Worried About the Wrong Things

by Jacqueline Ryan Vickery

  Jada had access to a shared Internet-enabled family computer (which was set up in the breakfast nook of the kitchen), to her own tablet, and to a data-connected smartphone (both of which her parents helped her purchase). She articulated that her phone was highly important to her, yet she regularly expressed a dismissive attitude toward technology and media production, claiming that it “wasn’t her thing” and that she found computers complicated and “not that interesting.” Jada was not a member of the Digital Media Club or of the Cinematic Arts Project, in comparison with students who were in the after-school media clubs, Jada could be described as a more casual user of technology. Her practices were primarily friendship-driven; her motivation for using media technology was as a way to stay in touch with her friends. This differs from the more invested practices of her peers in the Digital Media Club whose motivations were driven by an interest in media production. For that reason, it was surprising to me that Jada told me she had uploaded video content to YouTube when her more technologically savvy peers Javier, Selena, and Gabriela had not.

  One afternoon, as Jada and I were casually discussing how her weekend had gone, she showed me a video that she and some friends had recorded at her house; in it they were trying to choreograph a dance to a new Drake song.4 The video was similar to many user-generated amateur videos on YouTube: technologically it was simplistic and novice, the lighting was not clear, the camera movement was shaky, and it had not been edited in any way. In the video we see Jada and three other high school girls dancing and laughing as they try to learn the dance. The video ends with the girls playfully teasing one another and laughing at their own mistakes. In comparison with the sophisticated and technologically advanced videos that I was accustomed to seeing from students in the Cinematic Arts Project, this one stood out as markedly amateur and playful. Yet one of Jada’s friends had shared it on her YouTube account (with the consent of the friends). Meanwhile, the aspiring filmmakers I knew had consistently chosen not to share their videos online. What was the difference? Why had Jada—a self-described novice with little vested interest in media production—uploaded a video to YouTube, while other more digitally literate young people interested in media production had not?

  To help answer this question, it is useful to consider other similar research about young media makers. In her extensive ethnographic research about YouTube, Lange (2014) explored the identities, dispositions, social contexts, and literacies that structure young people’s video pro­duction, consumption, and distribution practices via YouTube. In one of Lange’s studies, all but one of the 40 participants had shared a video online, either on YouTube or on his or her own blog or website. Lange’s study gives valuable insight into the collaborative and social process of learning, creating, and play, yet of course there is an inherent sample bias in studying young people who have already shared user-generated content online. Although we have a lot to learn from such young people, the work has the unintended consequence of further perpetuating the false assumption that today’s “digital generation” are all actively participating in online communities. Lange is aware of the differentiated practices and avoids a monolithic argument; she certainly does not ignore or overlook social, economic, and cultural barriers to participation. Nonetheless, such work is valuable, yet unintentionally continues to contribute to an expectation that young people who share videos are the norm. Yet, we also must interrogate the barriers that prohibit some young people from participating fully in an online video sharing culture—particularly, when those who are not participating are the ones who might have the most to gain from participation.

  Many of the videos Lange analyzed were similar to the casual dance video that Jada created with her friends. Lange refers to such videos as “personally expressive media,” which is a broad definition used to describe a variety of youth-produced media that “enables a creator to communicate aspects of the self” (2014, p. 16). Beneficially, Lange distinguishes among novice, amateur, and pre-professional video makers. (Pre-professional video makers express concern about the technical aspects of their productions in relation to their own technical identities.) Not all of the students who participated in the after-school clubs had aspirations of working in the film industry, but many of them explicitly expressed such interests and goals. In Lange’s terminology, they could be considered pre-professional media producers. These technical identities were explicitly articulated by the teens when describing their own interest and investment in the Cinematic Arts Project. This was also revealed in the amount of time students invested in the technical aspects of their films, which were primarily extracurricular, and not part of their formal education or grades. Students reluctantly—or even proudly—admitted to falling behind on their school work because they opted to devote their time to their film and media projects instead of their required (and graded) school work.

  At first glance, it may appear that students involved in the after-school clubs were merely reluctant to share their creative media content because they were still constructing technical identities—identities they viewed as entrepreneurial and pre-professional. However, they often shared their projects with peers, with teachers, with parents, with potential adult supporters of the club, and even at local film festivals. The reluctance to share was intricately linked to the online environment. To the students, there was a difference between sharing their films in professional offline spaces and amateur online spaces that they had not reconciled; by constructing their identities as pre-professional, they were missing opportunities to construct professional online identities and networks.

  Social Literacy and Resiliency

  Fear of critique (e.g., mean and unwarranted comments) and fear that one’s creative media projects aren’t “good enough” are different, but they also overlap in that they both have to do with confidence. Many students who appeared confident in and proud of their skills and creativity feared how others would respond to their creative media content online. This may have been an individual issue of confidence, but given the prevalence of such attitudes among members of the club I tend to think it was something else. The sociologist Annette Lareau (2003) might argue that the reluctance could be linked to participants’ classed subject positions. Lareau has found that young people from middle-class families tend to demonstrate more efficacious beliefs about their own school performance compared to students from working-class homes, and that students’ perceptions and attitudes about their accomplishments are affected by their social class and their home structures. Perhaps the working-class, immigrant, and marginalized statuses of Sergio, Javier, Selena, and their peers has negatively influenced their individualized and collective senses of efficacy and confidence.

  However, another productive approach is to additionally question whose dispositions, interests, voices, and “ways of being” are validated in society. That approach shifts the focus away from individuals and toward the cultural power structures within society. Here it is useful to turn to Sims’ (2014) research on “differentiating practices” as a way to understand young people’s mediated participation and production. In his ethnographic research with middle school students in a media-oriented school, Sims found that “the relative leveling of access and skills exhibited in the classroom did not mitigate differentiated use in situations where students had more control over how they spent their time. In students’ more voluntary or ‘interest-driven’ activities … many historical structures of privilege returned to the fore.” “It is clear,” Sims asserted (2014, pp. 673–674), “that providing access and skills does not, in and of itself, lead to the media production activities that many digital inequality scholars endorse.” Sims’ findings differ in some details from the findings presented in this book, but his overall conclusion is similar to the experiences of students such as Sergio and Javier in this study. Because school did not encourage or facilitate sharing creative media content online, but rather the focus was almost solely on production, many students did not choose to participate
in these ways.

  What the “differentiating practices” approach allows us to do is ask, rather than how and why students “use” digital media differently, what uses and which users are validated and supported within these systems of practice—in this case, school and online communities. This requires us to consider participation as part of a broader social practice and structure, something that is not wholly individualistic or a singular choice. Rather,

  participation in social practices often positions selves in relation to others. … Through negotiations over participation, persons are identified and make their identities in part to say who they are and in part to say who they are not. (Sims 2014, p. 675, citing Holland, Lachiotte, Skinner, and Cain 1998)

  In this way I find Sims’ approach particularly applicable in helping unpack the reasons technologically skilled, creative, and otherwise confident students were afraid to participate in their online environments.

  Networked publics and social media have positively disrupted traditional corporate media models by providing spaces for diverse representation, greater incorporation and visibility of marginalized voices, the validation of amateur works, and the emerging hybrid media markets.5 Yet society still privileges the perspectives of white, straight, powerful, able-bodied, male adults. The commercial media that many of the students in this study valued, critiqued, emulated, and learned from, rarely depicted their values, bodies, lives, and class positions as (poor) young people of color. Further, when media do portray such identities and bodies, it is rarely in a positive and empowering (or realistic) manner (Gerbner and Gross 1976; Gray 1995; hooks 1992; Negra and Asava 2013). With this in mind, I cannot help but think that students’ fear of critique was more acutely a fear of being further dismissed, further silenced, and further marginalized within a media culture dominated by white adults.

  This fear can be further combined with what media scholars refer to as the “burden of representation” (Malik 2002; Mercer 1990), which describes the ways non-dominant individuals (who are marginalized on the basis of gender, race, ability, age, class, geography, religion, sexuality, or some intersection of any of these identities) carry the burden of positively representing their entire race, gender, religion, and so on. This is particularly true of young people, who “have had to carry a peculiar burden of representation; everything they do, say, think or feel, is scrutinized by an army of professional commentators for signs of the times” (Cohen and Ainley 2000, p. 89). One need only look at all the racist jokes about President Obama that imply that black men “make bad presidents” when the mistakes of the other 42 US presidents have never been blamed on the fact that they were either white or male. In this visible example, President Obama is evaluated not as a president, but as a black president, and is assumed to be representative of all future black leaders. This is the detrimental and racist burden of limited representation. In a culture that continually marginalizes, devalues, dismisses, and even demonizes youth (Gabriel 2013; Giroux 2009; Kelly 2003)—and more specifically, poor young people and young people of color, who rarely get media attention for reasons other than drugs, gangs, welfare, and criminality (Bullock, Wyche, and Williams 2002; Gilens 1996; Giroux 1996)—we must interpret students’ fears in a more holistic context of generalized fear about how society perceives their identities, bodies, and voices. Just as students’ fear that their ideas might be stolen online is part of a larger reality of theft at school, their fear of criticism and of not being “good enough” must be accounted for as part of a broader internalized fear that has historically and continually dismissed and misrepresented their identities and voices.

  In terms of interventions, the school and the after-school media clubs are certainly validating students’ perspectives and projects. This is demonstrated by the confidence with which students shared their projects with each other, mentors, teachers, and even me as a researcher. However, the disparity is between what they do and share in the club and what they choose to do and share online outside of school. What students needed help negotiating was the difference between constructive critiques and unproductive criticisms. Critiques offer suggestions for how to improve their ideas and content, whereas criticisms have little value in the learning process and can be dismissed. Fostering resiliency is a challenging but necessary part of growing up. Teens are understandably concerned about mean and hateful comments online. However, if sharing media online is part of the project’s goals and curriculum—and an equalizing aspect of participatory culture—then at least when they are at school students have adults ready and willing to help them navigate the negative terrain of the comment section (rather than being left to deal with it on their own in out-of-school settings). Teens need adults to help them process, negotiate, and cope with the inevitable negative online experience, as well as teach them ways to block and report such incidents when necessary. We cannot deny the risks of sharing media content online, but students need encouragement to take risks that can also lead to beneficial outcomes. Once again historical fears and the conflation of risk and harm has led to limited expectations that fail to balance the opportunities of risky practices (such as visibly sharing creative work in networked publics) with potential threats.

  We should help young people learn to appreciate and value their current subject positions, skills, and the learning process, alongside their pre-professional aspirations. It is valuable for schools to help students create professional online portfolios, but it is also essential that students do not only view their creative projects as pre-professional. It is important for young people to appreciate who they are and not just who they hope to become. Youth, as a social construct, is often built around discourses of becoming rather than being. To a certain extent students in our study had internalized these future-oriented narratives, perhaps to the detriment of valuing their current youthful amateur identities. This is also revealed by the students’ own reliance on the word “work” as a way to refer to their projects and creative media content. The word “work” reflects and is embedded within market-driven discourses that value their creativity in terms of labor, capital, and the professionalization of their practices.6

  It is not productive for students to compare themselves to professionals or to consider all of their films as part of their future professional work-oriented portfolio. There is value in sharing work in progress or amateur, playful, and self-expressive projects. Personally expressive and amateur media can help students learn how to network and share in a more relaxed and informal setting and can be beneficial outside of a market-driven understanding of value (in the same way that creative writing is a valuable practice outside of professional writing goals or rewards). The Cinematic Arts Project facilitated a safe environment for teens to take risks and fail, and to learn from those experiences. Certainly the consequences of failing online can be potentially detrimental, but they do not have to be. The social literacies that participatory cultures and networked publics require can only be learned through experimental trial and error, by reaching out, leaving comments, posting your own creative content, and so forth. Mistakes will be made, but typically they are not detrimental. Waiting until one’s project is polished and professional may seem a good strategy, but by avoiding risks of negative online experiences teens instead run the risk of never learning other valuable digital literacies: networking and collaboration.

  “It’s just not my thing”

  The third common reason why participants did not share their work had to do with the often unacknowledged amount of labor involved in maintaining an online presence and identity.7 When we talk about young people who actively and routinely upload original creative content, respond to feedback, attract and retain followers, and sustain personal learning networks, we tend to overlook the amount of time and labor such participation requires. I want to emphasize again that I do not think we should automatically expect young people to invest in crafting visible identities within networked publics—and the fact that some teens chose not to disru
pts otherwise homogenizing expectations of young people’s digital practices. However, it is important that teens who are invested in crafting pre-professional technical identities learn how to benefit from intentional visibility.

  One barrier that precluded some students from participating in networked publics as much as they would have liked was that they had other obligations. Many students either maintained part-time jobs as a way to contribute to household expenses; many others were expected to help care for younger siblings or cousins living at home. Several of the teens in the after-school media clubs lived with single parents, lived in multi-generation households, or had parents who worked at night, and the responsibility of caring for younger children at home was often displaced onto them. These competing responsibilities even interfered with regular school attendance, and prohibited some students from being able to attend meetings of after-school clubs as frequently as they would have liked. It is not surprising that some teens, already strapped for time, saw participation in networked publics and online participatory cultures as burdensome or too much work. Antonio was an active and regular member of the Cinematic Arts Project and hung out in the club many nights a week. Unlike some of his peers, Antonio had experimented with sharing creative photos as part of an online portfolio. His photos could be described as artistic, and he took pride and pleasure in photography. One reason he was reluctant to share them online—and later removed the photos—had to do with the quality of the images. He had taken the photos with an outdated phone, and he felt they weren’t professional enough to share online. A member of our research team suggested that, instead of sharing his photos in a professional portfolio, Antonio could share them on Tumblr, which encourages an edgy and low-quality aesthetic. In an interview, Antonio struggled to articulate why he didn’t want to share his photos, but eventually recognized that it had to do with the labor and time required to maintain a blog on Tumblr: