).
17
For a helpful discussion unpacking discourses of the "electronic generation," see
Buckingham, After the Death of Childhood : Growing up in the Age of Electronic
Media.
18
See, for example, Geraldine Bloustien, Girl Making : A Cross-Cultural
Ethnography on the Processes of Growing up Female (New York: Berghahn Books,
2003), Anita Harris, ed., All About the Girl: Culture, Power, and Identity (New
York: Routledge, 2004), ———, Future Girl : Young Women in the Twenty-First
Century (New York: Routledge, 2004), Sherrie A. Inness, Delinquents and
Debutantes : Twentieth-Century American Girls' Cultures (New York: New York
University Press, 1998).
19
Sandra Weber and Claudia Mitchell, "Imaging, Keyboarding, and Posting
Identities: Young People and New Media Technologies," in Youth, Identity, and
Digital Media, ed. David Buckingham, The John D. And Catherine T. Macarthur
Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2007).
20
Ibid., 39.
21
JoEllen Fisherkeller, Growing up with Television : Everyday Learning among
Young Adolescents (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002).
22
Ibid., 30.
23
Ibid.
24
Jenkins, Textual Poachers : Television Fans & Participatory Culture.
25
Ibid., 46.
26
Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, Fandom : Identities and
Communities in a Mediated World (New York: New York University Press, 2007),
Cornel Sandvoss, Fans : The Mirror of Consumption (Malden, MA: Polity Press,
2005).
27
Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture: From "Jackie" to "Just
Seventeen". (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1991).

144

28
Margaret J. Finders, "Queens and Teen Zines: Early Adolescent Females Reading
Their Way toward Adulthood," Anthropology & Education Quarterly 27, no. 1
(1996): 81.
29
Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel, New Literacies : Everyday Practices and
Classroom Learning, 2nd ed. (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2006).
30
Ito, "Mobilizing the Imagination in Everyday Play: The Case of Japanese Media
Mixes," 403-04.
31
Anne Haas Dyson, Writing Superheroes : Contemporary Childhood, Popular
Culture, and Classroom Literacy (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997).
32
Susannah Stern, "Producing Sites, Exploring Identities: Youth Online
Authorship," in Youth, Identity, and Digital Media, ed. David Buckingham, The John
D. And Catherine T. Macarthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).
33
Ibid., 3.
34
Ibid.
35
Shayla Marie Thiel, ""Im Me": Identity Construction and Gender Negotiation in
the World of Adolescent Girls and Instant Messaging," in Girl Wide Web, ed. Sharon
Mazzarella (New York: Peter Lang, 2005).
36
Mary Celeste Kearney, "Producing Girls: Rethinking the Study of Female Youth
Culture," in Delinquents & Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls'
Cultures, ed. Sherri Inness (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 298.
37
Ibid.
38
Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style.
39
Ibid., 29.
40
Mary Celeste Kearney, Girls Make Media (New York: Routledge, 2006).
41
Ibid.
42
Elisabeth Soep, "Making Hard-Core Masculinity: Teenage Boys Playing House,"
in Youthscapes: The Popular, the Natioal, the Global, ed. S. Maira and E. Soep
(Philadelphia, PA: University of Philadelphia Press, 2004).
43
Ibid., 178.

145

44
Butler, Gender Trouble : Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Gee, "Identity
as an Analytic Lens for Research in Education."
45
Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.
46
Bloustien, Girl Making : A Cross-Cultural Ethnography on the Processes of
Growing up Female.
47
Robert Sardiello, "Identity and Status Stratification in Deadhead Subculture," in
Youth Culture: Identity in a Postmodern World, ed. Jonathon S. Epstein (Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 1998).
48
Heather Horst, Becky Herr-Stephenson, and Laura Robinson, "Media Ecologies,"
in Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with
New Media, ed. Mizuko Ito et al. (The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation, forthcoming).
49
Josh Kun, Audiotopia : Music, Race, and America, American Crossroads ;
(Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2005), 21.
50
Ibid., 19.
51
Nicole Fleetwood, "Authenticating Practices: Producing Realness, Performing
Youth.," in Youthscapes: The Popular, the National, the Global, ed. Susaina Maira
and Elisabeth Soep (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), Elisabeth
Soep, "Beyond Literacy and Voice in Youth Media Production," McGill Journal of
Education 41, no. 3 (2006).

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Chapter 5: From Digital Divide to Participation Gap

"They see me rollin'. They hatin'.
Patrollin', trying to catch me ridin’ dirty."
–Chamillionaire, Ridin’

"They see me strollin'. They laughin'.
And rollin' their eyes 'cause I'm so white and nerdy."
-Weird Al Yankovich, White and Nerdy

The Chamillionaire song (“Ridin'”) quoted above was a favorite among the
kids I observed at CMS. It was especially popular with the boys. They would play it
on the laptops whenever they could, and often sang just the first few words when
entering the classroom or while transitioning between projects. Mr. Davidson and
Ms. Abel often complained that they found themselves singing the song too. Mr.
Davidson sometimes sang it in the classroom, which usually prompted amused but
scandalized reactions from the students (especially when he got the words wrong)
and lightened the atmosphere in the classroom.
The lyrics of the original version of the song critique racial profiling and
describe the strained relationship between some African Americans (particularly
young African American men like Chamillionaire) and the police. Shortly after
“Ridin'” was released, Weird Al Yankovich released a parody of the song called
"White and Nerdy," which also addresses marginalization, albeit of a completely
different sort. While I am in no way trying to equate police brutality with being
ostracized for being a geek, both songs, in essence, are about being marginalized

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because of one’s identity and activities. Whereas Chamillionaire wants to be treated
fairly by the police, Weird Al just wants to “roll with the gangstas.” In both cases,
the power differentials (mediated by race) are insurmountable.
At the same time that it offers a critique of marginalization, White and Nerdy
reinforces a variety of assumptions about participation with media and technology.
The song begins with a verse establishing the kind of cultural capital possessed by
Weird Al’s geeky MC; he is a graduate of an Ivy League school, he is good with
math and computers, and he has an appreciation for certain “legitimate tastes” (Earl
Grey Tea and MC Escher, for example). In a later verse, media and technology
become the focus:
Shopping online for deals on some writable media
I edit Wikipedia
I memorized Holy Grail really well
I can recite it right now and have you ROTFLOL
I got a business doing websites
When my friends need some code who do they call?
I do HTML for them all
Even made a homepage for my dog!

These niche media and high-end technology practices mark the speaker as a specific
kind of user of media and technology. The practices the song highlights, such as
math skill, media fandom, computer programming, and high-end internet use have
been reinforced as practices “belonging” to geeky, white, young men through various
discourses about media and technology use. The incongruity created by juxtaposing
these representations of “white and nerdy” identity with the melody, beat, and style
of a rap song (which is marked as “belonging” to a group of which the speaker is not
a member) is what makes the song a successful satire. It is also representative of

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ongoing questions and conflicts about access to media and technology. The lines of
“belonging” drawn within the song reflect real assumptions about who is and should
be using media and technology in specific ways.
This chapter examines discourses related to the digital divide and the
participation gap. Like the lyrics to “White and Nerdy,” these discourses work to
differentiate between users and non-users of media and technology. The chapter
begins with descriptions of three families from my school-based fieldwork, and is
followed by a discussion of digital inequality (variably called the “digital divide” and
the “participation gap”) and educational equity. My goal in this chapter is to
highlight the connections between digital inequality and other types of inequalities,
especially those related to economic and educational/social capital. Although
discourses about the digital divide and participation gap work to call attention to the
possible outcomes of digital inequality, they do less to investigate the underlying
causes of unequal access. Understanding better the links between digital and social
inequality seems a crucial undertaking due to the increasing value placed on digital
media in terms of literacy, work, and participation.

Investigating digital inequality

It is difficult to tell from my interview data precisely what each family’s
economic situation was, but based on conversations with parents, the type of living
situation, and the number of working adults in the household, it is possible to get a
general idea of how money worked in each family. A few of the families might have
fit a profile of “middle class” if they were living in an area of the country with a

149
lower cost of living; several, particularly the single-parent families, appeared to be
struggling daily to cover necessary expenses through employment, state services, and
child support. The three families I profile in this chapter all lived in apartments
ranging from one to three bedrooms. Carlos and Vivian were each a part of a single-
parent family with three or four children. James lived with both of his parents and his
two younger siblings, although he had been raised by his grandmother during the
early part of his life. I have chosen to profile these three particular families in this
chapter because none of them had a computer in the home and because most of the
parents had little or no experience using computers. (James’s mother used a
computer for limited purposes at work, but none of the other parents used the
computer at work or elsewhere on any kind of regular basis.) A brief profile
introducing each family follows.
1

The Ramos Family

James Ramos was just a few days away from his eighth-grade graduation
when I interviewed him and his parents, Alicia and Martin. James lived with his
parents, his nine year old sister and his one year old brother in a three bedroom
apartment. Martin had immigrated the United States from El Salvador when he was
very young and Alicia was a second generation Mexican-American. Both Alicia and
Martin worked full time, relying on nearby family members for child care for the
baby.
James shared a room with his sister and had a television and CD player in his
room. In the family room, there was an entertainment center with a large television

150
and speakers. The family had cable and Alicia and Martin talked about watching
programs on Discovery Channel, Animal Planet regularly, as well as various
primetime network shows. Alicia noted that they collected DVDs and generally
bought new movies as soon as they appeared on DVD. The family also collected
magazines on various interests. Both Alicia and Martin had cell phones. However,
the family only paid for Alicia’s phone service because Martin’s was covered by his
company. With James entering high school the following year, they were planning to
get him a cell phone for emergencies, but had concerns about him using it
irresponsibly (making crank calls, going over minutes, and/or losing the phone).
Another piece of technology on the horizon for James was an iPod, which his parents
were planning to buy him as a graduation gift.
The family did not have a computer at home. As Alicia explained it: “We’re
interested in using the computer, but for safety purposes, we’d rather not have
personal use of it, because it’s hard to control the usage.” In addition to concerns
about their children’s safety, Alicia and Martin worried about visiting family and
friends using the computer inappropriately and had decided that for the time being,
they would go without the technology.
Despite not having a computer at home, James frequently shared information
with his classmates about cool websites—in particular, sites about cars and hip hop
as well as sites that provided access to free Flash games. James regularly accessed
the internet using his downstairs neighbor’s computer and internet connection. He
and his neighbor (who was also a middle school student), spent time online during

151
the after school hours before their parents arrived home from work. Using this
access, James was able to maintain a MySpace page and do research on topics of
interest to him.

The Aguilar family

Carlos Aguilar lived in a one-bedroom apartment with his mother (Marta), his
two younger brothers (ages 9 and 5), and his two year old sister. The apartment’s
living room and kitchen were basically the same room, separated only by a half wall
that cordoned off an area of the kitchen and to make room for a few cabinets and a
sink. Almost every surface space in the apartment was covered with stuff—papers,
toys, books, knick knacks, etc. A large sofa and two industrial-style sewing machines
filled most of the room. Along the far wall of the room was an entertainment center,
also covered in clutter, which held a small television. A second television, with two
videogame consoles and a DVD player connected to it, was perched on a table next
to the entertainment center. There was a third television in the bedroom. The
apartment’s only bedroom was shared by the whole family. Carlos and his brother
shared bunk beds, but the top bunk was completely covered with clothing and toys,
so both boys (and sometimes also the 5 year old brother) shared the bottom bunk.
Marta, the two younger children, and sometimes Marta’s partner (the father of the
two younger kids), shared the double bed on the other side of the room. Marta’s
partner could not live with the family full-time because if he did, Marta would not
qualify for welfare, which she needed because the father of the older boys did not
give pay child support.

152

When I began the interviews with Carlos and Marta, it quickly became
obvious that most of the questions in my interview protocol were irrelevant to their
family. The family did not have cable, a computer, or any mobile
communication/entertainment devices. Instead, our discussion focused on the
televisions. In her interview, Clara mentioned that at least one television was always
on during the day:
Lo que pasa es que yo me dirijo a la televisión por la hora. Porque así digo,
ya sé el horario que tiene el programa y ya me meto, por ejemplo, el
“Despierta América”, tiene el reloj, entonces no es que lo esté viendo, lo que
veo es la hora y digo ya es hora de irme a la escuela...Ya cuando regreso a la
casa prendo la televisión de vuelta porque a las dos horas, a las 10, tengo que
ir por Marcos, es una cosa que me sirve como reloj. Que se termina ese
programa, OK, vámonos para recoger a Marcos. Yo lo uso, tal vez no es
tanto para ver el programa lo que yo lo uso como por la hora. Por ejemplo, así
como ahorita ya empezó esta novela, entonces ya sé que ya no tarda en venir
Christopher y si se termina esta novela y Christopher no ha venido yo ya
estoy afligida y ya estoy qué le pasaría y qué tengo que hacer y ya estoy con
esta cosa que… o sea la televisión me sirve como reloj.

I turn the TV on because of the time….I know the program schedule, and I do
things around [it]. For example, “Despierta America,” has a clock [on the
screen]. So it is not that I am watching it, what I see is the time, and then I
say, “It is time to go to school.” … When I come back I turn the TV on again,
because two hours later, at 10:00, I have to go get Marcos. It serves me as a
clock. When the program is over, [I say] “Okay, let’s go get Marcos.” I
don’t really watch the program. It is like a clock to me. For example, this
soap opera just started, so I know that Christopher will be here soon. And if
the soap is over and Christopher is not here, then I start getting worried, and
I am like, “What happened to him? What should I do?” I mean, the TV is my
clock.

According to Marta and Carlos, both televisions in the living room were often on
simultaneously, one showing the program Marta wanted to watch, and the other

153
showing a video or a game for the children. The television to which the DVD player
and game consoles (N64 and GameCube) were connected did not have an antenna,
so it was not often (or ever) used to watch television. The family owned several
videos and DVDs and about eight video games. In addition to the television, videos,
and games, the family had some books and listened to the radio regularly.
Carlos was a fan of Rebelde (RBD), a musical group and Spanish-language
television show popular among Hispanic teens. In his class at CMS, he was the only
boy who openly admitted to liking RBD, although he made it clear that his interest
was firmly rooted in the music and the girls in the band, not the story of the
television show, which was much like a teen soap opera. He had a binder in which he
kept pictures of the female RBD members that he had clipped from magazines and
newspapers or that he had printed from websites. (He had occasional access to the
printer in the school library because he had made friends with the librarian.) The
front of the binder was covered with glittery stickers of the girls’ images. Shortly
after my interview with Carlos, during which he showed me this binder, I heard from
another student that it had been confiscated at school because a teacher saw some of
the pictures and thought they were too risqué.

The Mendoza family

The Mendoza family consists of Vivian (12), Diana (Vivian’s mother), and
Vivian’s two sisters Inez (16) and Yvonne (9). At the time of our interviews, Diana
had been raising the girls on her own for about nine years and worked multiple jobs
to support the family. Inez also held two jobs in addition to attending high school full

154
time and contributed much of what she earned to the family’s income. Although she
did not have a paid job, Vivian had a number of chores and responsibilities including
cleaning and watching Yvonne. She also frequently accompanied her mother on
Saturdays to help her clean houses. The family’s two bedroom apartment was on a
busy street not far from the school. Diana told us that she rented out the apartment’s
second bedroom to her boyfriend in order to meet the rent. The girls shared the other
bedroom and she slept in the living room on the couch.
The living room of the apartment had a small entertainment center with a
television and VCR/DVD player. There was a videogame console in the cabinet of
the entertainment center, but Vivian told me that it did not work. During our time
visiting the family, the girls showed us their collection of about fifty videos, as well
as several books. Like the Aguilar family, the Mendoza family watched a great deal
of television, both in English and in Spanish. Diana told us that the television was
often on as background noise while she was cooking or cleaning. Additionally, the
television and/or radio were often on while the girls did their homework. As Diana
explained:
...La grande, ella está haciendo la tarea y está oyendo música. Está sentada
ahí en la mesa y la música está puesta. La medianita, a veces está sentada en
la mesa, pero yo estoy viendo la televisión acá, entonces, estoy aquí: “haz la
tarea; haz la tarea.” Tengo que estarla fichando ... como la grande es la que
habla inglés, ella es la que les ayuda a las demás. Yo no le ayudo, por el
aspecto de que ella es la que habla inglés y es la que entiende más.

…My oldest one [Inez] does her homework, and listens to music at the same
time. She sits at the [kitchen] table with the music on. The middle one
[Vivian], sometimes she sits at the table, but I am watching TV, so I have to
be like, “Do your homework. Do your homework.” I have to keep an eye on
her…since the oldest one speaks English, she would help them [her sisters]

155
with their homework. I don’t help them, because she is the one who speaks
English and she understands better.

Television was also a family activity, as there were several programs (mostly
telanovelas) that the Diana and her daughters watched together. The family also had
regular movie nights, during which they would rent a movie, order pizza, and spend
the evening together.
Diana, Vivian, and Inez each had a cell phone. Inez paid for her own service;
Diana and Vivian used pre-paid phones which did not always have minutes available
because the phones were at the bottom of the priority list for bills. The phones were
used primarily for communication between Diana and her daughters and for calling
family members in El Salvador. The family did not have a home computer because
of the cost. Diana noted that the girls periodically went to the public library to use
the computers there, but that it was difficult for her to bring them to the library
because of her work schedule. Occasionally, Vivian would go with Inez to her
boyfriend’s house to use the computer for school projects, but the majority of her
experience with computers had been in classes at CMS.
Although they did not have a computer at the time, Diana talked about getting
one in the future if it worked into the budget. Her thoughts on having a computer and
Internet access are representative of what we heard from the majority of parents we
interviewed:
Pues, yo no sé mucho de Internet, pero yo he visto allí que ellas se ponen a
estudiar y sacan mucha información, cosas que a veces uno ni siquiera las

156
tiene en la mente. En la computer ya sale todito, todito el historial, y ahí se
puede dar uno cuenta. Entonces, se me hace muy interesante. Pero siempre es
bueno tener una computer y tener Internet, siempre que sus padres estén
vigilando.

I don’t know a lot about the Internet, I have seen them [her daughters]
studying there. They get a lot of information. Information about things that
you don’t even have in mind. Everything is in the computer; everything, the
whole history, and you get to know things there. I find that very interesting.
It is always good to have a computer, and to have access to the Internet as
long as the parents are keeping an eye on it.

Parental control over internet access was a major concern for most of the parents we
spoke with, largely prompted by news stories about children and online predators.
Diana’s concerns about safety and behavior—on and offline—were particularly
strong. She told us that the family regularly discussed issues such as physical and
sexual abuse, contraception, drinking, and drug use.
As I mentioned in the introduction to this section, I have chosen to focus on
these three families in this chapter because they did not have a computer in the
home. Beyond that commonality, the media ecology of each family was unique.
Despite the types of media and technology the families did use, they were still
among a population considered to be on the “wrong side” of the digital divide
because they did not have a computer with internet access at home. The kids in Mr.
Davidson’s and Ms. Abel’s classes did, of course, have fairly regular access to
computers at school, but as a whole, the families relied on public libraries and
friends/neighbors for access. In each case, several family members (the parent(s) and
younger siblings) did not use computers at all.
The next section of this chapter considers discourses related to the digital

157
divide and the participation gap. Although neither of these issues are purely technical
access problems, both have been frequently framed that way.

From digital divide to participation gap

Beginning in the mid-1990s, concerns about access to technology—
particularly computers and internet access—have frequently been framed in research,
educational, and popular discourses in terms of a “digital divide” between people
who have access to technology and those who do not. People who lack access to
technology are assumed to be at a serious disadvantage in terms of civic
participation, education, and employment opportunities, and providing access to
technology is understood as the way to eliminate these inequalities. Computers and
the internet are not the first technologies to be framed as an immediate concern for
access or as capable of solving social inequality. DiMaggio et al describe the
similarities between debates over internet access and debates over universal
telephone access. U.S. Telecommunication policy related to universal phone access
has been especially influential in structuring policies and interventions related to the
digital divide.
2
In addition, there are many similarities in digital divide discourse and
earlier discourse about cable television penetration in low-income, ethnically diverse,
urban neighborhoods.
3
In the cases of phone and cable, as in digital divide discourse,
technology access was framed as a solution to the problems of marginalized groups.
Michelle Rodino-Colocino
4
distinguishes between what she calls “first wave”
and “second wave” digital divide discourses. First wave discourses focused
exclusively on access to technology, operating under the assumption that equal

158
access to hardware and connectivity would not only eradicate disadvantage directly
related to a lack of access to technology, but would also alleviate larger social and
economic inequalities. Second wave digital divide discourse attempts to move away
from the technical determinism implicit in this argument, encouraging a
reconceptualization of the digital divide to consider the social context of technology
use. Second wave discourses emphasize skill and technological literacy in addition to
advocating for more equal access to technology. Rodino-Colocino notes that what is
missing from both first and second wave discourses is sufficient attention to the
political economy of technology—specifically, the constitution of the labor force for
technology-based work. She calls for a third wave of research and theorizing that
engages with questions of corporate power and coercion of employees through
investigation of labor practices in the IT industries, an issue that is directly related to
the discourse of skills that figures so prominently into second wave discourses.
Attention to the realities of labor in the current technological market—particularly
issues such as the global economic and social impacts of outsourcing by U.S.
companies in order to pay less for technical support services or coercive practices
related to underreporting overtime, discouraging unionization, etc.—moves the
discourse further away from just being about access and encourages reconsideration
of assumptions about what skills are valued in the workplace.
Initial research on internet access in 1995 was published in a report by the
National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) called
Falling through the Net: A Survey of the “Have-Nots” in Rural and Urban America.
5

159
The 1995 report reflects NTIA’s findings that poor households (income less than
$10,000) in rural areas were the most threatened by the digital divide, showing the
lowest rates of ownership of personal computers and modems. Further, ethnic
minorities (with the exception of Asian households in urban areas), people under 25,
and seniors (55+) were found to have the lowest rates of computer ownership and
internet access. Follow-up surveys in 1998 and 1999 found an overall increase in
household connectivity via phone, computer, and Internet. At the same time,
however, both studies reported a widening gap between the “haves” and the “have
nots,” as well as significant disparities in access based on education, income, and
race.
6
A 2004 study to investigate the status and impact of broadband penetration
once again found that although overall access was increasing, the same disparities of
location, education, income, and race remain.
7

Between the time of the 1995 Falling through the Net report and the second
and third installments in 1998 and 1999, the Telecommunications act of 1996 went
in to effect. The stated goal of the Act is “to let anyone enter any communications
business--to let any communications business compete in any market against any
other.”
8
This goal is accomplished by the Act in part by changing rules about cross-
market ownership, a decision that has greatly facilitated the growth of global media
conglomerates and multi-platform media produced by those conglomerates. The
change in the regulatory climate for telecommunications has been criticized as
contributing to the digital divide by driving up prices of telecommunications and
information services.
9

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For each of the families, economic factors were a key reason for not owning a
computer and not having cable or internet. Limited income, economic insecurity, and
other financial priorities put technology at the bottom of the families’ lists of
priorities. In the case of the Aguilar and Mendoza families, paying for essentials—
housing, food, clothing, transportation, and medical care--usually required the
family’s entire income. Saving money for a large purchase like a computer was
difficult, if not impossible, due to more pressing unexpected expenses. For example,
Marta discussed how she had recently needed to reallocate money she was saving for
a computer to cover more immediate expenses:
Marta: ... a veces digo “la voy a agarrar ahorita” pero como digo, cualquier
cosita y me gasto el dinero en otra cosa ya. Por ejemplo, estaba empezando a
guardar pero como la niña se me enfermó, entonces ya agarré dinero del que
ya estaba para agarrar.
Lisa (Entrevistadora): ¿Y no tiene seguro médico?
Marta: Sí, pero lo que pasó es de que tengo el Medical de la niña pero
estuvimos gastando en comida porque como yo estuve, no internada, estuve
todo el día con ella en el hospital, ¿quién cocinaba para ellos? No se podía,
entonces pues ya se agarra dinero para ir a comprar comida y ya es más
difícil.

Marta: … sometimes I am like, “I am getting it [a computer] now,” but then
something comes up and I spend the money on something else. For example,
I was already saving money for it [the computer], but then she [the baby] got
sick, and then I had to take that money for…
Lisa (Interviewer): You don’t have medical insurance?
Marta: Yes, my daughter has Medicaid, but we were buying food since I was
with her in the hospital the whole day, so I didn’t have time to cook for the
rest of my children. So I used that money to go and buy food. That’s how it
gets difficult for me.

Being uninsured and struggling to pay for necessary medical care is, unfortunately,
the reality all too often for low income families in the US. Indeed, this story is so

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common that Lisa and I assumed that the computer fund went to covering hospital
expenses, not considering the economic impact eating out (an expense that we incur
regularly and take for granted) would have on the family. Given this kind of
economic insecurity, technology ownership was necessarily given low priority
despite the value Marta placed on it for her children’s education.
Similarly, Diana discussed her strategies for coping with financial insecurity,
telling us that all of the family’s financial decisions are made jointly and weighed
carefully. She summarized these strategies, telling us: “Siempre tenemos tenemos
que pensar que ahora tenemos y mañana podemos no tener” (“We always have to be
aware that we may have something today, but tomorrow we might not have it.”) Her
wages from her two jobs do not meet all of the family’s bills, so Inez also contributes
much of her income from her part-time jobs to help cover expenses. Diana and Inez
also send money to family members in El Salvador to help them pay for medicine
and food. From her interview, it was clear that Diana was an expert at stretching the
family’s limited budget and worked hard to plan ahead in order to protect the family
from missing essentials:
Soy de las personas que cuando recibo mi cheque, voy, cambio mi cheque y
pago el bill de la luz, el bill del gas; voy a la tienda, compro papel del baño,
servilletas, azúcar, arroz. Siempre, siempre, trato la manera de tener azúcar y
arroz en casa, hasta cien libras. Porque aunque sea arroz, les doy de comer.

Every time I get my check, I cash it, and then I pay the electricity bill and the
gas bill. I go to the store and buy toilet paper, napkins, sugar, and rice. We
always have sugar and rice at home, up to 100 pounds. That way I can
always feed them [her daughters], even if it’s only with rice.

These two families were getting by—but just barely. However, at the same time that

162
putting food on the table was a real and everyday concern, both Marta and Diana
valued education and worked hard to provide their children with whatever resources
(including technological resources) they could to help them succeed in school. The
complex economic negotiations that went on in these families are important to note
in trying to understand the realities of the Digital Divide. While Digital Divide
discourses have positioned economics as a major factor in determining use and non-
use of technology, they rarely have connected the Digital Divide to the realities of
inequality and poverty in this country, and in particular to the everyday lived
experiences of those identified only as “non-users” in digital divide studies.
In the Ramos family, purchasing media appeared to be less of an issue. As I
mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the family owned multiple televisions,
had cable, and collected DVDs and magazines. When it came to buying a computer
and getting internet service, Alicia and Martin foregrounded their concerns about
online safety and control over how the technology was used. Later in our discussion,
the cost of the technology also came up as a reason for not owning a computer or
having online service. Their concern appeared to be not in the purchasing of
hardware, but the costs of internet service. As Alicia explained:
…families who do have computers, they spend a – I guess the more services
you have, the more money you spend. It’s just like cable television. The
more services and channels you want, the more you pay, and so it kinda – it’s
an extra bill on top of that for us. And we’re kinda like – we have a method
that we always save for a rainy day, because you never know what tomorrow
– what it may bring, and so forth like that, and so we look at it like an extra
bill, like a utility bill, I mean, the Internet service, and we’re kinda like
debating whether or not – can we afford [it].

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In addition to the costs of internet service, Alicia mentioned that the cost of fixing a
computer if it broke might also strain the family’s budget. Repairs to the other
technology in the house (such as the televisions and cell phones), she told us, would
be covered by insurance or were within Martin’s scope of interest and technical
ability, so he would fix or replace them. The human resources for maintaining
technology are important to consider alongside recurring costs such as internet
service. As Ellen Seiter has noted, overlooking the human resources necessary to
keep a school network running has been a major issue for many schools who have
outdated or nonfunctional hardware and/or lack a technical support specialist on the
school’s staff to keep the hardware and the network running. The same issues arise
for families; without an “expert” within the family it may become difficult (and
expensive) to maintain a working computer.
In each of these families, the economic impact of “being connected” is
considered in relationship to all of the other aspects of the family’s finances.
Technology is not elevated above other expenses or seen to offer a direct solution to
the family’s needs, as it is in much discourse about the digital divide.
As Jennifer Light describes, "The digital divide offers a narrow way to talk
about inequality that is noncontroversial because, while claims makers might
disagree about the causes of social and economic inequality, they agree that
increasing the use of computers is a ‘good thing’.”
10
Indeed, technical solutions such
as outfitting schools, libraries, and community centers/programs with hardware and
internet access frequently have been presented as solutions to much larger issues

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of inequality As is evident in the success of efforts to wire schools compared to other
issues related to access and schooling--such as debates about English-only
instruction or special education--the faith in the value and possibilities of technology
has been extremely successful in smoothing over issues that might otherwise cause
dissention and force the discussion into a stalemate. Fifteen years after initial efforts
to wire schools began, there is a one hundred percent penetration rate reported for
public schools. However, in those same fifteen years, it has become startlingly
obvious that simply building labs and installing computers and internet connections
does not guarantee a level playing field.
In an analysis of ethnographic interviews with families about the digital
divide, Lynn Schofield Clark, Christof Demont-Heinrich, and Scott Weber posit the
discursive theme of individualism as a “key to understanding the constraints that
exist on the way in which the topic of the digital divide is conceived of, and
discussed, among the US public today.”
11
Individualistic discourse surfaced in their
interviews in two main ways that varied based on the socioeconomic status of the
family being interviewed. Higher income families “believed that the responsibility of
developing computer competency among the population rested with each individual
rather than with the government, social service agencies or other institutions.”
12

Gaining access to computers was viewed as a matter of choice and priority; concerns
about the digital divide, therefore, were generally dismissed as unnecessary worry, as
those who did not have access had chosen not to have access or simply did not give
access a high enough priority to make it possible. Lower income families in this

165
study similarly attributed responsibility for computer access and technological skill
to the individual; however, their reasoning behind this allocation of responsibility
centered not on choice, but on the value of the technology itself. The authors report
that lower income families tended to view the computer primarily as a means of
entertainment, and therefore as a non-necessity or a luxury. Based on its emphasis on
choice, individualism can be understood as a powerful mechanism for talking about
digital inequality separately from other forms of inequality.
Individualism in discourses about the digital divide is critiqued by Stephen
Lax in his description of such discourses as ideological efforts to shift emphasis in
schools and training programs from direct support and experience to “information
about.” For example, it is thought that by providing internet access in schools, all
students have access to the same information about getting a job or getting into
college. Because Digital Divide discourse posits access to information as the solution
to inequality, equal access is equated to equal opportunity. Therefore, if one is not
successful, the fault can be placed on the individual rather than looking to other
factors contributing to success or failure.
13

In addition to discourses that foreground individual responsibility and choice
in questions of digital inequality, Anna Everett calls attention to the ways in which
digital divide discourses construct certain groups of people as “outsiders” to
technology. She writes:
At issue here is the power of this discourse [digital divide] to construct and
naturalize an IT insider/outsider binary opposition that easily casts
underrepresented racial minority groups, in general, and youths, in particular,
literally as poster children for what I argue is too often the disabling rhetoric

166
of the digital divide.
14

It is true that the findings of the NTIA “Falling through the Net” reports and other
investigations regarding access to computers and the internet have prompted access
interventions targeted at ethnic minority groups, people living in center city/low
income neighborhoods, and young people (and often times, at people who fit in all
three categories.) What Everett is critiquing here is not the efforts themselves, but the
repeated positioning of young people of color as “victims” of the digital divide in
public discourse and media, the effect of which is reinforcing assumptions about who
has (and does not have) technological access and skills, which can in turn lead to
decreased opportunity for those same young people.
The students I worked with at CMS were also constructed, in Everett’s terms,
as “outsiders” to technology, not just because of income or race, but also because of
ability. As special education students, the students (and teachers) had to combat
assumptions about their eligibility to use media and technology at school.
Throughout the school year, Mr. Davidson and Ms. Abel confronted doubts (their
own as well as those of their colleagues) about their students’ abilities to learn with
technology. In one interview, Mr. Davidson told us he was “fearful that [he was]
wasting their time in a way, by working on multimedia projects instead of working
with them exclusively on language skills.” These doubts influenced his decisions
about continuing various production projects throughout the year. For example he
decided to put aside an animation project that was taking much longer than

167
anticipated in order to review key concepts with the students in preparation for
standardized testing.
The construction of the special education students as outsiders was more
apparent in the classes’ relationships to the rest of the school community. Several of
the students’ projects were screened at school assemblies and events; at each of these
events, the students received positive feedback from other teachers, students, and the
school’s administration. After the first screening of the year, at which some of the
students showed off their I Poem projects, Mr. Davidson told me that the school’s
Principal had been moved to tears by the projects. The disconnect between the
assumptions about special education students held by some members of the school
community and the display of skills evident in the students’ productions help
legitimate the projects and move the students closer to “insider” status. As Mr.
Davidson summarized: “When you have kids [from whom] nobody expects
anything, whatever you get from them, everybody’s oohing and ahhing…And
especially when they get a product that is of such quality, nobody feels like they
have the right to say anything.”
Despite the problematic nature of discourse and interventions related to the
digital divide, it continues to have resonance in American society, and particularly in
educational circles. Recent scholarship in the area of computer and internet diffusion
and access has preferred the term “digital inequality” and “differentiated use” as a
nod to the complexity of access that goes beyond “haves” and “have nots.”
DiMaggio et al. note, “The pressing question now is less ‘who can find a network

168
from which to log on?,’ than ‘what are people doing, and what are they able to do,
when they go online?’”
15
This differentiation is important, not only because it
complicates the notion of access to include markers of quality and social capital, but
also because it pushes away from binary constructions—“haves” and “have-nots” as
well as “insiders” and “outsiders.” This shift in discourses about access should not be
interpreted as a declaration that the digital divide is “closed.” In fact, quite the
opposite is true.
Approaching digital inequality from the angle of participation instead of
access helps to capture some of the “messiness” of everyday use. It can also
highlight some of the inequalities that arise from different ways of using technology.
This focus on ways of using technology has also been framed as a type of divide—
the participation gap—which has been theorized in relation to the development of a
set of techno-social skills deemed necessary for participation in society and culture
via media and technology. In their white paper “Confronting the Challenges of
Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21
st
Century,” Jenkins et al. defined
the participation gap as “the unequal access to the opportunities, experiences, skills,
and knowledge that will prepare youth for full participation in the world of
tomorrow.”
16
These skills include ways of consuming, producing, and understanding
various types of new media.
Like earlier waves of research on the digital divide, the participation gap is a
historically-specific concept, influenced by the current technological and media
landscape. Whereas the digital divide operates on the assumption of a technological

169
landscape in which technology is a resource--much like books on a library shelf--that
can be accessed purposefully for finding information, connecting with one's
community, and for entertainment, the concept of the participation gap turns
attention to participation in a different media landscape--one of saturation and
convergence. Unlike a library with orderly shelves, the current technological and
information landscape looks much like my office at the moment--shelves groaning
with the weight of too many books, photocopied articles scattered across the floor, a
pile of DVDs (some bought, some borrowed, some burned) leaning precariously in
the corner, and family photos from an exploded album piled hastily on a corner of
the desk waiting to be organized into an album. Saturation of resources and the
melding of different types, purposes, and genres of media are key features of a
convergent media and technology environment. Within this media environment,
different skills and ways of participating are required.
The participation gap, in Jenkins et al.’s formulation, is unequal access to
conditions that allow young people to develop the technical and social skills and the
context-specific knowledge necessary to navigate online representations of and
portals to community and cultural life. These skills and knowledge are known as
New Media Literacies—ways of reading and writing new media texts that are
dynamic, linked, and shared. I will discuss features of New Media Literacies in
greater depth in the next chapter. However, what is salient to the discussion in this
chapter is that, as literacies, New Media Literacies carry with them not only a

170
specific set of skills but also a specific ideology and relationship to power; they are,
in essence, a representation of cultural capital that structures participation.

Educational capital, participation, and technology

Concerns about inequalities in participation and technological access can also
be situated within larger discussions about inequality and cultural capital in schools.
Unequal access to technology and media is, unfortunately, just one of many types of
inequalities students in public schools across this country deal with every day. As I
discussed in chapter two, schools are important institutions in the granting of cultural
capital and the reproduction of educational and social advantage. However, as
Annette Lareau and Elliot Weininger point out, successfully navigating the school
system requires that parents demonstrate a high level of cultural capital—knowledge
of how to advocate for their child, knowing who to talk to, etc. At the bare minimum,
an understanding of how the system works and a way to communicate with school
officials is necessary to make it through the school system.
17
Ricardo D. Stanton-
Salazar echoes this sentiment, calling attention to the difficulties minority families
may experience in navigating institutions. He writes:
For lower status group members, attempts at help-seeking and network
development within mainstream spheres usually occur with in the context of
differential power relations and within social contexts that are culturally
different from, if not alienating to, cultural outsiders.
18

A very basic example of a challenge to accessing school support networks is
language. CMS, like most of the schools in the Los Angeles area, attempted to
accommodate families whose first language was not English by providing many

171
notices in both Spanish and English. At times, however, information from the school
was only provided in English, a major barrier for parents who do not read or speak
English. In the description of the Mendoza family, I included Diana’s description of
her strategy for delegating homework assistance to her oldest daughter because she
could read and write in English. Diana also relied on Vivian to translate school
notices, a difficult task for Vivian given her difficulty in reading:
Cuando vienen los papeles en inglés, ella es la que los lee y es la que me dice:
“mamá es para esto y esto.” Y digo: “Ok, ya lo firmo.” Y cuando es ella, que
hay que firmarle un papel a ella, le digo: “espéreme; explíqueme por qué
tengo que firmar este papel, sino no se lo firmo.” Sí, porque sino, no voy a
saber ni qué es.

When I get papers in English, she [Vivian] would read them and say, “Mom,
it is for this and this.” I say, “Okay,” and I would sign them. And whenever I
need to sign a paper for her, I would be like, “Wait a moment. Explain to me
why do I need to sign this paper, otherwise I won’t sign it.” Otherwise I will
never know what it is all about.

Without the support of her daughters, Diana would be largely cut off from the school
community and unable to gather the information she needed to participate in her
daughters’ educations. The language disconnect is one example of what has been
described as a “linguistic barrier” by Phelan et al.
19
and elaborated by Stanton-
Salazar. He describes linguistic barriers as discourses and practices that invalidate
bilingualism and frame use and development of the students’ home language as
problematic. As Stanton-Salazar describes, linguistic barriers, along with
sociocultural, socioeconomic, and structural barriers, “operate to problematize and
even thwart access to institutional support and therefore to key institutional
resources.”
20

172
Although interaction and control within the school was difficult for many of
the families in my study, all of the parents discussed the value they placed on
education. Similarly, Vivian regularly articulated her identity as a good student
(which, in her case, was more about following the rules and working hard than
getting good grades). Carlos liked school primarily because it was his only
opportunity to socialize with his friends, although he did mention to me several times
that he was proud of the media projects he had produced as well as the progress he
had made in learning to read. Educational capital was valued by each family as a
way of ensuring future success and attending and working hard in school was a
regular topic of discussion (and sometimes conflict) in the households. As Diana told
us:
Pero sí, también: “Vivian, -le digo yo- estudie, prepárese, para que usted no
ande haciendo lo que yo hago... Sino, usted se va a quedar limpiando casas,
trabajando en un restaurante por el mínimo, cuando usted puede trabajar y
ganar doble, y estar sentada frente a una computer y decir: “hazme esto, trae
lo otro.” Le digo que no solamente estar limpiando baños de otras gentes. Eso
es lo que yo les digo.

I always say, “Vivian, you have to study. You have to get an education so
you don’t end up doing what I do… Otherwise you will end up cleaning
houses or working in a restaurant getting minimum wage, when you could
have gotten a good job and make twice as much. You could be sitting in front
of a computer saying, ‘Do this for me. Bring me that.’ You could do much
more than just cleaning other people’s bathrooms. That’s what I tell her.

While Diana emphasized the importance of education in general, she also strongly
encouraged her daughters to play a musical instrument. Musical ability has long been
considered a marker of cultural capital and has been associated with cognitive
development and literacy by academic research and marketing.
21
Vivian played the

173
accordion. After a brief stint in the middle school band class, which accommodated
whatever instruments the students chose to play, Vivian’s accordion lessons had
been put on hold, although she still practiced occasionally, much to the chagrin of
their next door neighbor. The choice to play the accordion is interesting to think
about in terms of cultural capital as well as the sociocultural barriers Stanton-Salazar
discusses. The accordion is not an instrument one finds in an orchestra; it is much
more likely to be used in folk music and in music from Mexico and Central America.
While the CMS band class made an effort to validate “alternative” instruments, it is
unlikely that Vivian was highly encouraged to continue with the class, as she might
have been if she were playing the violin or a more traditional instrument or if she had
been playing a traditional instrument from a young age and was a proficient and
talented musician that would be beneficial to the band. Vivian had just recently
picked up the accordion for the first time and while she was an expert at playing
“Jingle Bells,” her repertoire was quite limited.
James’s parents were similarly concerned with their son’s success in school
and looked to extracurricular activities in order to help him gain educational capital.
James was about to transition from the relatively safe space of middle school to a
much larger high school where he would have less supervision and personal attention
from teachers and other school staff and faced the very real possibility of failing or
dropping out. Alicia and Martin recognized that school was not a priority for James,
and while they were not happy about that fact, they were working on enrolling James
at a specific (public) high school because James could play on the baseball team

174
there. They felt that being a part of the baseball team would provide James with
additional motivation and accountability at school. As Alicia told us:
We really want him to go to [name of high school] because of the baseball
program that’s there, and we think that with the help of the special education
program, he’ll be able to succeed...Because we’re looking at him not being so
successful in education as another child. I mean, he can outbeat the system
and the program of special education, but he has to really want it for himself,
and it seems like he only wants baseball. He only wants sport--he thrives
more for the sport, and nothing else. And you have to balance out both the
studies and the grades, as well as getting into the school. So we’re trying our
best to get him into that school.

The open enrollment process allows parents to apply for a limited number of seats at
a school that is not the one their child is assigned to based on their home address.
James’s initial application for open enrollment was denied because of his behavior
record at CMS. However, his parents were reapplying (using additional information
and support from the special education coordinator at CMS) in the hopes of a
successful second attempt. Besides taking a great deal of time to complete the
application and appeal processes, navigating a large school district to know which
schools are better than others or which schools have good extracurricular activities
(like sports) requires that parents have a social network from which to get
information and referrals. While some information about schools is publicly
available, most of this information is published online; getting a hard copy of
government reports requires time and money. Further, much of the information
Alicia and Martin were relying upon to make their decision about James’s high
school was not official, public information. Alicia mentions later in her interview
that the school in which they were trying to enroll James had a better reputation than

175
the one to which he was assigned. Information about reputation is information that
comes from social connections and is therefore quite different than information
gleaned from the schools’ official information.
Returning now to the question of technology, issues related to the
technology/online participation gap can be understood in relation to the economic,
social, and cultural contexts of each family. Although the families I profile in this
chapter did not have computers at home and although the parents had extremely
limited experience using computers, each parent mentioned the value that she or he
placed on technology as a tool for supporting their children’s learning. Technology
was distinguished from other forms of media, such as television, and was attributed
elevated educational value. As Marta summarized:
... yo digo que es [la computadora] muy bueno para ellos. Es más fácil todo.
Todo es más fácil con la computadora. Entonces si ellos van a estudiar y les
beneficia eso, pues es muy bueno...En cambio la televisión no es ningún
beneficio. Es un entretenimiento pero no tiene ningún beneficio. La
computadora sí porque se puede trabajar con eso.

…I think that [the computer] is really good for them [children/students]. It
makes everything easier. Everything seems easier with the computer. So if
they are going to study and get a benefit from that, it is a good thing...On the
other hand, they don’t get any benefit from the TV. It is an entertainment, but
it doesn’t provide any benefit. The computer does, because you can actually
work there.

The value placed on technology for educational success and increased work
opportunities, as well as each family’s plan to acquire a home computer and internet
access when it was financially feasible evidences the families’ understanding of the
participation gap and the potential consequences of remaining on the “wrong side” of
the gap. However, at the same time that technology was viewed as an educational

176
resource, each parent expressed concerns about having a computer in the home. Most
of the concerns centered upon the safety of their children; other concerns were in
relation to keeping tabs on the amount of time their children spent on the computer,
or otherwise regulating use and sharing among family members. For example,
consider Alicia’s explanation of the Ramos family’s hesitancy to get a computer:
…[We worry about] how vulnerable children are to the computer and what’s
out there that can be - all those chat rooms and people just getting online and
logging on to the children. And that’s what we’re mostly afraid of. I mean,
because we watch a lot of programs where it involves children - violence
against children, so we try to teach that to them, that this is the dangers of
having a computer and the usage of the computer, and neglecting that time
that we do have with them instead of - because we know that they would be
fighting over the computer, if we did have one.

Fears about online predators came up in each parental interview; each parent also
noted that although she/he did not have any personal experiences of their children or
children they knew being solicited online, they had heard about it on television news
programs, which urged parents to be vigilant in protecting their children from online
dangers.
Considered together, these two discourses create a serious conundrum for
parents who do not have direct experiences of using technology from which to draw.
On the one hand, technology is promoted as an important educational tool; further,
emphasis on the importance of out-of-school experiences using technology
(specifically, having a computer at home) has gradually moved to the center of
discourses about participation and the participation gap. As I will discuss in the next
chapter, New Media Literacies have been framed primarily as out-of-school
literacies, placing the responsibility for their development on individuals and parents

177
rather than considering the role of institutions in providing learning experiences
conducive to the development of new media literacies. At the same time that
technological skills and NML are framed as essential skills and as needing to be
developed outside of schools, a competing discourse about online dangers places
additional responsibility on parents to supervise and regulate technology use—not
just to control learning, but to keep their children safe. The home computer is thus
constructed as a necessary danger for children’s success in the future.
As this chapter has illustrated, access is complicated and embedded in a
network of social structures. The technological determinism implicit in early digital
divide discourse has been, in part, addressed by new attention to the context of use as
well as the social and human resources necessary for technology use. The
participation gap continues this work of considering contextual factors within the
context of new media.
While shift from hard technological determinism is, by and large, a positive
change, it has brought with it a declaration that participatory culture is antithetical to
schools. Whereas the digital divide was thought to be fixable by wiring schools, the
participation gap is thought to require more resources and different resources, most
of which schools are not prepared to provide. Part of the challenge of participatory
culture for schools is related to the longstanding division between schools and
commercial culture (as I have discussed in chapter 2). Another part of the conflict is
related to the way kids are constructed as consumer citizens within participatory

178
culture. In the next chapter, I investigate the concept of consumer citizenship in
relation to new media literacies, a set of media literacy skills linked to participatory
culture.

179
Chapter 5 Endnotes

1
The interviews with Marta Aguilar and Diana Mendoza were conducted in Spanish
by Lisa Tripp. The excerpts are presented in Spanish and English. Alicia and Martin
Ramos were interviewed in English.
2
Benjamin M. Compaine, The Digital Divide : Facing a Crisis or Creating a Myth?,
Mit Press Sourcebooks (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001).
3
Light, "Rethinking the Digital Divide.", Anthony Wilhelm, "From Crystal Palaces
to Silicon Valleys: Market Imperfection and the Enduring Digital Divide," in Access
Denied in the Information Age, ed. Stephen Lax (London: Palgrave, 2001).
4
Michelle Rodino-Colocino, "Laboring under the Digital Divide," New Media &
Society 8, no. 3 (2006).
5
"Falling through the Net: A Survey of The "Have Nots" In Rural and Urban
America," ed. U.S. Department of Commerce (Washington D.C.: National
Telecommunications and Information Administration, 1995).
6
"Falling through the Net Ii: New Data on the Digital Divide," ed. National
Telecommunications and Information Administration (Washington D.C.: U.S.
Department of Commerce, 1998), "Falling through the Net: Defining the Digital
Divide," ed. National Telecommunications and Information Administration
(Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1999).
7
"A Nation Online: Entering the Broadband Age," ed. National Telecommunications
and Information Administration (Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce,
2004).
8
http://www.fcc.gov/telecom.html
9
Mark Cooper and Gene Kimmelman, "The Digital Divide Confronts the
Telecommunications Act of 1996: Economic Reality Versus Public Policy," in The
Digital Divide: Facing a Crisis or Creating a Myth, ed. Benjamin M. Compaine
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001).
10
Light, "Rethinking the Digital Divide," 716.
11
Lynn Schofield Clark, Christof Demont-Heinrich, and Scott A. Webber,
"Ethnographic Interviews on the Digital Divide," New Media & Society 6, no. 4
(2004): 531.
12
Ibid.: 534.
13
Stephen Lax, "Information, Education and Inequality: Is New Technology the

180

Solution?," in Access Denied in the Information Age, ed. Stephen Lax (London:
Palgrave, 2001).
14
Anna Everett, "Introduction," in Learning Race and Ethnicity, ed. Anna Everett,
The John D. And Catherine T. Macarthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and
Learning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 2.
15
Paul DiMaggio et al., "From Unequal Access to Differentiated Use: A Literature
Review and Agenda for Research on Digital Inequality," in Social Inequality, ed. K
Neckerman (New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004), 28.
16
Jenkins et al., "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media
Education for the 21st Century," 5.
17
Annete Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (Berkeley and
Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2003), Annette Lareau and Elliot
B. Weininger, "Cultural Capital in Educational Research: A Critical Assessment,"
Theory and Society 32 (2003).
18
Ricardo D. Stanton-Salazar, "A Social Capital Framework for Understanding the
Socialization of Racial Minority Children and Youths," Harvard Educational Review
67, no. 1 (1997): 4.
19
P. Phelan, A.L. Davidson, and H.C. Yu, "Students' Multiple Worlds: Navigating
the Borders of Familiy, Peer, and School Cultures.," in Renegotiating Cultural
Diversity in American Schools, ed. P. Phelan and A.L. Davidson (New York:
Teachers College Press, 1993).
20
Stanton-Salazar, "A Social Capital Framework for Understanding the Socialization
of Racial Minority Children and Youths," 24.
21
Ellen Seiter, "Practicing at Home: Computers, Pianos, and Cultural Capital," in
Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected, ed. Tara McPherson, The John D.
And Catherine T. Macarthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).

181
Chapter 6: Conclusion

In an interview I conducted with Mr. Davidson at the end of the year, I asked
him what he thought was the most significant change in his students. He told me:
…the most significant way [the students changed]– is that their self-
confidence rose. I remember when they finished their standardized test…and
I asked ‘em, ‘How was it?’ They said that it was easy…I don’t know if they
did well or not; but I know that they started to believe in themselves.

Throughout the school year, he had pointed out to me small changes in individual
students--that Carlos had begun reading chapter books, that James was showing up to
class regularly and on time, and that Sara was more expressive than she had been at
the beginning of the year, for example—all of which are small but significant
changes for students, and particularly for students in special education. All of these
changes, however, are related to the larger-scale change Mr. Davidson mentions
above—students beginning to believe in themselves.
It would be easy to dismiss this statement as an empty, feel-good claim of
improved self-esteem. However, I think that the change Mr. Davidson describes is
much more substantial than that. Through the media production projects they
undertook during the school year, Mr. Davidson’s students were forced to think
about issues related to their own identities and participation as students, family
members, friends, and consumers, and began to see that both identity and
participation are complex, dynamic, and overdetermined. Some aspects of students’
identities that had previously always been disallowed at school—popular music, for
instance—had made their ways into the classroom and contributed to projects for

182
which they had received accolades, not just from their teachers and friends, but also
from school administrators, other students, and family members. Being a proficient
media producer, indeed, one who could go into a classroom of “gifted” students and
be an expert, had become a part of each student’s identity. Media production had
become a set of skills that the students could manipulate to express themselves; it
was also a unique and valued set of skills that distinguished them as special students,
not just special education students.
As kids who accessed and used media and technology in diverse ways, who
operated within often strict boundaries for consumption dictated by parental rules,
cultural and social norms, and economic factors, it is clear that the CMS students I
have profiled in this dissertation can be characterized neither as innocent victims of
manipulative media and technology nor as savvy whiz kids with a “natural” acuity
for technology. As such, my research has affirmed Buckingham’s claim that this
binary does not make sense, particularly in relation to contemporary children.
Additionally, the binary construction of “haves” and “have-nots” often used in
digital divide discourse does not accurately explain these students’ relationships to
media and technology. Again, the story is much more complicated than either binary
construction can explain.
In recent years, the binary construction of kids as victims or masters of media
and technology sometimes has been expressed using the term “Digital Natives”.
1

Digital Natives are people born after 1980 who have grown up (or currently are
growing up) in a climate of media saturation and networked media. Like discourses

183
of “cyberkids” or “The Electronic Generation,” the assumption of a natural acuity
with media and technology is problematic. Digital Natives are contrasted with
“Digital Immigrants,” older people who have adopted a similar stance toward media
and technology after spending part of their lives in a less mediated world. As John
Palfrey and Urs Gasser point out, not all young people are Digital Natives. It takes a
particular kind of person—one with particular motivation and resources—to be a
Digital Native
2
. Although the students I worked with at CMS were born well after
1980 and used digital media on a regular basis, they likely would not meet the
criteria for identification as Digital Natives because they lacked the money to buy
gadgets as well as the time and the literacy skills to devote themselves to mediated
lives.
It is the longevity of the construction of kids as either victims or savvy users
of technology that, in part, motivates the concerns about access I have discussed
throughout this dissertation and particularly in chapter five. At the same time that
kids recognized as having new media literacy skills (or, synonymously, as being
Digital Natives) are being recognized and empowered in ways similar to those with
which they have become familiar through other parts of the market, other kids are
marked as “illiterate,” not only in terms of alphabetic literacy, but also in terms of
the technological and social skills identified as essential to future success. Because of
the links that have been forged (both within discourse and institutions) between
media, technology, and consumer citizenship, being on the wrong side of the digital
divide or the participation gap--being neither a Digital Native nor a Digital

184
Immigrant—not only threatens kids’ experiences at school, but also (apparently) puts
their futures in jeopardy.
As consumer citizens, kids are addressed as already empowered participants.
They are endowed with opportunities and authority to make decisions, to buy things,
to express opinions. They are powerful. Schools do not operate under this model,
which conflicts with the power kids experience at outside of school. This does not
mean that schools intentionally aim to disempower students (although that is an
unfortunately frequent happening), it means that schools have a different definition
of empowerment. Both in school and in the realm of consumption, empowerment is
contingent upon tacit knowledge enacted through social norms, behavioral
expectations, and, occasionally, explicitly through discourse or policy (such as the
junk food bans.) The goal of media literacy/new media literacy, therefore, should not
necessarily be to displace or discredit one form of empowerment over another, but to
make transparent the forces of power at work, thus allowing students to articulate,
consider, and make informed decisions about their participation in various venues.
Schools need to be a place where kids learn about media literacy and new
media literacies because, despite the lingering problems of resources associated with
digital divide interventions, schools are, for a number of children, their primary
source of access to working technology and internet access. If we as adults and
educators buy into the idea that technology skills are essential for future success, as
appears to be the case through the widespread discourse of “21
st
century skills,” we
need to be proactive about providing access to the conditions and opportunities that

185
allow students to develop those skills—not just technical skills like typing or
moviemaking, but also critical skills for understanding and participating in various
formats.
My focus throughout this dissertation has been on what and how the students
in Ms. Abel and Mr. Davidson’s classes learned. Although I have mentioned here
and there the role of the teacher in designing a particular project, enforcing rules in
the classroom, or assisting students with various parts of the process, the teaching
that went on in the classroom has largely been left out of this narrative. This is not
because teaching media literacy or media production is unimportant. Indeed,
teaching (in a variety of forms) is an essential resource and an element of access that
is often overlooked. It is for this reason that the next section of this chapter focuses
on teaching. Teaching media literacy through media production is a major challenge
for teachers, particularly because most teachers receive no formal training in media
production, technical skills, or media literacy. Ms. Abel and Mr. Davidson were
different from most other faculty at CMS because they were being trained in media
literacy and media production through their participation in a professional
development program designed to teach these specific skills. Despite this training,
the vast majority of the technical and creative skills and pedagogical techniques used
in the classroom were developed by the teachers “on the ground” as the media
projects took place. Looking closely at some of the pedagogical practices Ms. Abel
and Mr. Davidson used and at some of the challenges they faced in teaching media
production is helpful in identifying recommendations for future research and teacher

186
training in media literacy and media production.

Teaching Media Production
As bell hooks notes in the quote that follows, good teaching can be
understood as a performance that draws the audience in and encourages and enables
them to participate in learning:
Teaching is a performative act. And it is that aspect of our work that
offers the space for change, invention, spontaneous shifts that can
serve as a catalyst drawing out the unique elements in each classroom.
To embrace the performative aspect of teaching we are compelled to
engage ‘audiences,’ to consider issues of reciprocity. Teachers are not
performers in the traditional sense of the word in that our work is not
meant to be a spectacle. Yet it is meant to serve as a catlyst that calls
everyone to become more and more engaged, to become active
participants in learning.
3

Teaching media literacy in the contemporary media environment requires an
understanding of the media environment, new pedagogical techniques, and a
different understanding of what it means to be “literate.” Because of the institutional
structure of schools and the current focus in educational policy on standardized
testing, all of these elements are likely to be met with resistance. Sometimes that
resistance comes from where you most expect it, such as administrators who are
responsible for maintaining or improving the school’s test scores in order to avoid
losing funding and control of the school. Other times, resistance comes from other
teachers, parents, or the students themselves. In the case of CMS, all of these forms
of resistance were evident at different times throughout the school year.

187
Understanding the media environment not only means having experience
with various tools and spaces; it also means sifting through a wealth of discourses
about the spaces themselves and about the young people who use them. For example
discourses that construct digital media production as leisure or play, or discourses
that place informal and formal learning in opposition to one another influence may
influence teachers’ perceptions of the place of media production in the classroom.
Further, as Sonia Livingstone has indicated, it may not be a feature of young people
that makes it seem that they do not need to be taught how to use media and
technology, but rather a characteristic of adults:
Indeed, the very difficulty of accessing and using the internet beguiles many
adults into believing that if only they could master “clicking” on links with
the mouse, then they—like their children—would be internet “experts.” This
is not a belief that we hold for the pen, else we’d stop teaching pupils English
once they had learned to read and write, but the child who “whizzes” around
the screen seems so skilled that, we conclude comfortably, they know all they
need to know already.
4

However, as Livingstone notes and as my research in the CMS classrooms
demonstrate, there are a number of ways in which students may benefit from
instruction in media and technology use.
Len Masterman has highlighted “non-hierarchical teaching” as a key
component of teaching with and about media. He writes:
The nature of the media themselves encourage non-hierarchical teaching
modes. Not only, at their best, do they spread information and knowledge
laterally, speaking across rather than down to their audiences. They also
generally speak with the same voice to an audience divided by class, race,
gender and so on. In media lessons, teacher and students alike are equally and
equal objects of address. Breaking with this equality by establishing a more
hierarchical mode can have unfortunate consequences. It is likely to be seen
by students (though it would never be expressed in these terms) as a form of

188
cultural expropriation through which their own cultural forms and pleasures
(especially in the areas of music and entertainment) become subjected to
mediation by teachers and in danger of being wrested from students
altogether.
5

In both of the classrooms in which I conducted participant observation at CMS,
classes flowed between hierarchical (teacher-in-charge) and non-heirarchical
organizations. The beginning of projects tended to be more teacher-designed and
directed than later phases of production. Students sometimes began the projects with
worksheets to map out the content of the project or the class would spend one or two
class periods holding a group discussion about the topic of the project. The technical
production skills, however, tended to be figured out “on the ground,” as students
worked on their projects. This kind of flexible thinking and trial and error practice
has been called “tinkering.” More recently, in our work on the Digital Youth project,
we have proposed a concept we have dubbed “messing around” as a way of
understanding how some young people orient toward media and technology. Key
components of messing around are the trial and error practices and flexible and
creative thinking seen in kids’ attempts to figure out how to use new hardware or
software or how to express ideas in new and creative ways.
While the students were able to figure out many of their questions about
hardware and software through messing around, they appeared to need additional
guidance in order to understand the critical element of the projects. For example,
students were given sometimes given minimal instructions to guide a web search, or
were involved in a pre-project discussion about a topic they had not yet researched.
The students’ lack of traditional literacy skills and their lack of experience decoding

189
media presented a distinct challenge to taking a critical approach to media. Older
students or students who do not have the same difficulties with reading and writing
may need less scaffolding in this area. However, assisting students with critical
assessment of resources as well as expressing critical thinking through their media
productions appears to be an area of need regardless of learning disabilities.
In each of the projects that required web research, students struggled to find
the resources they needed for their productions. They also struggled to assess the
credibility of what they found. I discussed the typical search strategy I observed
during the research for the junk food documentaries in chapter two. Similar issues
with searching came up in a later project which asked students to create a timeline of
significant events in their lives. Students were instructed to choose one significant
personal event and one significant event from world history that occurred during
each year of their lives. For most students, this meant starting in 1994; for most
students, this also meant starting with an event that was both a significant personal
event and a significant world event: the Northridge earthquake.
The purpose of this project was to assist students in making connections
between personal history and the world around them. Beyond the initial instructions
on the project, the formal teaching for this production was minimal. Students were
guided in certain technical skills (such as using a scanner) and checked in frequently
with Mr. Davidson or the classroom assistant when they ran up against problems.
Otherwise, students were left on their own to do the project in their own way. In this
way, the classroom looked more like a “flat” (non-hierarchical) learning community

190
than a traditional classroom. The “mentorship” model of on-demand answers from a
co-participant is similar to the peer learning that is characteristic of informal learning
settings.
Students scanned family photographs to represent the personal events in a
timeline built in iMovie. They were instructed to go online to find world events and
images to represent them in the timeline. Although students were allowed to use any
web resource or book in the classroom library to do the research for this project, they
quickly figured out that Wikipedia provided a quick and easy way of finding both the
information and the images they needed. The search strategy was to enter the year
(e.g. 1994) into Wikipedia and choose from the list of events that appeared. The list
was categorized by month and included events such as significant births and deaths,
Nobel Prize winners, fictional references to the year, and prominent news stories.
Students generally scrolled through the events, starting with January, until they
found one that looked important or interesting enough to include. This strategy
resulted in many of the timelines featuring the same world events for each year.
Despite the lack of explicit instruction from Mr. Davidson, it was clear in
talking with the students that he continued to be seen as an authority in assessing
credibility and value of information. For example, I worked with Gabriel while he
was doing research for his timeline and asked him how he decided if an event was
important. He had two markers he used to guide his choices. The first was whether or
not the event had an image associated with it in the year summary page on
Wikipedia. The second was whether or not Mr. Davidson said it was important. As

191
Gabriel put it, “Mr. Davidson said we don’t want just any thing. We want important
stuff like the Northridge earthquake. That was an important thing…[because] a lot of
people died.” Indeed, death and destruction were markers of importance for many of
the students, as most of the important world events students incorporated into their
timelines were natural disasters, plane crashes, wars, and celebrity deaths.
Determining the importance of events was one area in which nearly all the
students struggled. However, it was striking to me that some students also struggled
to determine whether or not information is real. As Gabriel and I worked together to
research events for his timeline project, we had a conversation about the Mars
Exploration Rover, which came up in his search for events in 2004. The event was
highlighted on the page with a picture, but Gabriel did not believe that it was real. He
thought it was a fabricated picture, possibly from a movie. When I talked with him
about the expedition, that the researchers found evidence of water on Mars, and that
the evidence of water indicates that there may have been (and may still be) life on
the planet, he looked astonished and asked me if I meant aliens. I tried to explain to
him that the image he probably has of aliens from movies and television is not real,
and that the life the scientists were referring to in the case of the Rover was likely
microscopic. To this, he told me that he was sure there was never life on Mars
because if there had been, the aliens would have already moved to Earth, and he had
never seen an alien.
Gabriel’s difficulty assessing credibility has, I think, less to do with his
reading ability, as he was one of the stronger readers in the class. (In fact, he was

192
slated to move to a “regular” education class at the start of the following school
year.) Instead, I think he was accustomed to navigating media and online spaces that
blended fantasy and reality. In chapter three, I told the story of watching Gabriel and
his brother play Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. This is an example of a blending of
fantasy (the actions in the game) and (semi) reality (the setting, which was
particularly real for Gabriel who had only recently moved from the area of Southern
California upon which the setting was modeled.) While I am not trying to argue that
he had trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality in order to make claims
about the “effects” of him playing the game, I do think that the seamless blending of
real and not real, particularly in the absence of knowledge or resources to double
check information (such as asking a teacher or knowing about alternate sites for
information) presents more difficulty to kids than one might expect. As such, this is
an important area of which teachers should be aware, as well as a site for future
research.
A second area in which teachers can help students take a critical approach to
media production is in projects about identity and self expression. As subjects of a
variety of ideologies—gender, race, class, even consumption—the opportunities kids
have, even in the “democratizing” spaces of the web, to critically reflect on these
ideologies and discourses and to express themselves in ways that complicate or resist
certain subject positions are relatively infrequent. This type of production is difficult,
and in many cases only happens within specific interest-driven communities.

193
Teachers can encourage critical reflection on identity in a variety of ways.
One method I observed in the CMS classrooms that appeared to be a powerful
teaching tool was modeling the practice of self-expression desired of the students.
For example, as I mentioned in chapter three, the class discussion about the
American Dream (in relation to Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech) was disastrous until
Mr. Davidson told the students his own story of immigration. Similarly, both he and
Ms. Abel showed the class the poems and artwork they had created at a professional
development workshop related to the Muchos Somos/We are Many exercise. In both
of these cases, flattening the hierarchy in the classroom and modeling the critical
skills desired of students assisted them in incorporating critical analysis into their
projects.
For children with learning disabilities, the processes of media production can
be difficult to understand and manage. Kids like Justin, for example, who have
difficulty controlling their attention, may have trouble getting started on projects or
may find it difficult to transition away from projects they are enjoying. Both of these
elements were difficult for Justin, but were managed by breaking down the project
into small goals. In this way, Justin could accomplish a small goal on a project that
was difficult to start or manage. He also started each project with a defined end point
for each goal, which helped him pull away from projects he found preoccupying. As
was evident in both of Mr. Davidson and Ms. Abel’s classes, the media production
projects were very motivating for kids who were generally disengaged from school.
Throughout the year, both teachers remarked to me on the improved attendance and

194
promptness of students during production projects. In a school district that has
recently reported that one third of high school students drop out before graduation,
6

simply getting kids to show up to school regularly is a huge accomplishment.
In our contemporary educational environment, neither teaching nor learning
is an easy job. The introduction of technology into the classroom can be beneficial in
many ways, as it supports alternative pedagogical techniques, acts as a motivator for
students who are disengaged with school, and opens up a wide variety of resources to
students who might otherwise never know that they were available. On the other
hand, using technology in school requires a great deal of labor, creativity, and
patience—on the parts of both teachers and students. Digital media, in the present
moment, appears to be undergoing an infinite expansion, moving into sectors of life
and culture that have never before been touched by technology. It is tempting to
declare the teacher “obsolete” in the presence of e-learning modules and resources
like Wikipedia. However, it is important to remember that teaching is an essential
part of learning and should be taken seriously when considering media education.

Learning and Teaching in Middle School

I often say that attending middle school was much better the second time
around. I showed up for second period and left after fifth. I knew all the answers. I
did not need to worry about finding a date to the dance or about what my friends
thought of me or my outfits. Indeed, attending middle school as an adult is much
more pleasant than attending as an adolescent.
The classrooms I worked in were energetic, creative, and generally fun places

195
in which to learn. The positive atmosphere was a result of many factors—certainly
not just the media and technology used in the classroom. While they were certainly
not without their challenges, conflicts, or catastrophes, I do not think it is an
understatement to call media production a transformative form of teaching in these
classrooms. To conclude, I return to the quote from bell hooks that I used earlier in
this chapter. Hooks reminds us:
Teachers are not performers in the traditional sense of the word in that our
work is not meant to be a spectacle. Yet it is meant to serve as a catalyst that
calls everyone to become more and more engaged, to become active
participants in learning.
7

Teaching through media production fits hooks’ description of transformative
teaching as a catalyst for active, meaningful learning. As such, media production is a
tool for teachers and students who want to be active participants in learning, and
must be made available to all students, regardless of who they are, where they go to
school, or whether they are in regular or special education.

196
Chapter 6 Endnotes

1
Palfrey and Gasser, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital
Natives.
2
Ibid.
3
bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New
York: Routledge, 1994).
4
Sonia Livingstone, "Internet Literacy: Young People's Negotiation of New Online
Opportunities," in Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected, ed. Tara
McPherson, The John D. And Catherine T. Macarthur Foundation Series on Digital
Media and Learning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 101.
5
Masterman, Teaching the Media, 30.
6
Mitchell Landsberg and Howard Blume, "1 in 4 Quit High School in California;
State Officials Release Results of a New System That Tracks Dropouts. But the
Numbers Tell Only Part of the Story," Los Angeles Times, July 17 2008.
7
hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom.

197
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Asset Metadata

Creator Stephenson, Rebecca Herr (author)

Core Title Kids as cultural producers: consumption, literacy, and participation

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 10/17/2008

Defense Date 08/25/2008

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag digital media,media literacy,media production,middle school,OAI-PMH Harvest,special education

Place Name Los Angeles (city or populated place)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Banet-Weiser, Sarah (committee chair), Gross, Larry (committee member), Seiter, Ellen (committee member)

Creator Email bhs@hri.uci.edu,rherr@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m1674

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Legacy Identifier etd-Stephenson-2393.pdf

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Document Type Dissertation

Rights Stephenson, Rebecca Herr

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu