Innovative Uses and Unexpected Outcomes
 

Editor: Tara McPherson, University of Southern California

Summary of Volume: This volume identifies core issues for further study concerning how young people’s use of digital media may lead to various innovations and unexpected outcomes, including a range of unintended learning experiences and unanticipated social encounters. While such outcomes might typically be seen as ‘positive’ or ‘negative,’ this volume aims to push beyond simple accounts of digital media and learning as either utopian or dystopian in order to explore a complex variety of emergent practices and developments. The essays explore how youth can function as drivers for technological change while also recognizing that technologies are embedded in larger social systems, including the family, schools, and peer groups. A broad range of topics is taken up, including but not limited to social consequences such as (un)equal access across economic, racial and ethnic categories; media panics and cultural anxieties; issues of policy and IP; media literacy; citizenship vs. consumption; creativity and collaboration; digital media and gender equity; and shifting notions of temporality or of the public/private divide. The purpose of this collection is to invite individuals to identify and examine possible consequences of digital media use that might be unanticipated or unexpected and that are worthy of in-depth investigation while also casting a historical eye, querying what is new about new technologies.

Volume Chapter Summaries and Authors:

"Revisiting “Old” Media: Learning from Media Histories"
Ellen Seiter
This essay reviews the connections and divergences between old and new media in terms of the acquisition of cultural capital. In investigating media literacy, it will consider the developmental abilities, the kinds of scaffolding, and the economic and technological thresholds for domestic usage that are required to reap the greatest benefits from new media.

"Policing Gender and Technology: The Case of Girls Online"
Justine Cassell
This chapter provides a look (both historical and contemporary) at moral panics around girls’ uses of technology.  It will also describe some ways in which the internet may allow girls to experiment with identity, with peer networks, and with autonomy, in modes that are both essential to their healthy development and threatening to adults.

"Wireless Play and Unexpected Innovation"
Christian Sandvig
This review considers play as leading to unexpected innovation in advanced wireless technologies. It concludes that much of the potential for new media to enhance innovation actually echoes much older patterns, as evinced by comparisons to wireless history.

"Youth in the vanguard of change?: The domestic shaping and familial consequences of digital media at home"
Sonia Livingstone 
Drawing on recent case studies (including the UK Children Go Online project) and theoretical writings, this chapter will investigate the domestic shaping and familial consequences of new technologies for children and young people, examining the persistent figure of youth in the vanguard and focusing in part on the notion that 'youth' is too big and diverse a category to yield much insight for critical analyses.

“Let’s take her to a magic circus”: Emergence of programming as a cultural practice in a school context
Paula Hooper
Looks at a longitudinal study of a group of African American children in an African-centered elementary school in the Boston area who learned over several years to produce in Logo environments.  The work documents unintended consequences and examines the intertwined nature of social, cultural, and cognitive factors involved in understanding and supporting children’s learning with programmable media.

"The iSchool Backchannel: Unexpected Learning in an Expected Space"
Sarita Yardi
Online chat rooms offer an exciting new communication medium for learning in the classroom. Students can participate in a collaborative virtual community through the sharing of resources, knowledge production, creative inquiry, and active engagement. This chapter offers an exciting exploration into this environment as a tool for learning.

"Found Technology: Player Creativity and Innovation in the Making of Machinima"
Henry Lowood
In this article, I will investigate the relationship between player/consumer creativity as conventionally understood from studies of fan culture and the position of creative players as discoverers, innovators or co-creators of new media technologies through computer games.  The focus of this investigation will be the historical development of Machinima, a new narrative medium that has sprung out of computer game technology and play since the mid-1990s

"Growing Up Digital: Control and the Pieces of a Digital Life"
Robert A. Heverly 
This chapter examines control over the digital artifacts that result when children and young people grow up not just exposed to and using digital media, but when they grow up digital, with their lives and their experiences recorded and distributed by themselves and others.

"Automodernity, Education, and Digital Youth: Autonomy, Automation, and the Formation of Identity after Postmodernism" 
Robert Samuels
Through a critical analysis of new communication technologies, I argue that we have moved to a new historical and social period called “Automodernity.” This cultural moment stresses the way digital youth are combining autonomy and automation to redefine identity in all aspects of contemporary life.

"A Pedagogy for Original Synners"
Anne Balsamo
What will the class of 2020 expect from the educational environments and pedagogical approaches currently evolving to meet its needs? And what should we expect of these students? This chapter aims to provide a framework for examining currently under-recognized styles of digitally-enabled learning and to promote strategies of critical and creative synthesis as a foundation for future pedagogy.