media-6

Transcriber:	Randy Lee (rxl_98@yahoo.com)
Brief Bio:
Date finished:	May 25, 2005
Proofreader:	Nety Chen
Brief Bio:
Date finished:	20/06/2005

Hello, I'm Henry Jenkins, the Director of the Comparative Media Studies here at
MIT. About two weeks after  the Columbine massacre at Littleton, Colorado, I got
called before the US Senate Commerce Committee to testify on the relationship of
youth culture and violent entertainment. [0:21] And I think what struck me when
I was in that room was that there're all kinds of adults sitting around the
tables talking about young people, their relationship to technology, their
relationship to culture, their relationship to schooling and to each other,
[0:35] and not a single young person in the room, except my son who was then a
teenager who was tagged along to see his father testifying. [0:43] It struck me
that there're a lot missing from the picture that was being given in Washington
as we're trying to set policies that would affect education, that would affect
the regulation of entertainment in term of understanding of young people's
relationship to technology.[1:00]

So I set about on two missions. The first was to visit high schools around the
country and talk to young people about their use of digital technology. And the
second was to go on-line and began to look closely at the website's, chat rooms,
internet lists that young people were creating, so we had a more vivid picture of
what that community was like.[1:23] Why focus on digital media? Well, because in
a way the week of Columbine, we entered into a period of moral panic. Moral panic is when
you stop asking questions and start assuming you know the answers. [1:38]Time
Magazine initiates that in part if you look on the week of the shooting, their
cover story was "The monsters next door: What made them do it?" And the very
next week they provide their own answer going up on-line. The Washington Post
surveyed its readership and discovered that, asked people what they thought were the
most significant causes of the shooting, and the top answer, with 82%, was the
Internet.[2:05] Something like 60% said that they thought the availability of
guns was the significant factor in the Columbine shooting.[2:12] So more adults
were frighteneding of the young people's access to Internet than young people's
access to weaponry. And in fact, that was a chilling comment to me.[2:22] As if nNo other
website existed for teenagers, except the website created by Harris and Klebold,
the two shooters in that case,[2:30] which significantly a lot got written about
their websites, but almost no one saw them because they were removed from public
view within a few minutes after the shootings took place at the high
school.[2:41] So journal thrilled drilled about them as they'd seen them. In fact, very
few of them actually did.[2:46] Many journalizations get got made about their these
websites, but they won't weren't tested against any kind of baseline of what youth culture
actually looked like. That's very typical of the way the journalists cover the
Internet.[2:58]For example, one of the statistics when I talked to people about
youth on-line, was a study that was done a year or so ago, where they said one
out of four teenage girls have received unwelcome sexual advance on the
Internet.[3:10] But two problems of that study, the first was that it didn't
bother to establish a baseline of what percentage of teenage girls have received
an unwelcome sexual advance in their day-to-day interactions with people.[3:22]
And secondly, it turns out that their definition of unwelcome sexual advance was
broad enough to include someone being asked out on a date by someone they didn't
want to go out with.[3:31] So you have to admit, in fact, it will be surprising
if only one out of four teenage girls have ever been asked out on a date by
someone they didn't want to go out with, [3:40] let alone been subjected to
sexual harassment or sexual molestation or sexual stalking which is was a level of
language which is used mostly in the media in reporting them. [3:51]

So what about I find when I began talking to teenagers and going on-line? [3:54]
The first thing I saw, when you look at teen websites, they often present
themselves as a utopian space that's totally removed from the world of school
and the world of form home[4:05]. There's a scar They are described as a place where people can have
their own identities that they think can preserve their dignity and self-respect
that they can express themselves so they can form communities with other
people.[4:16] What interesting is, if you look at the utopian rhetoric, it
almost always includes hints of dystopian relationship to schooling.[4:24]If you
read one of the websites I like to look at is a site called "Palisades".
Palisades is described as a strong fence that protects you from being torn down.
And in fact the worm it's is a girl described the her site, she several time emphasized the need for
protection, need to be free from being torn down from people around them. [4:44]
And that emphasis on the dark side of the schooling should give pause to adults
who are looking for an understanding why something like Columbine comes
about.[4:54] 'Cause when I talk to young people, they almost always understand
it that in a context of school bullying, in a context of parental neglect, in a
context of kids lack of self- esteem and dignity.[5:05] And many of them say
it's remarkable that they were never pushed to the point where they wanna gun
down their classmate because they feel like they know what kinds of experiences
these young boys went through. [5:16] And we see that when we look on the web.
We see that expression of both a hope for something better. The web seems to represent
for them.[5:24] And we see that sense of fear and or anxiety about what the school
classroom actually means to these kids.[5:31] You think it is very significant,
you think what it means to have a homepage when you don't have a home. What it
is to have a homepage when you don't control the physical environment around you
where the virtual environment becomes the only space where you can decide what
you wanna tell, who you wanna be as opposed to having identities and assumptions
foist on you in the school environment.[5:53] It becomes especially important
for kids who were outsiders, kids who were alienated within the school community
because those kids often feel like there's no safe haven for them in the school.
I was one of those kids and I remember rather vividly walking through the
hallway in my high school[6:10] having people spit at me, call me name, threaten
to beat me up. I remember one day, (the school was a square), I remember walking
around the square during my lunch hour, walking faster and faster trying to get
around four, five different clusters of kids all of them were verbally abusive
to me [6:27] and feeling there's was no place that I belonged. There was no place
that I felt connected to other kids.[6:33] My son who'd is something of an outcast in
high school, but he was able to go online and connect to other kids and form a
social network that supported him.[6:42] He found someone somewhere who <<was
not, didn't care, less enigmatizing divertising>> on the basis of the public perception of him in this media
face-to-face environment, but instead respected him for what he contributed to
the world being in that group, what kinds of idea he expressed, what kinds of
values he embodied in his own relationship.[7:00] So his early relationships took
place online. They were social relationships. Initially friendships, but
gradually, romantic relationships with teen age girls who he knew intimately but
were in fact living half-way across the country, and one case half-way across
the world, in another. [7:18] And that set of social connection seems very very
important. The act of forming, say, of the webring links among websites for teenagers
becomes a moment of acceptance of linkage to other kids that I think becomes
central for the social-rituals rich world of that generation.[7:35]

Subcultures becomes particularly important in that context. There's a amazing
site that I stumbled across in my research that had a picture of Audrey Hepburn
on it. And I was curious to click down and see what teenage girl would put a
picture of Audrey Hepburn on her website. And what it said was "I'm a person of
mixed-racial generation ancestors", and she rattled off 8 or 9 different national
cultures that were in her blood, in her family ties.[8:01] And she said: "I don't
know what race of or nationality I am. I don't know where I belong." That sense of
old categoriesy of racial and national identity breaking down in a multi-culture
society over generations, leaves one hungry for that sense of affiliation of
cultural connection of ruddiness"rootedness". But the search becomes for a self-selecting
culture community, something like the goth-community, something like the "riot-girl",
something like the "skaters" or the "ravers", becomes communities of affiliation that
these young people feel ties to.[8:37] They are becominge very very powerful part of
who they are and how they see themselves. And schools attempts to suppress those
views as took place for the goth community following Columbine becominges direct
threats to their sense of developing cultural identity.[8:52] Their sense of who
they are, and what their place it is in the world.[8:55] I remember talking in a
high school in my lecture tour and a this teenage girl came up to me wearing pastel
color, a little pink flip-flops, a little bit of glitter on her chins, and she
said: "I am a goth." And I said, "That's remarkable!" [9:09] And she pulled open
up her top a little bit and showed me this necklace which her wore, which was
clearly a marker of goth subculture identity that she wore underneath all the
pink and pastel.[9:20] And she said I went into the closet, and I went into
cover because of the reaction to my subculture following Columbine.[9:27] And it
was like my friends who were gay or lesbian, whether or not out of the office,
who wear a little pink triangle underneath their tops, that she was hiding who
she was[9:35], but she clung to that symbol because that was the central part of
her culture identity.[9:40]

The other thing I want to say about web in these teenagers' life is it is the
space of creativity. One of the letters I got after Columbine was describing the
fact that Harris and Klebold got all the attention for the message they wanted
to deliver [9:53] about what it was to be a outsider, about what it was to be an
alien in a high school, and asked if they had written an essay or point or had
taken a photograph, would anyone in adult population would pay attention to
those ideas?[10:05] It's a legitimate question because all through the web, one
sees site after site were kids and teenagers writing stories, doing photoshop
collages, writing poems, publishing their own literary magazine, composing music
and putting it on the web with in mp3 files, making digital films.[10:21] It's There's an
enormous ways array of creativity in the web by these teenagers. It is totally unknown
by the adults surround them in their surroundings; - by their parents, by their teachers. That's
fostered by their participation and the online subcultures.[10:33] Now what's are
the implications of that for us as a educators? I think it's fine to go back to
those this questions of media literacy which is a word that can storm around an awful
lot in educational cycle.[10:45] Media literacy normally in United States seems
to mean "just say no to Nintendo". "Turn off your TV set. Don't consume media."
And that purely negative notions of policing taste of telling kids what's bad
for them to consume seems wholly totally out of touch with the reality these kids have found
of community, of mutual support, of self-esteem, and the creativity in the web
environment.[11:09] It's simply not an approach to the media education that is gonna
fly. Beyond that, for being honest about what we mean by literacy: Literacy is
not a taste; it is a set of skills.[11:19] If we talk about traditional literacy,
and we image someone who could read, but couldn't write, we would not describe
them as literate.[11:28] We would not describe them as someone who has the full
skills necessary to participate in the society of literacy. So for me, the way
you approach media literacy is to begin by empowering teenagers to create, to
express themselves, to build on existing base of subcultural expression or
personal expression, which is taking place in the web environment.[11:47] To
give them projects which gets them a in frame of mind of thinking about building
media. And then through that, have them begin to think more critically about
media in their own environment.[11:58] The media they consumed. If you want to
make messages about racial stereotype, or the role of violence, or
commercialization. The way you do it, is not to say: "This is bad. Don't touch
it!"[12:10] But rather to say: "You're making this product. What choices you're
going to make about the relationship you have to your consumers? What values you
use to embody in that product? What kinds of role model you're profiling for
other teenagers to the site you've constructed.[12:25] To think through it as an
ethical set of choices as media producers, as literate citizens of digital
environment, rather than as simply consumers of a passive traditional
media.[12:36]

The other thing I get out of this research is to really think about how we
create environments for learning that reflect that utopian dimension of cyber
space that I described.[12:49] We learned about teenagers on the web, and turned
them back on the school and said why the kids find school such a threatening and  
<<inhospitable>> environment? Why are schools destroying people's self-esteem and
breaking down their eagerness to learn? And what could we learn in the school
community by better understanding the kinds of worlds teenagers are building for
themselves in the web environment?[13:12] What could we learn about teaching,
for example, by examining games where people confront challenges and problems
and work through them over and over again, that they're willing to put in the
drudgery of learning the game system,[13:24] but they're not particularly
willing to put in learning their math homework or their science homework. I
think we have to understand what that is and why the drive there is so powerful
when traditional forms of learning for this generation has broken down.[13:38]
It's kind of cliche comically a shame to make this point that this is the first generation of kids
to grow up with interactive technology in home. The sociologists started to call
it this: generation dot com. I found that something of slander because the phrase
"generation dot com" again implies a generation of consumers who are tied to the
dot com economy which what is remarkable. is iIn fact this is a generation of doers,
creators, community builders.[14:05] So it's much better to think of it as
"generation dot org". Especially when you consider its provisional culture, the
culture the teenagers have built for themselves keeps working and working and
working when many of the dot coms that were attempting to exploit the youth market
have folded in the result of the recent market crashes.[14:23] The whatever the
teenagers have built seems to be a sustainable form of culture that lasts in the
case of gothic culture 20 plus years at this point.[14:32] Whereas what we have
attempted to build for kids and market to kids seems highly transcended and
disposable. So if you are for really gonna understand education and the mission of
education for the 20th 21th century, the more we really have to do is to develop a
much more ethic ethnic graphic perspective on the kinds of cultures, and the kinds of
learning, and the kinds of community [14:51] that will merge in the online world
of teens.

Thanks.