Real social change in protecting young people online will not occur until adult society quits playing “gotcha” with young people’s privacy practices, and instead respects the contextual integrity of young people’s practices and preferences. Like adults, young people need spaces for interpersonal and private communication and spaces for networking and public participation. They need spaces where they feel safe to express unique identities—identities that adults and society may find concerning. But they also need spaces to participate as citizens and engage in public discourse about their concerns and experiences. And they need adults to help them understand the difference, to help them navigate different levels of visibility.
Lastly, we need platform policies and architecture that respect the differences in these spaces; we need policies and interfaces that aim to not only profit from teens’ participation, but also strive to understand and respect their unique practices and expectations. Because young people have begun to abandon Facebook, and because other platforms have become more popular, it may seem odd that I have spent so much time analyzing Facebook in this chapter. However, Facebook is the social network site with the longest history, and through it we can analyze how changes in architecture and business models affect discourses of risk, visibility, and privacy. Despite its waning popularity—or perhaps because of its waning popularity among young people—we can learn a lot about how teens’ preferences, expectations, and practices shape and are shaped by commercial platforms that structure their engagement. For all its ills and benefits, Facebook has provided us with great insight into the tenuous relationship among commercial platforms, young people’s practices, and expectations of visibility and risk. I worry about self-censorship and disconnected practices that further silence and marginalize those already occupying positions of disadvantage in our society. Understandings of privacy must balance strategies for protection with strategies for helping young people embrace visible networked opportunities.
Notes
1. A judge dismissed the suit against the school district, but upheld the lawsuit against the individual administrator who found and shared the photo. At the time of writing, it is unclear what the outcome of the suit was.
2. For more about the psychology of identity, see Goffman 1959.
3. This may seem similar to the Georgia high school example I criticized. However, it is important to note that I only use the public profile pictures of the friends and do not share any information that is kept behind privacy walls (that would otherwise only be visible to friends). Facebook users typically choose a profile picture knowing it is visible to strangers and is accessible to anyone regardless of friend status. Additionally, Facebook users can control who can view their friends; if a user hides their friends then they are never included in this experiment. I only take screen grabs from friends who have made their entire friend list public. I also include a screen grab of twelve of my own friends, thus rendering myself equally as vulnerable in this experiment. Further, I do not reveal the name or identity of my friend and my goal is not to shame or embarrass. I am comfortable that I have not shared information or photos that breach contextual integrity of a public profile picture.
4. Starting in April 2010, users could Like information on sites outside of Facebook. This means that “when the user clicks the Like button on a site, a story appears in the user’s friends’ News Feed with a link back to the website” (“Like Button,” Facebook Developers, May 2011). For example, if you Liked an article about college football on ESPN’s website, a link to the article on ESPN’s website would appear in your friends’ news feeds with a caption that you had Liked the article. You did not have to deliberately post the article to your Facebook for your friends to know you had Liked it. From your friends’ perspective, it appeared as though you had intentionally re-shared the article through your Facebook feed.
5. Public is the default for “Pages,” which are typically representative of an organization or group, rather than an individual; but it is an option for individuals and individual posts.
7
(Dis)Connected Pathways: Expectations, Goals, and Opportunities
There are so many challenges out there, and I feel that school hasn’t prepared them with everything they need to know to succeed. I want to prepare them for the real world. … I think the after-school club fills in some of those gaps that the school doesn’t prepare them for, because getting out into the real world is tough.
Mr. Lopez (teacher and mentor to after-school media clubs)
Throughout this book, I have primarily focused on how policies and practices at school have exacerbated risks for young people or missed chances to create more equitable opportunities for marginalized and low-income students. In this chapter, I also consider technology classes and after-school clubs as examples of how teachers, schools, and policies can help students manage the costs and benefits of risks associated with digital media. As I will demonstrate, Mr. Lopez, the Tech Apps teacher, intentionally incorporated media technology into his courses, which served as working models of how learning can look when opportunity-driven expectations are at the forefront of students’ and teachers’ approaches to media use at school. However, there remain other systemic barriers—material and cultural—that block connections to more equitable pathways. The move toward opportunity-driven expectations of student media use can be situated within a broader optimistic view that considers the positive relationship between technology and social change. However, I also worry about discourses that celebrate the democratic potential of digital media to create new pathways for future success, yet overlook the very material, cultural, and social constraints that prevent those most in need from actually benefitting from the very interventions designed to close those participation gaps.
One approach that aims to instate a balance between opportunity-driven expectations and an awareness of the risks and barriers that inhibit more equitable outcomes, is the connected learning model that was developed by the collaborative and interdisciplinary Connected Learning Research Network (Ito et al. 2012). On the basis of international research in many different learning environments, Ito et al. explain connected learning as an approach to education that “advocates for broadened access to learning that is socially embedded, interest-driven, and oriented toward educational, economic, or political opportunity.” “Connected learning,” they continue, “is realized when a young person is able to pursue a personal interest or passion with the support of friends and caring adults, and is in turn able to link this learning and interest to academic achievement, career success or civic engagement. This model is based on evidence that the most resilient, adaptive, and effective learning involves individual interests as well as social support to overcome adversity and provide recognition.”
As is illustrated in figure 7.1, connected learning involves three properties of learning experiences: production-centered, shared purpose, and openly networked. Further, four design principles structure the connected learning environments: everyone can participate, learning happens by doing, the challenge is constant, and everything is interconnected. Together these contexts, properties, and design principles make up the connected learning approach that Ito et al. argue supports and sustains learning that engages young people in beneficial and equitable ways.
Figure 7.1 A framework for connected learning. Source: Ito et al. 2013 (licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License).
The connected learning approach is intentionally focused on alleviating economic and educational gaps. However, as I will demonstrate, risk structures choices in seemingly individualized ways that are actually deeply embedded within social contexts that limit the autonomy of choices. Because Freeway High’s student population included many students from low-income backgrounds, first-generation immigrants, and families without college backgrounds or experiences, the school and students faced many challenges to equitable learning opportunities. Many students wer
e academically disengaged and struggled to maintain interest in school for a variety of reasons including language barriers, family obligations such as caring for siblings, financial hardships, and precarious and nomadic home lives. Additionally, many students came from families that did not have experience with college and thus they were often navigating unfamiliar pathways without much home guidance or connections to expanded social capital. For example, Anna (18 years old, Mexican-American) had mentioned wanting to go to college but had not applied yet. When asked if she was planning to apply to college, she responded as follows.
Anna:
I don’t even know. I haven’t even looked really at all. I don’t know what I’m going to do so I don’t know where to look for a school. I don’t know what I’m looking for. I’m totally out of it. It doesn’t help that my parents are totally not on track of anything that we’re doing.
Q:
Do your parents not really talk about it?
Anna:
They always are encouraging me. Like, “Yeah, you keep your grades because you can get scholarships and go to college.” I’m, like, “Do y’all even know how to apply for a scholarship? Because I don’t. And y’all ain’t much help.”
Anna, like many other students at Freeway High, had aspirations of attending university or pursuing a middle-class career, yet her expectations, like those of many other students at Freeway, were often unrealistic. Despite the connected efforts of some of the courses and clubs at Freeway, students still did not have access to the material resources nor the social and cultural capital at home that would allow them to navigate these unfamiliar future pathways. Significantly, I do not want to imply that these shortcomings were the fault of individuals, instead the disconnects highlight systemic inequities and broken connections between education, home, and the labor market. Sonia Livingstone and Julian Sefton-Green poignantly articulate this observation in their book The Class (2016, p. 251): “Connecting learning across school and home might seem beneficial for everyone, but given the different resources that families can call on, in practice it opens the door to socioeconomic inequalities. Further, shifting the burden of responsibility for children’s learning from school to (also) home compounds already-heightened parental anxieties over children’s increasingly uncertain educational and employment prospects.”
Freeway High provided college-readiness workshops that helped students find and apply for scholarships. Yet the workshops often competed with other activities that students were already invested or interested in, such as band or the media clubs. Despite the many challenges, Freeway High was striving to find ways to be more relevant to students’ needs. This was evident from the many after-school clubs, vocational programs, and other resources aimed at supporting marginalized populations. Yet the success of such strategies varied within different student populations and often benefited those who already had advantageous access to networks of social and cultural capital. Students who were already at a disadvantage experienced marginal benefits but still faced systematic barriers that inhibited access to equitable opportunities.
Learning and Future (Dis)Connections
One somewhat successful approach to engaging students, which is the focus of this chapter, was that taken by Mr. Lopez’s technology courses and after-school clubs, which fit with many aspects of the connected learning model. As will be discussed, Mr. Lopez’s pedagogy had proved effective with many students at Freeway High and was credited with helping marginalized students graduate and find their passions. However, despite some success stories (including those of Javier and Gabriela addressed in this chapter), some students still faced structural and discursive barriers that prevented them from overcoming material and environmental challenges. The connected learning model not only provides a useful lens for exploring vital connections within students’ learning ecologies but also allows us to consider the disconnections that inhibit opportunities. At a glance, it stands to reason that schools ought to connect to home life in ways that amplify opportunities. Yet for many working-class families this connection presented an additional burden of responsibility that families were not equipped to provide for a variety of reasons including precarious immigrant status, financial challenges, and unfamiliarity with middle-class habitus1 and norms (Bourdieu 1990). Sergio’s and Selena’s stories will highlight that there was a disparity between some students’ expectations about future opportunities (in the technology and media industries) and their home life and the school’s capacity to prepare students for those positions. As I address through the stories of four teens at Freeway—Sergio, Javier, Gabriela, and Selena—the expectations about digital media literacy, skills, and opportunities tend to be contradictory and unstable: the school as an institution develops and employs particular expectations of technology, education, and goals, but students and their families have diverse expectations and make meaning out of their practices in ways that do not necessarily align with their future-oriented goals or the labor market. Students who did not have the advantages of diverse social networks and cultural capital were the least likely to reap the benefits of connected learning approaches.
If technology and media are to serve as interventions in the lives of marginalized young people or if media are to partially provide pathways to future successes, we must consider the role technology plays within the wider socially connected context of young people’s lives. Further, we must consider how young people’s expectations of their own futures are supported (or not) by the expectations of their peers, schools, adults, and the labor market of the creative media industries. Young people’s expectations of their future—as well as the ways in which they make meaning out of their own practices—often differ from the expectations of the adults in their lives and the ways social institutions map out future opportunities. In order for their expectations to come to fruition, they need adults and institutions to actively support—as well as shape—their opportunity-driven expectations. They also need expanded access to economic and cultural capital that expansive social networks provide more privileged and assimilated students.
What the lives of the four young people addressed in this chapter reveal is the importance of making and supporting significant connections between different influences and spaces of their lives—but also the importance of connecting their expectations to real-world opportunities, which are often missing. There is a disparity between the aspirations of young people, educational expectations, and employment options supported by precarious and uncertain labor markets. Building upon the connected learning model, I analyze the connections or disconnections between six key areas of the students’ lives: academic, peers, home life, adults, interests, and extracurricular activities as related to each students’ self-described short-term or long-term career goals (figure 7.2). Peers refers to the teen’s closest and most influential friends; academic refers to their formal educational environments and curricula at school; home refers to the support for and capacity to learn at home (access to the technology, resources, books, software, etc. necessary to learn at home); adults refers to parents, guardians, and/or other adult role models in their social networks that the teen trusts; interests refers to the teen’s personal passions, hobbies, curiosities, and activities; extracurricular refers to their informal learning spaces and activities (clubs, sports, band, church, etc.). Career goals are representative of a student’s self-identified and articulated short-term and long-term aspirations, expectations, and future career options. Students obviously had important life goals that transcended careers and economic aspirations—such as marriage, children, hobbies, and so forth; however, for the purpose of this analysis, goals are couched within a market-driven understanding of students’ career expectations, desires, and options.
Figure 7.2 A model of an ideal learning ecology.
In figure 7.2, the size of each sphere is representative of its influence on the participant and his or her goals (i.e., a large peer sphere and small adult sphere indicate that the participant
’s goals are largely influenced by their peers, and not as influenced by the adults in their life). In an ideal world, all six areas would both connect to and support a student’s career goals and there would be strong connections between each of the six nodes. Likewise, each sphere would be similar in size, as all six areas would influence one another and support the student’s aspirations, expectations, and goals. The length of the arrows indicates the quality or strength of the connections; a short arrow is indicative of a weak connection, a long arrow signifies a strong connection, and a missing arrow denotes a broken or missing connection. The elliptical arrow represents the importance of connecting a teen’s interests and extracurricular activities with their formal learning environment (i.e., academics) and goals, and vice versa. In the ideal model the formal learning spaces are both supported by and supporting the student’s informal learning spaces at school and connecting to the labor market.
Through an analysis of the connections or disconnections between media technology and other aspects of teens’ lives, I am able to avoid a technologically deterministic approach and instead situationally consider the ways in which technology and learning are socially situated and constructed within the broader lives of teens. Only when goals, the labor market, and learning ecologies are connected and supported can digital media literacy truly serve as an effective pathway to economic, civic, and social opportunities for equality. I do not mean to imply that the most important value of digital literacy is economic success or career opportunities. I hope the rest of the book has demonstrated the social, civic, educational, and personal value of practicing and connecting digital media literacies. The Digital Media Club and the Cinematic Arts Project were both designed in part to help marginalized students forge pathways to economic success. The focus of this chapter is on how the students’ learning ecologies in relation to digital media helped connect them with future career opportunities. Through an examination of Mr. Lopez’s classes, the after-school media clubs, and four select students involved in the programs, this chapter explores the complicated and unequal connections between risk, education, expectations, digital media, and future (economic) opportunities.
Worried About the Wrong Things Page 32