Skip to main content

Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media

Image
By
I just remembered the title of this book by danah boyd and co-authors.  Here's some summary information.  Possibly good source of data.
Social network sites, online games, video-sharing sites, and gadgets such as iPods and mobile phones are now fixtures of youth culture. They have so permeated young lives that it is hard to believe that less than a decade ago these technologies barely existed. Today’s youth may be coming of age and struggling for autonomy and identity as did their predecessors, but they are doing so amid new worlds for communication, friendship, play, and self-expression. - abstract of report
Conventional wisdom about young people's use of digital technology often equates generational identity with technology identity: today's teens seem constantly plugged in to video games, social networking sites, and text messaging. Yet there is little actual research that investigates the intricate dynamics of youths' social and recreational use of digital media. Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out fills this gap, reporting on an ambitious three-year ethnographic investigation into how young people are living and learning with new media in varied settings -- at home, in after-school programs, and in online spaces. Integrating twenty-three case studies -- which include Harry Potter podcasting, video-game playing, music sharing, and online romantic breakups -- in a unique collaborative authorship style, Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out is distinctive for its combination of in-depth description of specific group dynamics with conceptual analysis. - book summary
As a collaborative author myself I'm interested in what they say about the "unique collaborative authorship style" -- what kinds of phatic behaviors did the authors use when working on this paper? We could at some point attempt a round-up of phaticity in other recent collaborations, for example this research collaboration being developed at Stanford.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The plot thickens (with Herbert Spencer)

By Semiophrenic
In a paper attempting to outline the conceptual domain of comparative psychology , Herbert Spencer discusses the quality of impulsiveness in relation with human races (bearded and unbearded). Among his "sundry questions of interests" about the relationship between mental energy, evolution, complexity, etc. are the following notes: ( b ) What connection is there between this trait and the social state? Clearly a very explosive nature - such as that of the Bushman - is unfit for social; and, commonly, social union, when by any means established, checks impulsiveness. ( c ) What respective shares in checking impulsiveness are taken by the feelings which the social state fosters - such as the fear of surrounding individuals, the instinct of sociality , the desire to accumulate property, the sympathetic feelings , the sentiment of justice? These, which require a social environment for their development, all of them involve imaginations of consequences more or less distant; and th...
4 comments
Read more

Metacommunicative cues

By Semiophrenic
In the previous post on Extra channels I finished with a distinction between diachronic and synchronic metacommunication. In this post I'd like to respond to some comments by the co-author of this blog, Joe, in some of his previous posts, by invoking Jurgen Ruesch's concept of metacommunication . Gregory Bateson was interested in thinking about cybernetics, but didn't seem to feel constrained to think about it using a strictly computational or information-theoretic paradigm, while still being informed by the ideas. This gave him the freedom to talk about ideas like "context", "relationship", "learning", and "communication" without needing to define them in precise computational terms. Nevertheless, he handles the ideas fairly rigorously. (Joe, Phatic Workshop: towards a μ-calculus ) Gregory Bateson and Jurgen Ruesch, among many other notable thinkers, were part of the Palo Alto Group of researchers tasked to apply new methods (a...
7 comments
Read more