"Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out"
A massive multi-author, multi-strand report has just been issued—Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out by the Digital Youth Project and funded by the MacArthur Foundation.
Here's Henry Jenkins describing it:
"Hanging Out..." is staggering in its scope and in its implications. The researchers take seriously young people, their lives online, their subcultural practices, their identity play, their nascent civic engagement, their dating and social interactions, their involvement with fan production practices, and much much more. What emerges is a complex picture of how they are living through and around emerging technologies, how they are innovative in their use of new tools and platforms, and how they are struggling with the contradictions of their lives. This report is in no simple way a celebration of the digital generation, though it respects the meaningfulness of their involvement with digital and mobile technologies: it raises questions about inequality of access and participation; it points to conflicts between adults and youth around the deployment of new media; it identifies risks and opportunities which sites such as MySpace and YouTube pose for their young participants. Those of us who care about young people and education will be struggling with some of the implications of their research for a long time to come.
I strongly suggest you just Google around for reaction to this report (outsourcing my blog, I guess!) but here's a couple of things including the aforementioned Jenkins interviewing some of the researchers. And Holy Meatballs gives a slightly more layperson summary, part of which I quote below.
More than anything else, it dispels the myth that youth involvement with the connected, digital world is at best a waste of time and at worst an impediment to their social development. The report outlines the variegated and granular nature of youth habits online, differentiating between those that use technology to "hang out" with friends they already have face to face, those that "mess around" with tech through tinkering and creating, and those that "geek out" through deep engagement with global online communities that are oriented around a common interest.