Worried About the Wrong Things

by Jacqueline Ryan Vickery

  The biggest differences in the stories concern the roles of and the (dis)connections between peers, academic, adults, and home. Javier, Sergio, and Gabriela all had peer networks that supported their goals and/or their interests and academic pursuits. Selena, on the other hand, lacked peer support of her goals, interests, and academic pursuits.

  Much has been written about the effect of peer groups on teens’ academic performance, motivation, engagement, and self-efficacy; studies have found that peer networks and a sense of belonging are important for supporting (or detracting from) academic success (Goodenow and Grady 1993; Hymel, Comfort, Schonert-Reichl, and McDougall 1996; Juvonen, Espinoza, and Knifsend 2012; Wentzel 2005).

  Additionally, for Sergio and Selena (and to a certain extent for Javier) there was a disparity between their interests and academics and their home life. They did not have access to the resources and the material capital necessary for their home life to play a significant role in supporting their goals. Sergio and Selena did not have access to technology that would have enhanced their personal interests as well as their academic pursuits. Likewise, in comparison with the parents of Javier and Gabriela, their parents were not as well connected or equipped to help with homework or creative media production. Their home lives afforded them less access to social networks that could have provided more diverse and resourceful social capital.

  Further, what is abundantly clear in Javier’s and Gabriela’s cases is the extent to which each node actively supported their academic goals and the labor market. While Selena and Sergio found some spaces and influences that supported their goals, there were disconnects between academics and their goals, their home life and their goals, and the adults in their lives and their goals. For Selena, there also were disconnects between her peers and her goals. I do not identify these disconnects as a way to demonstrate deficiencies or failures on the parts of Selena and Sergio, but rather to draw attention to the structural and systematic barriers that shaped their connections, or lack thereof.

  The connected learning model helps us to identify essential connections and can illuminate disconnections that detract from academic success and learning. Yet the model does not necessarily connect to alternative pathways of success outside of higher education. The creative media and technology industries in particular still privilege college as the preferred pathway. Sergio’s story in particular highlights how connections between formal education and personal interests do not necessarily lead to a pathway that connects career aspirations to economic opportunities. Arguably Sergio was a candidate for higher education, but despite the connections this was not an expectation he had of himself. In the absence of higher education he was left to navigate precarious opportunities and was unable to work his way into the creative industry. His academic and informal education did not accurately manage his expectations or help him connect long-term goals to his interests and skills.

  Notably absent from the ecologies of all four students’ (even Gabriela, who was well connected and supported) was a supported connection between (a) personal interests, extracurricular activities, and goals, and (b) academics (i.e., the elliptical arrow in the ideal model). On the one hand, this further highlights the significance of the informal learning environments in helping students map out pathways that support their goals and expectations. But on the other, it accentuates and emphasizes a missing connection: academics must significantly support the informal learning spaces and personal interests of marginalized young people (and vice versa). As Sergio’s story demonstrates, there do not (yet) exist clear pathways for attaining social capital and economic stability in the creative industries outside of (a) academic pathways and/or (b) well-connected social networks that students’ can tap into for social capital. In the absence of higher education or connections in the industry, it remains difficult for students to connect their interests and informal learning nodes to their aspirations and goals. Hence the importance of helping students make greater connections between the informal and the formal learning environments, so that they are able to tap into other interests, skill sets, networks, knowledges, and capitals that create multiple pathways for attaining their goals.

  Schools, as a democratic space to create more equitable opportunities, are in a unique position to help students tap into greater networks of resources and capital. They ought to be expected to help students manage risks and alleviate burdens of responsibility that are otherwise displaced onto families and the home. To a certain degree, Mr. Lopez was helping students make connections within the larger creative industry and community; he introduced them to working professionals, encouraged collaboration within and beyond the school, and aimed to equip students with the efficacy and confidence to participate in public spaces beyond the school. However, there were still barriers that made it challenging for students to cultivate ongoing relationships, networks, and resources. Merely meeting a professional does not provide students with access to resources and capital; rather, those relationships must be cultivated over time through mentorship, trust, and reciprocity.

  This is where I see opportunities for digital media to alleviate gaps in inequitable distributions of resources and opportunities. Young people’s participation in networked publics provide opportunities for youth, regardless of social class and home life, to make connections beyond their immediate spheres of influence. Online they can connect and share with peers and adults, amateurs and professionals, in ways that are not easily feasible in offline social networks. But of course teens need incentives, support, and guidance in identifying and maintaining those relationships, which is where education, teachers, and policies can intentionally and deliberately contribute to more equitable opportunities.

  Notes

  1. The term habitus refers to individuals’ construction of class dispositions, histories, schemata, and perspectives. See Bourdieu 1990 for more on the relationship between habitus, taste, and class dispositions.

  2. Freeway High offered twenty AP courses, and approximately 25 percent of students took at least one AP course, but only 10 percent took an AP math course. Approximately 5 percent of students were in a Gifted/Talented program.

  3. A full discussion of how the tracks at Freeway High supported future pathways to success, or not, is outside the scope of this project. For more information about this topic, see Watkins et al. 2017.

  4. Much has been written about the role and value of after-school activities, particularly in the lives of marginalized students. See Daud and Carruthers 2008; Newman et al. 2000; Nicholson, Collins, and Holmer 2004; Rhodes 2004; Shann 2001.

  5. After my time in the field, I followed up with the school district. I was informed that the state of Texas was re-working its pathways to include more technology-focused and design-focused options that would fit within a college-bound track, but that they would not be implemented for several years.

  6. For further explanation, see the introduction to this book.

  7. See Ito et al. 2010 for more about “messing around” as a mode of learning.

  8. In her research on YouTube and youth, Patricia Lange offers a critique and further investigation of the “self-taught” narrative espoused by many of the participants in her study. Although young people often articulate and believe that they have taught themselves how to create and edit media, Lange noted that over time participants contradicted themselves by acknowledging the role of parents, peers, and teachers in helping them learn new skills and literacies. She makes the case that even “self-taught” learning happens through “socially encoded forms of knowledge” (2014, p. 191), such as online tutorials and instruction manuals. Further, young people use the term “self-taught” to refer to any form of knowledge acquisition that takes place outside of school and formal learning, thus often overlooking the other modes of informal learning that have contributed to their knowledge and skills.

  9. The Scholastic Aptitude Test is required for admission to most colleges in the US.

  10. The Free Applic
ation for Federal Student Aid is an application for college grants and scholarships from the federal government.

  11. In a follow-up interview almost a year later, Jack expressed an interest in attending a top-ranked public university to major in business or finance; he seemed to have lost interest in filmmaking entirely.

  12. The one exception seemed to be band, in which several members of the media clubs were also involved.

  13. Harlem Shake was a video meme in which people replicated short comedic videos that were accompanied by the song “Harlem Shake.” It spread quickly, thousands of videos being uploaded to YouTube every day at the height of its popularity in 2013 (Wood 2013).

  14. For more about the assimilation trajectories of creative immigrant young people, see Bermudez 2015.

  15. At one point, Gabriela’s father expressed concern that she was hanging out with the “wrong kind of Mexicans.” This caused strife between Gabriela and her father for a time. However, after getting in trouble with her new group of friends at a party, Gabriela reconnected with her former friends. She negotiated her Mexican-American identity in many different ways. For example, she preferred to listen to traditional Mexican music, which her father hated because he associated it with drugs, gangs, violence, and high school dropouts. After exploring different peer groups, Gabriela explained that she actually felt more comfortable around her upwardly mobile and assimilated (immigrant) peers. She was learning how to negotiate her identity in many different ways and sought the advice of her father regularly.

  16. Goth (short for “gothic”) describes a subculture and fashion style marked by dark clothing and makeup (for males and females), often with a fascination for morbid interest and styles.

  17. Chola is a slang word used to stereotypically describe people in the US of Latin American descent, usually Mexican, who are low-income, tough, and often associated with gangs. It often refers to fashion—dark red lip liner, dark eye makeup, piercings, lots of gold jewelry, straightened and gelled, hair, and so forth (Calderon-Douglass 2015). To my knowledge, Selena’s mother was not associated with a gang; rather, Selena was referring to her mother’s identification with the fashion subculture.

  18. “Tatted up” means “covered in tattoos.”

  19. Evanescence is a popular American rock band featuring a female lead pianist and singer, Amy Lee.

  20. Full disclosure: After the home visit I gave Selena an old mouse I no longer needed.

  Conclusion: Opportunity-Driven Expectations

  If the potential of connection is to outweigh the appeal of disconnection in the future, we must directly address the risk-averse fears and self-protective practices that stand in the way of rethinking society in the digital age.

  Sonia Livingstone and Julian Sefton-Green (2016, pp. 252–253)

  I briefly want to return to the three stories at the beginning of the book: a fictional episode of Law & Order SVU in which a teen girl was shamed for texting a nude photo, the news story of Megan Meier, who hanged herself as a result of bullying on MySpace, and the story of the teen twins Marcus and Miguel, who spent much of their free time playing video games. Each of these stories is about teens and digital media, and here I want to further complicate the ways in which each story portrays the relationship between youth and risk in the digital world. Common to all three stories are elements of youth who are constructed as at risk in familiar ways: as vulnerable to threats of sex, abuse, bullies, isolation, and addiction. All these concerns are embedded within historical fears and harm-driven expectations that have been fueled by popular media narratives, news stories, and policies about young people’s digital media practices.

  In the Law & Order episode on sexting and abuse, risk avoidance was presented as an individualized responsibility. The girl was physically and emotionally punished for expressing her sexuality, and thus the episode quite literally depicted her sexuality as harmful. Eventually her boyfriend was arrested for physically beating her, but the entire episode overly focused on the role of technology as the culprit of harm, rather than an abusive partner. Essentially it failed to take into consideration the role of consent by not addressing nor punishing the teens who knowingly distributed the girl’s image without her permission; collective social responsibility for managing risk and harm was effectively erased from the narrative. Though the episode raised some provocative questions as to how the law should address teen sexting, it nonetheless perpetuated a dualistic understanding of privacy by essentially saying “if teens don’t want anyone to see something, they should not have been doing it in the first place.” Such rhetoric creates an easy avenue for blaming teens for their own victimization. In this case, the rhetoric failed to acknowledge the contextual integrity in which the photo was produced and distributed. The narrative served to reify a binary understanding of public and private that ignored the networked social context of young people’s communicative practices.

  The suicide of Megan Meier is a particularly interesting example of how teens, technology, and risk are discursively produced. Although the case became a watershed moment that projected cyberbullying to the forefront of public conversation, even leading to new laws, the case was not actually about teens. Rather, it was about an adult who bullied a teen. As tragic as Megan’s story was, it also illustrated the ways in which young people are often used as scapegoats for larger societal problems. Bullying and cyberbullying are not mere “youth” problems, yet policies frequently aim to regulate “youth” problems when they are actually embedded within larger social and adult issues as well. Megan’s story highlighted how risk narratives can reify boundaries between youth and adult in ways that overlook the fluidity of youth as a discursive construct, and miss the nuances of risk and opportunity that do not fit within a neatly contained binary of youth/adult or risk/opportunity.

  The story of Marcus and Miguel, like so many of the stories in this book, is not typically represented in the news or in narrative fiction, or reflected in policies. Their experiences simultaneously demonstrated how risks are inevitable, but are accompanied by beneficial opportunities as well. The risky behaviors of talking to strangers and spending a lot of time playing games actually revealed the social benefits of technology for marginalized teens. The story of Marcus and Miguel probably was less thematically familiar than the Law & Order episode or the story of Megan Meier. For one thing, discourses of risk are often gendered—Marcus and Miguel’s story probably would be interpreted differently had they been two 14-year-old girls meeting and connecting with strangers online, rather than two boys. Stories of girls at risk (via technology) more typically dominate fictional narratives, but also news stories about teens at risk. As was explored earlier, this stems from a long fearful history in which girls and girls’ sexuality are discursively constructed as innocent, vulnerable, and in need of (adult) protection. Stories about girls (but not necessarily their actual experiences or voices) often dominate many narratives of risk, policy, and popular culture. Because boys are typically discursively constructed in more agentive and assertive ways, and therefore not as likely to viewed as vulnerable or incapable; the risks they take are less likely to incite a media panic.

  Yet beyond the gendered construction of their experiences, Marcus and Miguel’s classed position also rendered their experiences less visible. The experiences of working-class and poor young people are often silenced, marginalized, or erased from public concern. The ways in which low-income and immigrant youth navigate the digital contours of their daily lives differ from the ways in which their middle-class peers do so, as a result, they encounter unique and differentiated risks that must also demand attention and protection. But far too often their stories, ingenuity, opportunities, needs, and anxieties are silenced by the louder, more familiar, privileged concerns of the middle class. It is imperative that we produce more inclusive narratives, expectations, and policies that take into account the diverse ways different populations aim to capitalize on the benefits of their digital media practices.


  From Disconnections to Connections

  My goal has been for the stories told and the research described in this book to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of how expectations of risk, technology, and youth shape policies, opportunities, and young people’s lived experiences. I have aimed to expand the analytic lens beyond historical fears and harm-driven expectations to also incorporate the risks and opportunities that are subsumed within popular discourses of risk. What I have tried to make clear are the ways in which harm-driven expectations perpetuate disconnections in society. I want to briefly return to the primary disconnects introduced at the beginning of the book as a way to pose an alternative model based on opportunity-driven expectations and connections.

  The current harm-driven model of approaching the relationships between risks, youth, and technology is built upon fearful misunderstandings, broken connections, and missed opportunities. The actual everyday lived experiences of marginalized young people are rarely incorporated into popular imaginaries of young people today. This is evident in the “digital native” and “digital generation” rhetoric that expects all young people to be well connected. It assumes that young people innately know how to use media, and disregards the necessity of intentionally helping teens develop skill sets and critical digital literacies required for participation in networked publics. Further, it ignores the unique barriers that inhibit some marginalized young people from confidently and safely participating in a networked digital world. Within the current model of harm-driven expectations, we see discourses of risk that devalue the ways young people make meaning out of their own mediated practices. Their practices are overlooked or dismissed within adult-centric institutions. And many narratives, policies, and practices overly focus on the role of technology as an agent of social change; they presume that new technologies are inherently harmful. Harm-driven expectations lead to the creation of policies and practices that aim to regulate and control technology, rather than to understand the broader context in which technology plays a role in young people’s learning ecologies. The harm-driven model amplifies the voices of the privileged at the expense of the marginalized, values protection over empowerment, and tries to control technology—and, by extension, youth—in ways that further alienate young people from equitable opportunities.