Bridging Media Psychology and History: An Interview with Charisse L’Pree Corsbie-Massay (Part Three)

You distinguish here between broadcast and cable television. Are they distinctive media? How do their effects differ? 

 Similar to magnetic tape, we often don't think about network and cable as different, but this evolution of the technology was essential to our relationship with television content. When the difference between network and cable television is discussed in media studies, it is largely about differences in industry and policy – targeting different groups, bypassing fin-syn laws, pay content, and so on – but they are absolutely different technologies. When I refer to network television, we are talking about audiovisual content delivered through radio waves. Alternatively, cable television is a hardwired cable into your home, eliminating the problems of radio waves, including the need for an antenna, the potential for signal disruption because of weather or other obstructions. So suddenly we had guaranteedaudiovisual content. The increased spectrum also allowed service providers greater control to limit access to paying customers, as well as more channels for targeted programming. These changes are made possible by sending messages over a literal wired cable. 

 To tie back to magnetic tape, I don't think that magnetic tape receives the same attention as other technologies because magnetic tape didn't necessarily beget its own content and its own unique messaging; instead, it was a new way for users to engage with pre-existing messages. There is some work on direct-to-video content and exercise tapes because that is the new content that magnetic tape made possible, but this lack of attention demonstrates our obsession with content over the technology. In the case of over-the-air broadcast – what I call network television for lack of a better term – we think of cable as simply a new way to access media content with which we were already familiar, so we don’t think of it as a new technology. If the technology does not manifest new content, even if it gives us an opportunity to engage differently with old content or pre-existing content, then it doesn't get the same level of attention.

 By setting the boundaries of your account within the 20th century, you largely dodge the challenges of writing about social media, focusing your account of digital technology around computer games and Dialup ISP.  How would Twitter or Facebook fit within the framework you offer here?

 The choice to end the book before our current manifestation of social media serves several purposes. Most importantly it focuses the book on technologies to which no longer pay research attention. We stopped researching the psychological effects of radio when television came along, and research into the effects of television became passe with the rise of video games and social media. Considering this, one of my major arguments is that our relationships with 20th century media inform our relationships with 21st century media, including social media. So instead of talking about social media like Facebook and Twitter as its own chapter, I talk about our relationship with these platforms as the outcome of our relationships with prior platforms. The things that we attribute to the affordances of social media – the expectation of finding something that is personally relevant regardless of your personal preferences, the expectation of one’s voice being heard, the ability to connect with communities independent of space and time – I argue were somewhat available with earlier technology and therefore those uses were seeded before social media came along. 

 However, if we think about social media as its own unique technology, not as simply the accelerated opportunity to satisfy psychosocial needs that were triggered by earlier media, the specific affordances of social media must be clear. Three communication opportunities that are very unique to social media are…

1.    Mass distribution of user-generated content:In my opinion, this is the ultimate affordance of social media. Whereas other media like magnetic tape and eventually CDs allowed people to create content and distribute it, this content had to be copied and distributed through real space, limiting its reach. With social media, anyone can create anything, post it, and make it widely available. This affordance triggered a rise in influencer culture, where people can become popular overnight for just being themselves. A student once said that the new dream is to have your content “blow up;” the right person sees it, shares it, and suddenly you can make a living doing you. 

2.    Talking back to power and the invisible gatekeeper: Social media as a technology allows anyone to post anything on content by anyone else – barring changes in settings obviously. By eliminating the gatekeeper, we see how users will push back on institutions and individuals in power. I adore reading the replies on posts from people like Donald Trump, Taylor Swift, or Pope Francis just to see how random people use this space to stan, shade, and troll. It feels like every letter to the editor is published, but we also know that the algorithm is the new gatekeeper, and we are more likely to see the comments that the platform thinks will keep us engaged.  

3.    Infinite scrolling:In the end, infinite scrolling isn’t even an inherent part of social media, but it is a seemingly inseparable feature. What social media have offered from a technological perspective is literally endless content. TV shows and movies eventually run credits. Songs end. Mario saves the Princess. Content via dialup ISPs was close to infinite, but they weren’t designed to push you into more content, barring web rings. But Facebook and Twitter are designed to never end, to create a space where the next satisfying piece of content is just on the next page. This is the ultimate manifestation of the negative promise of channel surfing. But now, we don’t even have to change the channel, we just keep scrolling and the next channel is pushed to us.

 I started a private Instagram page for my son where I share one picture of him a day with friends and family. The experience of starting a new profile has been enlightening; I do not consider what I should and should not post with respect to my preexisting online persona, and instead simply share joyous pictures of a toddler. In addition, because he only follows about 100 people, we regularly get to the end of the feed. Instagram notifies you when you have gotten to the end of your new posts and proceeds to provide suggested posts, which is usually animal posts and zoo profiles in his case, so that’s cool. 

 As we think about what we expect from social media, its potential, promise, and practice. The potential is to engage with people around the world, the promise has been one of increased human connections, but the practice has been of never turning it off and literally feeding you posts that continue to draw you in. So, to come to the end of the internet, so to speak, is an epiphany. It shows you what the limits of the technology are when you're actively told that you shouldn't see the limits as well.

You describe yourself as a “fierce advocate for media literacy.” How are you defining “media literacy” here? As a mother, what kinds of educational experiences do you hope your children will receive to help guide their relationship to media?

When I talk about media literacy, in this case, as it relates to technology, is literally to look at the process by which messages get to us. 

 In 2017 for NAMLE’s Media Literacy Week, I conducted a series of interviewswith my colleagues at Newhouse to ask them how they define media literacy and how that operates in their classroom. And then created a series of images. I still use my own quote from that series for my definition of media literacy. Media literacy is the ability to see things that you are actively encouraged not to see.

This is the driving force of my teaching philosophy, to help students see what they're not supposed to see. And with respect to communication technologies, we are not supposed to see the medium itself. With any good media content, the medium should fall away – we get lost in books, we forget that we are in the theater, we return to memories through music – in short, the suspension of disbelief is to be able to ignore the medium and focus on the message. This is the sense of presence. 

 From a technological perspective, media industry does not make money by encouraging people to think deeply about the technology; money comes from making the technology invisible. When we talk about media literacy as it relates to technology, we're talking about being able to see howwe engage with something, and distinguish the potential of the technology (i.e., what canthe technology do) from the promises (i.e., how are we encouraged to use the technology by designers and stakeholders) and the practice (i.e., how do we actually come to use the technology). It is essential to understand that how we use a technology does not depend only on the technology’s capabilities; that there are a lot of people with a lot of interests – economic and social – in how technology is used and seeing this distinction is a form of media literacy. 

 When we talk about media literacy, we often talk about media industry and content framing. I think we really need to ask ourselves about the technology and this is where this whole book emerged from as it pertains to the class that I was teaching, both at USC and at Syracuse, the psychology of interactive media, where I ask students to think differently about the technology that they're accustomed to. We start with the printed word. Why do you read? How do you read? What is your relationship with the written word? What is your relationship with a book? How is an audiobook different from the tangible book? Why do you read magazines? Newspapers? Even though these are the same format – printed words and images – they are different technologies, and we expect different things and engage with them differently. But why? And to what effect?

 I think that this is particularly relevant to another question you asked: Over the past year, few of us have had a chance to watch theatrical films in public exhibition. This allows us to think through what is gained or lost from our encounters with the big screen. Did we learn anything important about cinema as a medium as a consequence of this social experiment?

 We know why we go to the movies – it is literally promised to us every year during awards season through the Oscars host opening monologue or some other industry self-aggrandizing montage. But the experience of theatrical filmis different from that of simply watching feature-length films (i.e., a story that begins and ends in 90-240m). I talk about theatrical film as a unique medium because we willingly give over our consciousness to the filmmaker…

 The venue distinguishes theatrical film from other audiovisual media, because the audience’s attention, experiences, and subsequently emotions are controlled by the medium. Users can certainly engage with moving pictures on television, backyard projections, and cell phones, but these venues do not control the total corporeal experience, and differences in display (e.g., screen size, audio quality) results in different experiences. Theatrical venues, including ornate palace-styled theaters and multiplexes, amplify the sensory experience of film by situating the user in a darkened theater that insulates them from outside noise and other distractions, resulting in consistent experiences across users regardless of time, geographical location, or user differences. (p. 22)

Now that we are watching film in our homes on our televisions, laptops, and even mobile devices, there is no consistency of corporeal experience. The film is consistent, but the venue is infinitely different between users. Films at home are more like books – the content is the same, albeit richer due to audio and visual information, but the experience of the film differs based on the user’s setup. Unfortunately, with a toddler, I haven’t had the chance to watch many movies even in quarantine, so I haven’t been able to really test this theory by talking to others about films that are being released on streaming platforms[1]. But I would assume that the interpretation of the film and one’s overall assessment of its quality may come from a combination of the film itself, the emotions that the user brings to the film, and the format in which the user watches it, the latter of which has generally not been a significant consideration pre-COVID. I hope the Academy offers a new award: Best Small Screen Film… 

As for how my child changes how I think about all of these things. It is unbelievably fascinating to know all of these things in theory, to have done this research for decades, to have written this book, and then to watch him live and experience the things. Sometimes its research in action, sometimes it’s something that has never crossed my mind. For example, he generally does not like video. Admittedly, we kept him away from screens for the first 2 years as per the recommendations of the American Psychological Association, but now he is disinterested in non-interactive video. He plays Khan Academy Kids and other educational video games, but he really doesn’t like anything that he can’t control. Interestingly, he loves books and magazines because he can control the progression of the story and he can move backward and forward at his discretion, which is largely counter to what I would have suspected given that those formats are less rich, less immersive, but he doesn’t seem interested in being immersed, especially if he is not in control. 

 We've been trying to introduce videos into his media diet, but it’s tough and it's really interesting to watch like my other friends with similar aged babies take to videos so easily because they've been watching for so long. Or they have older siblings who watch, and you can't really keep away your younger one when the older sibling is watching content. It’s just really remarkable to see how he's evolving with different media differently. He has a wonderful control over Alexa, getting the speaker to play his favorite songs on repeat. He even improved his pronunciation to better get what he wants. 

 I am technically an expert on media and psychology, and very knowledgeable about trends in development with respect to both of these disciplines, but every child is different, and I appreciate more every day how every one of us is an outlier. And I think that's probably where I would leave this. 

 The goal of a media psychography is to think about one's own biography through the media technologies, through the communication environment in which we have been immersed. So, to understand our own psychology, it is essential for each of us to understand the way in which we communicate be that language or culture or technology. I would hope that to foster media literacy in all of my readers, my students, your readers, your students, is to ask them to think differently about the communication environmentin which they live. 

[1]Although I have big plans to watch The Matrix 4and Bill and Ted 3later this semester for supplemental episodes of my podcast on Keanu Reeves with Bob Thompson. Shameless Pitch: criticalandcurious.com/s2

Charisse L’Pree Corsbie-Massay is an Associate Professor of Communications at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. She holds BS degrees in Brain and Cognitive Science and Comparative Media Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MA degree from the School of Cinematic Arts and a PhD in Social Psychology from University of Southern California. Charisse's work focuses on how media affects the way we think about others and our perceptions of ourselves. At Newhouse, she teaches courses on media theory, media psychology, and diversity. In her most recent book, 20th Century Media and the American Psyche, she investigates changes to the communication environment over the past 150 years and how these rapid yet pervasive shifts have affected our psychology. A committed teacher, L’Pree has spent the past 20 years encouraging others to think differently about their relationship with all forms of media and across disciplines. You can read more of her work at charisselpree.me or follow her @charisselpree.

Bridging Media Psychology and History: An Interview with Charisse L’Pree Corsbie-Massay (Part Two)

How did Americans’ relationship to mass media first take shape? What changed from the previous ways people received and processed information?

This is a really interesting question and I'm not certain that I have the answer, even though the book is entitled 20th Century Media and the American Psyche. I begin my analyses by unpacking how communication technologies affect the way humans think about themselves and others, and throughout my analysis I acknowledge that I’m writing from an American perspective: I focus on the technologies that were popular in the United States, acknowledge that the policies and practices of mass media technology in the United States are different from other countries, and draw on the individualism that is valorized in American culture – although it is not explicitly mentioned (shame on me!). 

In general, I think that the human relationship to mass media is as old as human communication itself. We generally don’t communicate to mass audiences with drum signals (i.e., broadcast without storage) anymore, but we feel something when we see them deployed in a movie like Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), just like we feel a relationship to hieroglyphs because we are aware of the source’s intention to communicate. So, I think that our relationship with mass media, American or otherwise, comes from the fundamental psychosocial need to connect with others. Therefore, the American relationship with mass media existed long before this thing we call America existed, including pre-Columbian North America and post-colonist United States.

 However, I think that Jared Diamond offers an interesting perspective on the history of the American relationship with communication technologies – and subsequently mass media – in his book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997). The written communications of the European colonists allowed for more detailed and effective strategies across space and time, putting Indigenous Americans at a marked disadvantage. Although not unique to the United States, the use of communications as a soft weapon continued long after the colonies were established: for the better part of mediated human history, only a handful of people have had access to creating and distributing messages, often white (acknowledging the evolution of whiteness as afforded to different ethnic groups over time), male, and wealthy; enslaved Africans and African Americans were not allowed to read, and therefore not given the opportunity to participate in many components of this thing we call America; and every few years, some elected official proposes legislation to make English the official language of the United States, effectively eliminating any requirement to translate documents and systematically disadvantaging non-English speakers. 

Considering this history – and I'm theorizing in real time here – I think that the American relationship with mass media took shape at colonization and has been one wherein the masses have been hustling for media access, including the ability to create, distribute, consume, and ultimately control mass messages. The American Dream, or getting one’s own piece of the pie, includes mediated representation, which has been systematically withheld from most people for centuries. When applied to the claims that I make in the book, this perspective fleshes the overall theory that the evolving American relationship with mass media replicates interpersonal relationships: coming from a default of solitude (i.e., non-representation and singlehood) we are seeking emotional satisfaction via media and IRL. 

I don’t know if that answers your question, but that was a fun detour. Thank you!! 

Your introduction suggests that the “relational” approach you propose here grows out of your own experiences growing up in a highly mediated culture. What kinds of epiphanies did you have as you navigated the place of media in your life?

I have so much to say on this one, but just in the interest of connecting this question to the last question, here is a paragraph from the conclusion that I think also serves as a nice bridge regarding relational experiences vs. technological determinism. 

Much like interpersonal relationships, each past relationship informs (or should inform) what we want and need from future relationships. This is not the same as technological determinism; the technology has not determined our culture or our psyche. Rather, our psyches have determined the practices of technology, which then became normalized into our culture. We share selfies online for the same reasons our ancestors made cave paintings—to affirm our existence. We also reflexively check our social media for the same reason we feel a sense of awe when they looked at these cave paintings—connecting with humans is inherently and viscerally satisfying. (p. 180)

Back to your question and again, thank you so much for asking it because I feel like the book was an exercise in unpacking epiphanies and I hope that those reading the book also have the joy of similar epiphanies as they begin to think about their media uses differently. 

The whole book begins with probably the most impactful epiphany that has since led me down this path of scholarship in media psychology…

In 2000, I had an epiphany while watching late-night infomercials: With enough money, anyone can reach into your home at any hour and convince you to buy or believe something that you had never considered before. In that moment, through this revelation, my life was forever changed. (p. 1)

 This intersectional moment of media technology, content, and industry and how these three branches of media come together to impact how I think and what I do was mind boggling to me at the time. 

 Media technologies are so pervasive, it's like being a fish in water. And we all have those moments when we suddenly realize, “Oh my goodness! I'm in water!” Most importantly, it was the recognition that through the technology, I invited these messages into my home. I willingly and eagerly sat in front of this screen engage with the messages for hours on end, without recognizing that media technology was a choice. People buy televisions as a default, again detaching themselves from their own agency. That’s amazing.

In the end, I think that we generally fail to see how we are in a relationship with the media technology and that in itself is an epiphany. Habitual media use, taking pictures to make memories, the default expectation that our media will be able to deliver what we want when we want. Each of these behaviors parallels the interactions with have with partners, and that in itself was an epiphany. That my cameras – from point-and-shootsto my iPhone – have made more memories than some people in my life; that I depend on film, music, radio, and television to make me feel better when I’m sad, to make me laugh, to make me see the world differently more so than some of my professors or partners. This in itself is an epiphany. 

Everybody has a favorite media. Everyone has said at some point or another… “I love X…” I love television. I love video games. I love music. I love movies. I love the internet. We say this but we do not closely analyze whywe love these technologies. What do they allow us to do? And I think that opportunity for a close investigation of one's own relationship with media technologies invites epiphanies. 

One of the more surprising media included in the book is magnetic tape, which has rarely been discussed in works on mass media. Why did you decide to include it here? Why is it important to consider as you map the relationship between 20th century media and the American psyche?

I think magnetic tape is beyond important. And frankly, the fact that it has not been included in our common media history discourse is a major gap in the evolution of our relationship with media. There is work on magnetic tape and how it affords like avant-garde content, music videos, journalism, hip hop via pause tape production, and all of those things. But I haven't seen a real psychological analysis of our ability to control the ether. And as we talk about on-demand media today, magnetic tape[1]is our first instance of on-demand media as we know it. I can capture what I want when I want, especially from content that originally demanded synchronized behaviors as described in the second section related to radio and television. 

Magnetic tape allowed us to control and own broadcast content, to manipulate the ether. I remember the feeling of unchecked power that came from being able to set my VCR, or even just hit record when something was happening, to make it mine instantly. It offered a sense of agency that we have now come to take for granted in a digital space. But the opportunity to go to the video rental store and pick whatever movie you wanted, or record your favorite show if you weren't going to be home, or edit a mix tape like a radio producer to share with your friends. All of these opportunities have become normalized with on-demand media, but this behavior and expectation was launched with magnetic tape. 

And magnetic tape was so durable. Unlike records, or CDs and DVDs, or even digital files that can be deleted in an instant, VHS tapes and cassette seemed indestructible – as long as you didn’t leave them in a closed car in the summer – you could throw them around your car, in a box if you were moving, or just straight into your backpack without the proper case. I love this image from Jason Kohlbrenner featured in the chapter on magnetic tape. 

FIGURE 7.1 Tapes Haiku (2009)

Cassette Tapes are widely assumed to be one of the lowest quality storage devices of the 20th century, but they offered durability and portability, something that vinyl, CDs, and even MP3s couldn’t match. Literal piles of tapes, both in cases and naked, were common and inevitably held a treasure trove of content. (p. 130) 

I also think that the durability of magnetic tape gave us a false sense of security with respect to ownership in the digital environment. We like to think we own things, especially if we have paid for them, but the minute it has been uploaded to the cloud, it is made available to be deleted by some larger corporation. I recall having the Michael Jackson 20th Anniversary Edition of Bad that I uploaded to my iTunes. I then lost the CD. iTunes then decided that my file was not a legitimate copy and deleted it. Now I don’t have that album anymore. When you upload something to YouTube and YouTube decides that you don’t have the rights to it, your video can be deleted, and the thing that you thought you owned is gone, demonstrating that we don’t really have ownership over our media content, but since the ear of magnetic tape, we feel like we do…

 I think that records are probably the first instance of on-demand media. I could pull out a song and listen to it on a whim and play it as often as I liked. I could even start and stop wherever I liked by simply inspecting the grooves.

Charisse L’Pree Corsbie-Massay is an Associate Professor of Communications at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. She holds BS degrees in Brain and Cognitive Science and Comparative Media Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MA degree from the School of Cinematic Arts and a PhD in Social Psychology from University of Southern California. Charisse's work focuses on how media affects the way we think about others and our perceptions of ourselves. At Newhouse, she teaches courses on media theory, media psychology, and diversity. In her most recent book, 20th Century Media and the American Psyche, she investigates changes to the communication environment over the past 150 years and how these rapid yet pervasive shifts have affected our psychology. A committed teacher, L’Pree has spent the past 20 years encouraging others to think differently about their relationship with all forms of media and across disciplines. You can read more of her work at charisselpree.me or follow her @charisselpree.

Bridging Media Psychology and History: An Interview with Charisse L’Pree Corsbie-Massay (Part One)

This week, I am showcasing a new book, 20th Century Media and the American Psyche: A Strange Love, a magisterial work by a first-time author, Charisse L’Pree Corsbie-Massay, which explores the intersection between American media history and media psychology.

Charisse has been talking about writing such book going back to when I knew her as an undergraduate student living in Senior Haus, the MIT dorm where my wide and I were housemasters for thirteen years. (The stories I could tell!) I was lucky to be able to connect with her again when I came to USC and served on her dissertation committee. And I was one of the people who got to read this book in manuscript form and give it my public endorsement:

“20th Century Media and the American Psyche is an ideal textbook for educators who want to help their students engage with the impact of more than a century of changing media on the ways we think, remember the past, interact with others, and construct our identities. The perspectives here are both productive and generative, pushing aside old assumptions and pushing us to ask new questions. And the writing is engaging, personal, and witty, all of the things most textbooks are not. The interdisciplinary fusion of media psychology and media history is especially welcomed as a way to get students thinking critically about what has changed and what has remained as a consequence of earlier media ‘revolutions.’"

I am proud as Hell for her and what she has accomplished with this ambitious project.

Across this interview, I ask her about some of the core principles which organize this project, allow her to address the issue of technological determinism, and explore her long-standing commitment to media literacy education.

You organized your book around media that enable “sharing experiences,” “synchronizing experiences,” and “affecting experiences.” Explain this distinction.

I cluster the technologies of the long 20th century (i.e., about 1860-2000) according to the capabilities that they afforded that were not available with earlier media in order to assess how the communication environment changed during this time. 

Prior to the 20th century, the primary means of exchanging messages across space and time was the written word. The written word is powerful and can deeply impact mass audiences but the mass audience being able to experience consistent and realistic (moving) images and sound – thereby sharing detailed sensory experiences – is a massive shift, an unprecedented one compared to the centuries of human communication that came before it. This fosters a sense of intimacy, or feelings of closeness between individuals in a way that was unavailable prior to the advent of photographic film and recorded sound

Similarly, being able to share visceral sensory experiences at the same time with the advent of radio and television – that is synchronizing experiences – is a blink in human communication history (i.e., widely available for less than 100 years) and yet it has become the default for mass communication experiences since. This regularity, or the quality of being stable and predictable through habitual interaction, allowed us to develop shared schedules as a nation and engage in synchronized activities across space that had previously only been salient to those in the same community, resulting in a national sense of community that is fostered through shared behaviors in shared time, not just shared messages or content.

 Finally, the opportunity to affect or manipulate mass media messages was not widely available prior magnetic tape, video gaming, and dialup service provider, but now we regularly ask ourselves, could we survive without the internet? The question seems absurd when you consider that human society survived without real time active information access for literally millennia. Reciprocity—as an aspect of any successful relationship—means that both parties acknowledge and engage with each other. Reciprocal media are communication technologies that reciprocate, or respond to, the actions of users with corresponding actions (vs. interactive media).  In 25 years, the internet has become a psychological necessity on par with food, water, and shelter. That’s beyond amazing and worthy of consideration. 

 The purpose of the book to address how our communication environment has changed with the rapid evolution of 20th century media and how this change in the communication environment has subsequently affected our expectations of ourselves, others, and future media. Each of these clusters represents a massive shift in how we communicate, affording things that were not possible previously. By clustering them, my hope is for readers to see how rapidly our communication environment has changed and even more shockingly, how we take these affordances for granted even though they have happened in less than a century. 

Your book brings together two approaches -- one psychological, the other historical. What do you see as the relationship between the two? 

I regularly identify as an interdisciplinary scholar because the term indicates that my work exists at the intersection of two different disciplines, but to be honest, I have never felt that I was bridging disciplines, I was just trying to use the best tools available to answer the questions that I was interested in. However, academia is so siloed that the idea that connecting theories across disciplines is an anomaly instead of resourceful.

Silos are often false constructions that allow us to operate and label ourselves within a given space, but also prevent us from seeing how our work connects. In this case, over time, I think psychology is deeply rooted in history, even though psychologists like to think of themselves as independent of time, that these are constructs that humans will have exhibited arguably forever. But the psychological arguments are missing the question: how does the communication environment change? 

For example, many psychological studies rely on manipulating text; changing a name, changing the words use in framing an argument, changing what information is presented to the subject at different points in the text. However, this research never addresses how these psychological processes operated before the written word and widespread literacy. 

 That’s what's so essential to the historiography of psychology; we need to understand that our psychology is dependent on the world in which we were raised, and our world has evolved more rapidly over the past 150 years than say the 150 years before that (1700-1850) or as is commonly referred to in our discipline, since the advent of the printing press in the west in the 15th century (China had moveable type printing 400 years prior). 

 Much of this is rooted in my experiences moving between cultures as a child. I spent summers in Guyana, moving annually between the suburbs of New York City to a farm in what was commonly referred to as the third world… Clearly that’s a problematic term, but so is developing, or banana republic, or any of the other terms that we use to refer formerly colonized countries that have spent years trying to attain some sense of agency and self-determination on the other side of colonization. 

 I talk about the experience of having cable and video games with my grandfather in Guyana and not having those experiences in my American home, but at the same time, I also experienced what it meant to have rolling blackouts, no air condition, no indoor plumbing, and shoddy television when I stayed with other family and friends. This marked disparity in technology impacted how I think about and how I engage with the world. It affected my psychology. But the trends in psychology, specifically that much of the fundamental research is conducted on WEIRD participants (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic; Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010) is a painful blind spot that many psychologists are only beginning to address.

 As a post doc, I worked under Cheryl Grills, who focuses on Afro centric psychological phenomena. She spends a big chunk of the year on the continent, researching the cognitive processes of traditional African healing using psychological methodologies and approaches, but here in the west, we talk about that body of work using terms like African philosophy, spirituality, religion. We don’t think about it as a form of psychology and we don’t think psychology as part of their unique communication environment. 

 So back to your question about what the connection between history and psychology is. History is the story we tell ourselves about the past. But when we start to tell that story of the past, we see how we as humans have evolved over time. And by failing to correlate how we, our culture, our society, and again, our communication environment has evolved over time, then we fail to see how our psychology would arguably evolve over time as well. 

 As you are describing widespread consequences of introducing new media into the culture, how do you avoid the problem of technological determinism?

 Thank you for asking this question because this is a common assumption of my work. Long story short, I'm basically arguing the exact opposite of technological determinism. Technological determinism is the idea that technology determines society and is one of the first arguments that is debunked in the study of media; instead, I’m arguing that psychology determines technology use and our habitual use then in turn affects our psychology. We need to have an interdependent understanding of media because we have an interdependent relationship with the communication environment. Our psychology determines the communication environment and in turn the communication environment determines our psychology.

FIGURE 0.4 Psychology and the Communication Environment

How we communicate affects our psychology, and our psychology affects how we communicate. Communication technologies, including everything from language and music to smoke signals and radio, enable novel strategies for communication. As these technologies become normal, so do their associated strategies, thus impacting culture, society, and individual expectations for communicating. These expectations then impact the development and adoption of new technologies. (p. 9)

The phenomenon of early memories is particularly relevant here. The research in development psych reveals that infants actually form memories earlier than we are able to vocalize them. In the 1960s, Rovee-Collier revealed that 2-3 month-old infants “remembered” which leg would activate a mobile hanging over their crib. 

You can experience this when you have a visceral reaction to a smell, but you cannot recall where or when you first experienced it. Instead, psychologists argue that being able to communicate and encoding the memory into language is what allows us to then recall it later in life, and language largely doesn’t emerge until around 12 months. Coming back to your last question, the ability to communicate and how we communicate is essential to our psychology. Communication technologies have drastically expanded our opportunities for communication; therefore, they have drastically expanded our psychological abilities.

 Technology is affording new changes in the communication environment which then allow us to evolve. The criticism of technological determinism, or the idea that technology determines society, often ignores this major third variable: that technology changes the communication environment. We hear – and have heard for the past 25 years – that the internet and social media are going to change the world. And they have. But these technologies are social catalysts. Drawing from the definition in chemistry, a catalyst is a substance that increases the rate of a [social] reaction without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change; the internet and social media have afforded a communication environment that allows social changes to occur at a faster rate, much like the printing press, the written word, smoke signals, and even language itself.

 I will also take this opportunity to argue that the rhetorical use of the technological determinism is a shorthand critique that is used in spaces where technology develops quickly. I have not heard the term technological determinism applied to the advent of the written language or the printing press. However, we can all argue that the advent of the written language dramatically changed our society. 

I also think that our knee-jerk response to any whiff of technological determinism is an outcome of the popular discourse regarding media – we constantly hear arguments about the effects of media on society; the minute you tell someone what you do, their first question is “What do you think is the effect of MTV, rap music, video games, Facebook, [insert newest media here]?” Because the argument is so lazy and pervasive, we – as media scholars – have to push back on it every single time. I had a very unpleasant interaction at a history conference in 2017 when I was presenting some of my arguments on cable television and magnetic tape to discuss the environment of the 1990s. The respondent for my panel said, “I guess psychologists don’t have a problem with technological determinism,” then refused to allow me to respond. It was so sarcastic, dismissive, and righteous that it really set me down the path of having to defend my work against this particular criticism. 

I think that we need to address the connections between technology and society. And it is clearly not as simple as technology-determines-society. But technology changes the environment which we live. And that changes our society and our psychology.

Charisse L’Pree Corsbie-Massay is an Associate Professor of Communications at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. She holds BS degrees in Brain and Cognitive Science and Comparative Media Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MA degree from the School of Cinematic Arts and a PhD in Social Psychology from University of Southern California. Charisse's work focuses on how media affects the way we think about others and our perceptions of ourselves. At Newhouse, she teaches courses on media theory, media psychology, and diversity. In her most recent book, 20th Century Media and the American Psyche, she investigates changes to the communication environment over the past 150 years and how these rapid yet pervasive shifts have affected our psychology. A committed teacher, L’Pree has spent the past 20 years encouraging others to think differently about their relationship with all forms of media and across disciplines. You can read more of her work at charisselpree.me or follow her @charisselpree.

Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture (Fifteen Plus Years Later) (Part Four)

In this final installment of our series, Henry Jenkins and Tessa Jolls offer some final reflections on Confronting the Challenge of a Participatory Culturein the current context.

 Tessa Jolls: How did you react when you re-read the report?

Henry Jenkins: There are certain things I wrote that when I reread I don't remember hardly anything. This whitepaper, I reread and remembered almost every word of it. There were things that surprised me, but the conversations of that era were still so vivid in my memory. I can remember the thinking that went behind this paragraph and that paragraph, as we went to that writing process. 

Tessa Jolls: Where do you see things going in terms of participatory culture? Certainly, we're at a moment right now, and you had mentioned earlier that some of the things that you had predicted, are all happening right now. It's interesting that it's taken that long to catch up, but nevertheless, it's happening. How do you see that? How do you see the moment today and where it’s going to?

Henry Jenkins: In the wake of COVID-19, we’ve seen the widespread embrace of networked technologies and particularly Zoom in response to the social isolation we're all feeling. Ironically, we were attacked as advocates of digital media for a long time because digital media was isolating us from going out into the world and engaging with the people around us.  Now, we're trapped in our apartments, have no way of going out or engaging with the world, we're isolated from the people around us. I haven't seen the guy in the apartment next to mine since this thing began but we're communicating via Zoom and email on an ongoing basis. Schools have had to revert overnight to online teaching. I'm teaching online exclusively right now. We're hearing stories of kindergarteners being asked to spend three or four hours blocks online, engaging with their teachers. This conversion was done without the support that the white paper was calling for.  The professional development never took place. The development of new content and techniques never took place.  People do traditional teaching on Zoom and largely receive technical advice rather than pedagogical advice. So the white paper still offers tools to rethink what's going on. Of course, there are innovative teachers across America doing that thinking now. We've heard from some of them through the Civic Imagination Project.  We're working regularly with some great teachers in the LA area and we do work with the National Writing Project. But teachers still need more guidance. 

As for participatory culture, we now see it in its best and in its worse, right.  We are seeing some of the challenges of networking and navigation and the verification of reliable information in a world of disinformation, misinformation, and sheer confusion. We've seen the breakdown of civility and the nastiness of cultural divides in the online world but also groups rallying to take social action in incredible ways. We've seen commercialization leaving young people particularly vulnerable to various mechanisms of data collection. Sonia Livingstone often talks about risks and benefits of children and families online and the challenge is to keep both in focus at once.

I still would remain  firm in the idea that literacy in a network era is a social skill and a cultural competency; that young people need to think through together, with mentorship from adults, how to respond to the social challenges they face in this online world and that the way out of our current crisis is to foster a generation that thinks more deeply than previous generations about the human beings they're interacting with and their accountability for the information they put in the circulation.  I would still like to see us raise a generation with a mouse in one hand and a book in the other.

Tessa Jolls: My take on it was that it represents the dawn of the social media era. It came out right at the beginning of Facebook. There was a reference to Myspace in it, Friendster. We've seen a lot of change in that particular environment and yet it was right on the cusp of this enormous explosion of social media. What's your take on that, Henry? 

Henry Jenkins: Convergence Culture -- which I wrote just before writing this report -- makes almost no reference to social media. That's always striking to me when I look back that it's still about discussion boards and not about social media. Convergence Culturealso does not reference Web 2.0 and Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culturepicks up on both of those. So it's somewhere in that transitional period when social media is first becoming visible to us and where the concept of Web 2.0 is starting to become popular. Certainly, I was well situated to know about social media as it was coming into being: dana boyd has been an early researcher on social media, a very important figure in that space. I remembered email correspondence with her where she started describing the work she was doing on Friendster and some of the earlier social media spaces. Some of the younger graduate students on the committee were more deeply immersed in social media at that point than I would have been.

I'm proud to have an early Facebook account because of the connections between MIT and Harvard, where Facebook was first created but we weren’t using it very heavily during that period of time. When I read the stuff about Web 2.0, I cringe a little because it's still written in this moment of celebration about what a transformation in business model and orientation Web 2.0 would represent.  It's not yet reflective of some of the critiques of Web 2.0 that would start to emerge in the years following that. I've become more and more clear trying to draw a distinction between participatory culture and Web 2.0 and the work we've done then.

The idealism of some of the Silicon Valley companies that I was interacting with during that period is very tangible.  When I spoke to them they weren't quite in the grasp of the venture capitalists. This is something danad boyd and Mimi Ito and I talked about in our book on Participatory Culture in a Networked Era,that shifts in the way we thought about Web 2.0. 

Tessa Jolls: Yes. That's why the word prescient is called for here, because the content of the report anticipated so many of the cultural aspects that would emerge with the increased use of Web 2.0 and social media.  Was that your impression as well? 

Henry Jenkins:Yes. I feel good about how it reads today. There's very little in it that I would change if I rewrote it now.  With any of the skills we identified,  you could drill as deeply as you wanted to. Many of these skills have been taken up by other specialists. Some of those skills reflect conversations that were taking place in the educational world at the time, like distributive cognition, which was something that the more education-trained members of our team brought to my attention. So, we were synthesizing what was in the air at the time. It is not that we invented collective intelligence; instead, we were consolidating it, and researchers that continue to do important work in each of those areas.

After it came out, we did some work to add one additional skill. visualization, because when we talked to science teachers and math teachers and so forth, it became abundantly clear that visualization is quite distinct from simulation. If we looked at it more closely, we might identify a couple of more skills that would need to be on that agenda. I don't think any of the skills that we identified seem wrong or out of date. They're all things that we need more urgently today than ever before. I think the balancing act we did in terms of acknowledging traditional research, traditional literacy, media literacy in relation to the new media literacy seems more as important, if not more so than ever before. This is an era of misinformation and disinformation. We need to have all of those skills to sort through what's going on day by day and the flow of information right now. 

Tessa Jolls:I thought the skills you cited are all relevant and more important than ever, as you said. If anything, it is disappointing to me that we haven't made more progress, from the standpoint of institutionalizing new media literacies. You called for a systemic approach to education regarding the new media literacies. In some ways, I think we're still stuck right where we were. What do you think? 

Henry Jenkins:The MacArthur Initiative, in general, identified large numbers of people who shared a common vision of what needed to be done and recruited a lot of individual teachers who were willing to take risks and experiment and do things in their classroom. At the end of the MacArthur-funded Digital Media and Learning Initiative, there is a much more, much stronger body of evidence in support of some of the hypotheses we put forth in that report. There were some nuances on how it needs to be taught and what it means to bring it into the classroom which are really significant. 

 What we didn't see was the institutionalization of it, the scalability of it. It's been hard to get even individual school districts on board. There's been good luck coming out of the Youth and Participatory Politics Initiative. Their Civic Tool Kit has been picked up in citywide or district-wide standards, but not on state or national standards so far. So in some ways, this experience taught me a lot about how hard it is to make institutional change in education. 

Change still comes on the backs of individual teachers who are willing to do the hard work, to bring new resources and approaches into their school and to fight their department chairs and their principals in order to do something that still seems risky. It shouldn't be risky, this many years later. I think getting wide adoption is really, really hard and MacArthur pushed against that, and still didn't inspire much momentum. We're still seeing the Connected Learning Network trying to fight that battle and again, they are running up against a lot of stone wall. 

Tessa Jolls:  In the report, you also called for the informal learning environment to be involved. Do you feel that there's been progress in that arena or do you feel like it's pretty much the same story as formal learning, in terms of scaling?

 Henry Jenkins: There have been some large scale initiatives, for example, the YouMedia project out of the Chicago Public Library. The MacArthur promoted this program and it led to many, many other libraries adopting that model. It may be the biggest success story coming out of Digital Media and Learning. The librarians have taken up the calling.  I spent time after the report was released talking to library organizations and I found them much more receptive than teacher organizations. If anything the role of the librarian as an information coach has now been firmly established in the way they conceptualize themselves. Many of them have been really open to the new media literacies in one way or another. So definitely we had much more freedom outside of school than inside school through libraries and even through school librarians. You have more freedom than the sort of standardized educational test-driven curriculum, but there is so much more that should be done to fully integrate those skills into the afterschool space.

Tessa Jolls: Regarding institutional barriers, and you mentioned in the report that there's the participation gap the transparency problem, and the ethics challenge. 

Henry Jenkins: Credibility issues seem more acute after 2016 and the misinformation campaigns and the debates about fake news and so forth. That's a huge problem that we're confronting today and we're realizing that our concerns are not just casual use of information but active massive misinformation campaigns that are undermining the idea of standards of truth. 

Similarly, we need to address the intractability of the participation gap. This is what led me some years after the report to shift talking about living in a more participatory culture because that phrase means every time I say it, I have to call attention to who's left out, what groups are not allowed to fully participate, and what the barriers the participation look like. 

Those barriers seem ever more real in the age of COVID. We wired the classrooms and promised people access to computers through libraries. Now we're hearing that as many as a quarter of students in LA don't have access to public education during the quarantine because they don't have home access. They can't go on Zoom calls with their teachers and participate with their classmates. They're locked-out.  Regarding the most basic level of technological access, we are as bad as we've ever been in serving the needs of the lowest-income students. We're hearing stories of students writing papers on their mobile phones because they don't have access to computers at home. We're also seeing young people who lack mentorship. They need to fully understand the world they're traveling through and to have someone who's watching their back and giving them insight about some of the choices they're making along the way. 

The ethics challenge increasingly came to focus on questions of mentorship because in the report we talked about some of the work that had been done on high school journalism as a space for mentoring future journalists.  We called out the degree to which at least some young people had greater access to the communication capacity than ever before, and less mentorship than ever before. The research I've seen more recently shows that this is still the case, that most young people don't have access to mentors who can help them confront the challenges they encounter as they move through the world online. 

Looking back, I don't think we understood the full complexities of the picture. I think the fact that since this systemic racism, for example, doesn't surface anywhere in the report.  We understood the participation gap almost entirely in terms of economic barriers to access. Today, it's clear that it's not just access to technology, it's access to knowledge and skills, but it's also access to certain kinds of privilege. It's access to people who are willing to listen and respond to what you have to say. If the message given is that what you say is unimportant because of the color of your skin, then that outweighs almost anything else we do in the space of new media literacy. That problem is more and more visible to us today than it was when we were writing that report, and I feel we were almost naive when I reread the report.  

Tessa Jolls:Interesting. Yes. We need to give hope to everyone and yet it has to be a real hope in terms of our culture, in our leadership, in our mentors, and being open to listening and exchanging ideas. 

Henry Jenkins: It doesn't do anything to ensure a voice for everyone if people aren’t making ethical commitments to listen to each other. Without that commitment, what I say about participatory culture as a learning environment is at best a set of ideals and not a description of reality. Students can develop a document to send government officials or a newspaper and even their own parents, but if they don’t get a response back, then is anyone listening?  That's a big problem for us as a society. So to have a participatory culture there has to be a reciprocity of communication. This is something that Nico Carpentier and I have been talking about a lot in recent years. How do you build that willingness to listen and willingness to hear? Otherwise, you've just got noise and to some degree, the divisiveness of Twitter grows out of that sense of growing frustration with lots of people talking and no one's hearing what it is they have to say. 

At the same time I'm seeing the updated numbers on young people producing media. I had a chance to observe it in an interesting way. When I traveled to India three years ago, an anthropologist took my wife and me into the center of one of the biggest slums in India, where they filmed Slumdog Millionaire.  We went into homes of people and talked to young people about their use of technology. Even under those conditions most of the young people we talked to had made some media. There was a really powerful story of a young man, who told me his best friend had died of tuberculosis. A friend of his had access to an office and smuggled the man at night so they could use the office computers to produce a video tribute to their friends from footage shot using cell phone cameras and put it out on YouTube. So that was a really powerful story to me of the young people fighting against every circumstance to create and share something with the world, but you see so many other young voices being unheard, despite all of that.

Tessa Jolls: In the report, there was a statement that we should look at the new media literacies as a social skill. In a sense, I think that's exactly what we're talking about here. There are social skills that are involved in speaking and listening and being respectful and having dialogue and using all kinds of different ways of communicating, whether it's transmedia or whether it's a particular form of media. So could you comment on that a bit? 

Henry Jenkins: If we look at traditional print-based literacy, it could be understood as an individual skill. I think that grew out of the fact that most people lack the capacity to communicate beyond an immediate circle of friends and family. So reading was understood as reading things that had been produced by someone else. Writing was understood as writing letters or maybe at most writing a letter to the editor of the local newspaper. There was almost an assumption that literacy didn't have large-scale social and cultural effects. In a networked society, we need to think of literacy as a collective experience, not just an individual experience.  So we look at a world where all the research shows young people get their news not by sitting down and reading the newspaper in the morning by grazing information throughout the day through social media. So, what they see of the world is what their friends pass along to them. A sense of social accountability/responsibility needs to go hand in hand with this expanded communication capacity. 

When we live in a world where hate speech has such an enormous, divisive effect on the culture then understanding the consequences of our own speech is really important. That has to be understood in the social context and not just an individual context. The problem is people see it as, "Oh, that is just my personal opinion or I was just expressing myself." They are not necessarily thinking of themselves is part of a larger information echo system that has a ripple effect across the world. 

Tessa Jolls: That too, is a very important point for today's society and the way that we use technology. It also builds on an idea that you introduced in the report, which was that we should be expanding literacies, not pushing aside literacies. So, in other words, with the new media literacies, we should be looking at enhancing people's ability to critically engage, to be able to understand that social context.  You put your finger on the pulse! Henry, where do you see the field going at this point? Having taken this look back, when you look forward, what do you see it? Do you feel that the report is a guide to that future?

Henry Jenkins: My own current work for the last how-many years has been in the area of civics, which picks up on a number of the themes from the report. When I re-read the report, I see my current thinking about the civic imagination as in some ways growing out of the discussion of play and out of the discussion of performance, but also, the act of imagining is something that is not in that report. I wasn't sure what skills I would add, but I find myself pondering whether something like imagination or world-building is not a skill that is more visible to us today than it was when we wrote that report. That skill set is one that in fact, I am spending much of my time working on, not just helping students or young people think about it. We certainly are still doing work with schools and libraries and after-school programs. We are also working with adult communities. We have done workshops with churches and mosques. We have done activities with governmental officials. We have done activities with labor unions. We have done projects all over the world on thinking about the civic imagination.

In some ways, this new work is an extension of the toolkit that we identify in that report. It is designed to specifically enhance the sense of possibility within the culture at large, and particularly the sense of civic connection. In that way, the sense of civics I am talking about in our new work probably connects with the social skills and cultural competency we are describing here. We are trying to figure out what the skills are that we need to live with each other, rather than continually grinding down at the core of our democracy with each election cycle and every battle in between, to the point that we are no longer speaking to each other. To me, that is the most urgent thing. In some ways, that is about extending our notion of new media literacy, to talk to adults as well as young people.  All of us in our society need networking skills, negotiation skills, judgment skills, as we process this new world we are living in. Now, we need to figure out how to inhabit a global society, and within the United States, to live in a much more diverse society than many of us grew up in.

Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture (Some Fifteen Years Later) (Part Three)

In part three in our series about the production and impact of Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture, we spend a little more time with Connie Yowell, who commissioned the report on behalf of the MacArthur Foundation; Alice Robison, who was one of the co-authors of the report; Mimi Ito, who was another key leader of the Digital Media and Learning Movement; and of course, Henry. We also check in with John Palfrey, who is now President of the MacArthur Foundation and was running an important center at Harvard focused around how “digital natives” learn at the time Jenkins was up the road at MIT.  Each of them addressed Tessa Jolls’ questions about the lasting legacy of the white paper and of the Digital Media and Learning Project more generally.

Connie Yowell: I thought the reaction was two fold. In general, it was like breathing fresh, new life into education and how people think about literacy and how they think about learning. There was a hunger, amongst teachers in particular, to really understand the report and understand what to do with it. Once they saw it, and read it, and understood it, they were really eager to figure out what to do with it. One of the core challenges for teachers is engaging students and finding ways to connect learning to the things that young people care about. Henry’s brilliance was sitting at the intersection of culture, media, literacy and education. It was a new intersection for educators and one that had the potential to pave the way to paradigmatic changes in how we think about learning, technology and learner empowerment. It’s where learner interest, engagement and action intersect. 

Later on, Henry’s work on the Harry Potter Alliance as an illustrative case of how these things come together was equally significant and enabled educators and learners to break out of their traditional learning as transmission of information box, giving us a whole new imagination on where learning can happen, how it can happen and how its supported and embedded in affinity groups.  That was the first step in creating a whole pathway into thinking about a different way of teaching literacy. 

 There was a broad uptake. There were fringes of people who were way more conservative, who really struggled with it, but we saw a massive uptake and interest.

if we had actually had even more uptake and more engagement, we would have had a way of helping our young people understand this shift in online tools that became more ad-based and more focused on capturing their attention rather than engaging them in participation. 

Henry was writing about the first wave of tools that came out, which were all around participation, and making and creating a more extraordinary youth culture--whether it was LiveJournal or some of the other tools he was looking at. Even MySpace was more maker and creator focused than Facebook.  But we took a serious turn with Twitter and Facebook and their use of media to capture and sell attention as opposed to creating onramps to participation and production.  The new media literacy took an invaluable approach to enabling youth to both be critical of and participatory in media. We needed more time to scale the approach, but its not too late.  Its time for another wave of the work.  

Connie Yowell is currently serving as Senior Vice Chancellor of Education Innovation at Northeastern University and was founder of LRNG.

John Palfrey:   It's great to be able to reflect on a previous time in a set of ideas and how they've then tracked through. It's kind of a cool intellectual history journey, which is fun to go on. I would say, clearly, your white paper was a catalytic piece in the context of the digital media and learning work that MacArthur committed many, many years and hundreds of millions of dollars to. You can take great pride in having set up a philosophical framework for a lot of that investment. Then, as Connie Yowell went on to take the LRNG spinoff out of the DML work, trying to focus on the new media literacies of young people outside of schools and in places from Chicago to Birmingham, Alabama, to New Hampshire, she's really taken the same set of ideas and implemented them in a variety of contexts. So it absolutely was one of several, very important blueprints from MacArthur's work and a huge amount of investment.

In some ways, it may be even unusual to say that scholars would have had such a huge impact on what such a program ended up doing. That's actually a hallmark of the Digital Media and Learning project. It took so many cues from the field and from leaders in the field, obviously, but it wasn't so much the brainchild necessarily just of one or two program officers. MacArthur was leaning into what the field thought was required for the next series of directions and then invested behind it. 

Henry Jenkins:  Well, thanks for that. So you were at Harvard at the time we were doing this and you were doing your work on digital natives?

John Palfrey:   We had a great interest in how kids were learning and engaging with information in different ways, and obviously, very focused on what are the ways that we could understand that and support it and then understand some of the ramifications of it. As you know, it was a fun time with danah boyd and, of course, your work and many others in the field kicking around Cambridge and to have interlocutors and people who are kind of writing in public together, both informally and formally. It was actually a pretty generative time, at least from my perspective in terms of thinking through how kids were learning, how that was changing, what was important about it, what was enduring. It kicked off a lot of work that followed.

Henry Jenkins:  The joke has always been that Harvard and MIT are two stops down the Red line and opposite ends of the planet at the same time. But, in those days, we were finding ourselves on somewhat similar trajectories and involved in some productive conversations.

John Palfrey:   I think it's a good example of not necessarily being in the same institution, but being focused on some similar questions and then being able to have a semi-public dialogue that actually could be quite constructive. I certainly am personally grateful for that.

Henry Jenkins:  Me too.   What do you think were the biggest insights that came out of that moment in time in terms in terms of understanding young people's relation to new media technologies?

John Palfrey:  The insights around agency are always ones I keep coming back to -- the things that kids can do relative to media.  It's not simply a passive experience. You and I both have had a great interest in the ways that young people can be involved in shaping, not just communities, but democracy itself. Those insights you included in the paper are important and enduring. The other piece of it, I would say, which is more of this moment, but it may well be enduring too, is that so many kids are learning outside of the classroom and outside of the formal structure of learning. An insight that came through your work, but then was amplified through the DML work broadly is how much learning is happening across a variety of things, whether it's cognitive or social-emotional.  It's harder to describe the kinds of learning kids do when they engage with media outside of school, independent of adult control, and removed from formal education. Right now, that's so important for all reasons - some fatigue; kids not having access to the technology, not being able to participate in the formal learning. It’s important to see that broader set of new media literacies come into play and understand why they matter. Where we can make that available for kids, there’s a huge benefit from an equity perspective. The work that one teacher is doing in that 30 minutes or 45 minutes or whatever it is on Zoom with kids who are not able to be physically proximate to each other actually isn't the end of the story. That may feel like it's sort of a pandemic answer to your question, but I think it could be an enduring answer too.

Henry Jenkins:  The pandemic obviously keeps cropping up in all of these conversations because suddenly, everyone's focused on schools, online education and what that looks like at the current moment. Notions like screen time just has blown up because everything is screen time and we need to be asking what kids are doing on those screens and not just whether there are screens involved.

John Palfrey:  What are you supposed to say? The data have not borne out the idea that screen time in aggregate is a bad thing for most kids. In fact, there's plenty of evidence to say that a bunch of screen time can be quite good for most kids. 

Henry Jenkins:   So, any further thoughts?

John Palfrey:   Just gratitude. I'm grateful for the ideas and the enduring connection and the fact that I get to talk with you for a few minutes across this divide. 

John Palfrey is the President of the MacArthur Foundation.

 Mimi Ito: Our report was empirical and descriptive unlike Henry's work, which was actually suggesting stuff that educators might do. We reissued the Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out book. We've issued a tenth anniversary version where we have a new foreword that looks back on the ten years and what we missed, or not necessarily what we missed, but how the ecosystem changed or what we were surprised about. I think the speed at which the grown-up world gobbled the internet was surprising, or maybe not surprising, but just how quickly it became this arena where grown-ups were doing their grown-up things and they got colonized by politics and commerce. 

When we were doing our research, it was much more of a youth and academic-centered space. It was very different. It was perceived as the space of freedom for young people. Now, it's not at all. Kids are retreating to private spaces and the open internet is not a happy place anymore.

It was a pleasant surprise how many educators embraced our work. I often take a critical view of educational institutions, and I’m not a big fan of teaching myself. I do research and mentor students but I don’t do classroom instruction. I actually enjoyed school myself, but I don’t look to the classroom as a place that is spearheading digital innovation. I wasn’t holding my breath about educator response to our work, but I was pleasantly surprised. Over the years I’ve learned to appreciate and collaborate with more educational institutions instead of just engaging with youth outside of school. It’s a good thing.

One of the big outcomes was the establishment of the YouMedia Learning Lab at the Chicago Public Library and the network of youth media labs that were based off of our research, at least in part. MacArthur incentivized those, but they also brought in a Federal funder, the Institute of Museum and Library Services. That was pretty exciting just to see actual programs being launched. It wasn't like it was an application of the research. It was because we were all in conversation with one another. Then a lot of our subsequent work around connected learning was really knitted around bringing insights from the empirical research, which my study was part of the design and agenda studying stuff, like Henry's report and then people who were actually building and rolling out tests and innovations and practice. Those things all fed together into the two research networks that Henry (Youth and Participatory Politics) and I (Connected Learning) were a part of to build frameworks that were evidenced-driven but were also setting the agenda for innovations and results. Because of MacArthur's funding of all of the subsequent work, there's this ongoing influence that this work has had and because they used the Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out framework for the youth media learning labs and they shortened it to an acronym, HOMAGO. Now, even the library spaces, they're routinely described as HOMAGO spaces.      

Mizuko “Mimi” Ito is a Professor in Residence at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of California, Irvine.

 
Tessa Jolls:  When you think back on it, do you feel like you were surprised by anything? Were there surprises that you just didn’t expect as a result of the reporting being published?

Alice Robinson:  I shouldn’t have been, but I was surprised that some media literacy educators were resentful that the report got so much attention. That was unfortunate; however, I don’t necessarily think they were wrong. We didn’t do enough to acknowledge the deep history of media literacy to begin with. However, I don’t think any of us wrote the paper with the intent of reaching an audience beyond media study folks. None of us was an expert in any way on media literacy and we should have brought in media literacy folks. We were a group of literacy scholars and media scholars, and it got taken up by the media literacy audience, but it was not written for the media literacy audience. We should have anticipated that, and we didn’t, and that was I think unfortunate. However, it was incredibly well received by literacy, especially digital literacy, scholars and educators, and that made me really happy because I really wanted them to look at literacy in different ways as not just sort of an acquisition problem and so I thought that that was really great. I was really thrilled that media folks found themselves thinking more about learning and literacy.

Tessa Jolls: Agreed. Media people, in general, were just in shock at that point in time and they were really scrambling to understand this new world that they were having [0:52:36 inaudible]and I think the report was just so awakening for a lot of them or they knew they needed to know something, and it gave them something to go to, and be able to understand the framework for it, and that articulation that you talked about was very important and [0:53:03 inaudible]for lots of people, so that… yeah, that’s a wonderful point to make.

AliceRobison, Ph.D.,is co-founder of Quick Brown Fox Consulting, LLC.

Mimi Ito:  I certainly don't think that our reports would have had the influence they did if there wasn't for the additional support MacArthur was giving to other organizations that were taking up the work. I'm guessing the same for Henry's report as well, but I don't have as much insight into that.   

Tessa Jolls: Yes, understandable. Do you think we're in one of those innovative moments now with COVID and all the homeschooling going on? I mean it's hard to tell, but at the same time it seems like things are really shaking up right now. That can be an opportunity, as well as certainly disruptive. 

Mimi Ito:  I think it's hard to know. I mean it's definitely going to change things. Whether it's an opportunity for the things we care about to survive --  that I think is less certain. It does feel to me similar to that moment in history that we were talking about earlier. COVID has really accelerated the next wave of mainstreaming of online learning. Before COVID, when people said online learning, they actually didn't think of the things that I study, like kids geeking out on videogames and things like that. They wouldn't have considered  the more expansive version of literacy that Henry talks about.  A lot of people would not associate that with digital learning because they think of online teaching as the delivery of standardized formal education for the most part. I think that has changed because people understand the importance of digital and social connection because of COVID. 

COVID has accelerated the recognition that kids can't learn academic subjects unless they feel connected and safe and/or well-fed. It seemed obvious but it's a big deal that is officially being recognized. Before COVID, homeschooling was growing slowly, but it was still a fringe set of groups that consider themselves homeschoolers and schools repeatedly ignored the home context and saw their mission as residing within the four walls of the school. 

We had been seeing a lot of growth in online learning in the Higher Ed because you have a lot of non-traditional learners there, but it had been really slow in the K12 sector.  Suddenly all doctors are doing telemedicine. It's like, "Okay. Now, we actually have to think about not only what  it means for kids to be able to access the school content from home, but also how do you design an online learning environment, which has never been a mainstream concern within education. 

The fact that Zoom has come to dominate online learning is unfortunate. Why aren’t virtual worlds where learners can interact socially and create things being used? I am running a nonprofit, Connected Camps, that is trying to do this more social and project-based kind of online learning, together with Katie Salen, also from the MacArthur network. Our focus has been offering live, social, online learning experiences in platforms like Minecraft and Roblox. These are some of the only learning platforms that some educators use, that allows for kids to engage in a social, hands-on way. Compare that to Zoom, which often translates to a second-rate version of lectures or classroom discussion. Minecraft is a digital environment that gives you new and different powers that you don’t have in the physical environment.

There were never resources or thoughts from educational community of putting imagination as a priority.  Imagine if we had invested in a metaverse that was actually good for kids where they could build things together and where a teacher could circulate among groups of kids instead of having this metaphor of face-to-face and breakout rooms, which is not how educators work.  If you want to do project-based stuff, You can't. It's very difficult to do anything that's inquiry-based in Zoom. Since March, we expanded our team from a group of 25 to 125 and we're still not able to meet the demand of summer. 

Tessa Jolls:   Wow! That's really something, Mimi. Congratulations. You kept into it, yet a good time and needed, so needed. 

Mimi Ito:  Yes, it almost killed us. We're still trying to keep things afloat, but there wasn't much out there. Families were just desperate for a step that was social and engaging and meaningful for their kids. 

Tessa Jolls:  Yes, I believe it. It's been so helpful to explore this with you because I think the timing is good with all of this change going on and yet I think it's also important to recognize how some of the work that was done early on has really blossomed. I think that the work that MacArthur undertook has really made a contribution and, in a way, we're probably going to see more from that contribution now even then we did in the past, especially when we look at the education space. Do you have any other thoughts you'd like to share on MacArthur and the impacts that it had? 

Mimi Ito: For a lot of people who are touched by it, it created a set of relationships in a community that has been very resilient.  Some of what I have tried to inherit and steward even after the official DML initiative ended a couple of years ago, I recruited eight faculty who were involved in the DML initiative to our campus at UC Irvine and started a new research institute, the Connected Learning Lab as a steward of some of the community and the resources that came out of that work.  We have a website, the Connected Learning Alliance, where we continue to blog and publish reports. My team at UC Irvine has been running the annual DML conference. Henry was our very first chair for the very first DML. We merged with Games, Learning, and Society and the Sandbox Summit, into a new event called the Connected Learning Summit, which we had to cancel this year.   This year would have been the third year in this new format. Yes, the community is still very robust. I have no idea if we're going to be able to continue it in the world post-COVID, but at least for the first two years, even after MacArthur ended its funding, it was sustainable as a community supported event. I think that the people like to see each other. They like to stay connected with each other. I think that's also a really nice outcome of that work. 

Mizuko “Mimi” Ito is a Professor in Residence at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of California, Irvine.

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Henry Jenkins: We wanted to make the report as concrete for teachers as we could. That was part of the writing process. So when the report came out, the first stories we were hearing were that groups of teachers were sitting down at the faculty lounge in schools across the country, reading the report, discussing it, trying to identify what they were already doing, trying to identify what next steps they wanted to take. I heard from so many teachers through the years, that they had department-wide or school-wide discussions over the report when it came out. That was really a surprise to me.

Then we started getting requests to translate it into foreign languages. We soon lost track of the number of different languages it got translated into. We are hearing reports, particularly in Scandinavia, was one pocket that really embraced it and was discussing it very far and wide. I was invited to Latin America after the report came out, to a Buenos Aires conference with delegates of all the school superintendents and educational policy-makers of the Latin American countries. So, we know it had an impact. We don't know how big an impact it was or where the impact was best felt because it was  beyond our control.  MacArthur put the report out in the public domain and people were translating themselves and studying it themselves. So, there is no way to estimate the scale of where it traveled.

The media literacy movement embraced the report  in a very serious and thoughtful way. There was some unfortunate divide. Some people didn't understand why we were not sticking with the traditional framework media literacy had developed through the years. We challenged them in some ways that we thought were productive. We saw the existing media literacy work as  part of a larger framework we were describing, and didn't feel the need to reinvent the wheel or to reproduce what was already out there, but instead, to  direct people to read that existing material. Some connected learning people probably did not appreciate fully the work that has already gone on in terms of the media literacy movement: the recruitment of teachers, the building up of the vocabulary, and so forth. I tried in my own work to bridge that divide and to be someone who had a toe in both of those camps and saw the potential of us working together to achieve a more literate culture in all senses of the word.

Tessa Jolls: You have really lived with those words, Henry. I know from my perspective, you cited the Center for Media Literacy’s framework called the attention to the fact that it was geared toward more of a passive kind of questioning in terms of media being developed by someone else. I think that your report had a huge impact. I know it did on our organization because we subsequently used your research and then developed a process of inquiry for producers of media so that it can be taken a questioning approach from an active standpoint. So, I think the research was very timely and very informative. 

Henry Jenkins: Yes, you  did an excellent job of revisiting that and responding to that critique in a very constructive and generative way. I appreciate it, that the critique got taken in the spirit in which it was meant. 

 The work that we did for the white paper led directly to the work we did with Ricardo Pitts Wiley, Wyn Kelly, Katie Clinton and others on the Moby-Dick project, which became the book, Reading in a Participatory Culture.  Erin Reilly took over the leadership of Project New Media Literacies from Margaret Weigel as we moved towards a fuller application of the ideas in the white paper, and we ended up, among other things, developing a professional development program for teachers associated with the Los Angeles Unified School District, helping them apply participatory learning practices into their classrooms. The conversations I was having with danah boyd and Mimi Ito were commemorated in the book, Participatory Culture in a Network Era, which is a book-long conversation about our intersecting research through the Digital Media and Learning initiative.

I continued to work with the MacArthur Foundation, moving gradually from work on new media literacies (with Erin Reilly) to work (with Sangita Shresthova) on civic media, civic engagement, the political lives of young people, first through the Youth in Participatory Politics Research Network.  Our work in that phase culminated with By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activists. More recently, our Civic Imagination Project is part of the civic media grant making that MacArthur is doing. So participatory culture has continued to drive a lot of the research that I've done.  It doesn't shape everything that I do. I've done work on comics and some other things that are largely unrelated to that strand, although you can always see the connections. But that strand on participatory culture runs from Textual Poachers atthe beginning of my career down to our current projects on Popular Culture and the Civic imagination and onward into the future. 

In the final section, Tessa Jolls and Henry Jenkins reflect back on the report today and what we know now that we did not know when the report was first written.

Confronting the Challenges of A Participatory Culture (Fifteen Plus Years Later) (Part Two)

In part two of this series on the writing and publication of Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture, longtime media literacy advocate Tessa Jolls interviews two of my co-authors for the report: Alice Robison and Ravi Purushotma about their experience, what ideas from the report they think has survived the test of time, and how these ideas about education relate to their current professional and family lives. Margaret Weigel, the Research Director for the project, tragically passed away a few years ago. Katie Clinton was unable to participate.

Henry Jenkins:    Ravi Purushotma was one of the master’s students at the time. He came to us with a very strong commitment to thinking about new media in relation to learning and education. His particular fascination was language learning. He was doing really interesting things in his own life to try to learn languages using everything from video games to his iPod, to immerse himself into new language. He seemed absolutely the right person to do this work.

Margaret Weigel had just graduated from the program and was looking for work after her time with us.  We hired her as the research director of that project. The research directors play a really crucial role in my approach. As co-director of the program, I was pulled in so many different directions. I was on planes constantly, raising money, trying to manage a lot of different research initiatives. I would be distracted from one moment to the next, and I needed people for each project who would wake up every morning thinking about that project and would grab my attention when things needed to happen. Margaret played this role admirably through this phase of the research. 

Alice Robinson was hired as our postdoc to work on this project. She was a classmate of Katie Clinton who had just moved to Boston. Katie and Alice had been students of James Paul Gee at University of Wisconsin, Madison. I had met them during trips to visit Gee and Kurt Squire and they had made strong impressions on me. I'd liked both of them very much and felt that they would cross pollinate between the game centered research that Gee was doing and the more fan directed research that I had been doing. This was a good team, especially given MIT did not have its own education school for me to draw upon.

Tessa Jolls:It's interesting to look back on it and see what were the takeaways, and definitely, the participatory culture went worldwide. It was just incredible that it just kind of spread like wildfire.  So definitely, there was a need out there. There was a hunger out there for this new way of looking at the world. Were you expecting that kind of reaction, Henry? How did you feel at the time in terms of having done the work and released it?

Henry Jenkins:We had no idea what the response was going to be. MacArthur told me that they had very mixed reception on previous white papers that they had issued from research. So my expectations were relatively low.  We wrote it collaboratively using software that allowed us to share the text in process with each other, we were really trying to apply the technologies we were talking about. Ravi kept us state of the art in terms of the tools we were using to write the report. 

As we finished that first draft, Connie Yowell decided it made sense to bring in a developmental editor to increase the clarity and make it more widely accessible.  We worked with that editor closely. Yowell saw that there was real potential with us and our report became something that was really targeted at diverse stakeholders. 

Fairly late in the process, we realized that we needed not just to describe the skills and the research behind them, but also give concrete examples of how teachers could deploy them in their classes. That's where the postdocs particularly came into play. We had these brainstorming sessions where we brought that whole team together and just said, here's a skill, what do we know that's going on out there, where do we look for more examples. We reached out to media literacy organizations of all kinds to fill in those holes there. That's become an important part of the report, even though that may be the most dated part because it was describing prototypes, some of which took off, some of which didn't but it captures what was happening in the world as people saw this change coming. We were trying to get ready for it. 

But no, I didn't expect anywhere near the reception that that report got. I'm still floored by the number of discussions that I've heard about that took place as that report was released to the world. It's worth saying the two reports were released in parallel, meaning, Ito's report and my report were announced at this event at the Museum of Natural History and simultaneously a press event was held in Second Life. So that was MacArthur trying to use a new toolkit to release its reports to the world. 

Alice Robison:  I wanted to make sure that… Henry talked about Margaret because, as you know, she had breast cancer, and it was pretty severe, and she passed very quickly, and we all miss her. Margaret was just an incredibly, cool, Gen-X chick, and-- she was a true artist, and a radical and really representative of the Gen Xers. She played bass. She wore Doc Martens every day. She’s just a really cool chick and having her be a part of this paper, I miss her and I really think she would have loved to have talked to you about it. I I’m sure Margaret would be thrilled to know you were doing this.

In a true Margaret way, actually, she announced it on Facebook. She said, “Look guys, it’s not looking good, and I’ve got breast cancer, and I’m going to go in for one more round of treatment,” but it was very quick with her, like she did not catch it early. She said, “I’d appreciate it if you could just post something here,” and we did, and we all wrote to her and posted things, and her brother read them to her, and then it was I think a day or two later that he posted and said, “Thank you all. I read them all to her. She heard everything you said before…” and then she just died. It was, of course, shocking and awful, but at the same time, it was cool that she allowed us all to use that space to tell her how much we love her, and that she got to know that, and she used that tool in order to…

I do remember presenting the report at the National Media Literacy Conference in St. Louis, and I just remember how incredibly well received it was by a small minority of people who were excited about what we were talking about. It’s always true whenever you present radical ideas to educators. It’s always the minority who are most enthusiastic and most excited because they’re the closest to those changes that are happening. The further away you are, the more skeptical you are and that’s just true of anything. That minority of people were excited to know that they weren’t the only ones who were seeing the changes that we were seeing and they were so thrilled to get the validation that they had been seeking for a long time, and so for that, I’m still incredibly grateful.

There’s always going to be changes in platforms, right? There’s always going to be changes in applications and tools, but I think the principles that we described in the paper are still true. What we wrote in that paper is still very much true about distributed storytelling, and distributed cognition, and the ways that all of these media are specifically designed and created by teams of people in a very social way in a way that’s meant to be appreciated in social ways by people who love that content.

I have a nine-year-old and a seven-year-old. I was explaining to their teachers, not too long ago, that for them, YouTube stars are what rock stars were to us when we were young. My nine-year-old is begging me to have her own YouTube channel because she wants to be a media creator and create content for large groups of fans. She’s not thinking about, “Oh, this is going to appeal to a specific tailored-group.” She’s thinking, “I want everyone to love Minecraft as much as I do.” I think that was one thing that we probably could have been more articulate about.

We talked about, what was it, the transparency problem, the participation gap, and the ethics challenge.  The transparency problem is the one that most people are surprised by, meaning the persistence of the myths of the digital native will never die and I fought for years against this, and it still persists, engrained in millennial parents because a lot of these folks we were writing about then are now parents of their own children.

I’m part of an online summer camp for kids here, and we are spending hours talking about how to get all of our kids together on the same Minecraft server, and these other parents are just really resistant to think about how they might have something to offer their kids about how to be present in a collaborative online space and it’s so surprising to me that they would be so resistant to think, “Hey, maybe I should teach my kids a little bit about ‘password,’ or why you might want to think about muting yourself, or turning off your video, or think about what you say to others, or what does ‘griefing’ mean and why is it important not to grief someone, or why do we want to be careful about respecting what other people build in that space,” and they just assume  that their kids can just jump right onto this game and its online space with other people and know what to do. The transparency problem is still a huge concern of mine, and we don’t talk about it enough. 

We do talk a lot about the participation gap and the ethics challenge; but for example, rural internet is still very weak, still very limited, and it’s… we’re looking at things like how are we going to have distributed learning come August. Out here, we start school the very first week in August, some districts start at the end of July, and we still don’t have plans for how we’re going to do online learning for rural districts here in Arizona, how are we going to get them access, yeah, or what can be done on mobile devices. The Navajo Nation here in Arizona is one of the worst-hit COVID-19 population. I don’t imagine anyone that’s going to want to put those kids in classroom. What do we do if you don’t even have access to water? How are you going to have access to the internet? These things are really difficult, and I do believe that schools want the best for their students. I do strongly believe that there are limited numbers of things that can be covered in any given day, but the participation gap is still just as powerful as it was 16 years ago and the transparency issue is barely studied at all, so that’s something that frustrates me.

I don’t know if you know Katie Salen Tekinbas. She’s at UC Irvine. Katie Salen Tekinbas did the school project called “Quest to Learn” in New York City, that’s a school based on principles of gaming, Salen and Mimi Ito created something called “Connected Camps.” My  nine-year-old is participating… she’s done every single camp they’ve offered. It’s been wonderful to see how the principles that we wrote about are enacted in online digital curriculum and folks who are teaching these classes have no idea where this stuff comes from. They’re just thrilled to be teaching a class in Minecraft, but it’s fun for me to see my kid do the kinds of things that I wrote about 16 years ago.

Katie Clinton and I are very close, and we went to graduate school together, and we both went to work with Henry together. Katie’s son, same thing. It’s been so great to see and… I feel like all we did was really articulate what everyone who is immersed in digital media consumption at that time already knew. We just put it down on paper.

At the time Katie Clinton and I were finishing our dissertations and we were doing research on how video games were particularly good instantiations of what we already knew about learning science and how people learn, that’s different from saying, “Video games should be used to teach content areas,” okay? We were constantly trying to distinguish between video games as good instantiations of the research on learning versus folks who were in classroom being told to teach content with curriculum that was handed to them who wanted to use video games as a vehicle for that. Those are two different things, and so in the media literacy paper, we didn’t want to make that same mistake. We didn’t want to reduce what we were observing to a set of skills because we didn’t want that to be interpreted as, “Here’s the formula that you should be teaching in your class. Teach them how to blog, how to create YouTube channel.” Instead we were saying, “No, no, no. You need to teach them how to look at these phases in a different way. What you do with that is up to you,” but these phases are being created, and interpreted, and used in all kinds of fascinating new ways, what that ends up being translated to in the classroom is up to you because it’s your classroom, but we don’t want to reduce it down to a simple activity. 

Those little sections on what might be done, those are really tough to write. We understood the need. When we got feedback from readers, “Well, we want examples. We want examples,” and so we offered those examples, and I think they were good examples, but if you’ll notice, they’re not curriculum. Each of those sections, what might be done. Their ideas, their examples, they’re meant to be taken as such. They’re instantiations of the framework and examples of things that we had seen people do, and so we wanted to hold them up as good examples of the kinds of things we’re talking about without saying, “Here. Go teach X.”

Let’s say you’re teaching world history, that’s very, very different from teaching in a radio and TV lab. You can still use these principles in both content areas, but maybe one is going to be much more applied and the other one is going to be much more conceptual, but both can use these principles and use the framework in equally successful ways. There’s so many fantastic examples of how you could talk about distributed cognition in a whole class on the video game, Legends and use it  for example, in the Connected Camp. My daughter takes a weekly class in Minecraft, learning about ancient history of Rome, and they’re using all these principles, appropriation, distributed cognition, multitasking, all of the same things that we describe in the paper, they’re doing in that space and it’s because Katie Salen said, “Hey, Minecraft is a great place to explore what it was like to be a citizen in Ancient Rome,” but it’s not a class on ancient Roman history for a nine-year-old. …

 AliceRobison, Ph.D.,is co-founder of Quick Brown Fox Consulting, LLC.

 Ravi Purushotma: Henry was just always a brilliant mind and able to predict things quite well. It’s been a blast over the last couple decades to have had such insight into where things would be going. I mean, we really took it for granted just how aware of the direction things were changing we became by being around him.

If we were re-writing the report today, we might use some different language. There was a lot of talk about things like affinity spaces back in the time and maybe today we’d be using slightly different vocabulary. But, fundamentally, the underlying concepts of how we need to develop the skills to be able to take in information from society accurately, the skills to produce content and share information back with society in the best means possible -- that students need to find their voice. I think the underlying concepts still form the same fundamental conversation we’re having today.

Tessa Jolls:  Sure, yeah. But conceptually, you think, “Hey, yeah, we captured it,” and so that’s really gratifying to feel like it’s being used or could be used today. I think in that regard, the report really did make an impact at that time. What was your perspective about the impact that the report had?

Ravi Puralena:  I’m actually probably not super aware of the impact. I definitely got a sense it was getting good distribution. I would meet people randomly in social circles who would say, “Oh, my God. We just read your report in my grad seminar at Stanford!” So, events like that definitely gave me a sense that it seemed to have been an impactful report. But, for the most part, I had switched over to educational game design after graduating and I was a bit out of the media literacy discussion afterwards.

I guess I was trusting Henry a bit on where the report would land and where it would all go. Back at that age, I was much less attached to the process and just super excited to be a part of it all. I knew I wanted to make a difference in the Education and Media landscapes, but there was always, and there still is, a lot of uncertainty in my mind about where the best insertion point for making a change is. For change to happen, a lot of different efforts have to come together in parallel: some people need to take on arguing with the skeptics or traditionalists or policy-makers; some people need to be mentoring the open-minded but hesitant people looking to take their first steps; some people need to be trailblazing with the savvy early adopters and inventing the best possible solutions. In this field, there’s different media forms associated with each of those: the first one needs to be books and whitepapers like the one we wrote, the second might be things like YouTube guides and the latter might be things like programming mobile apps. Given my strong technical background, I always felt suited to the later. There also was simply more job opportunities being in the latter than the former. Also, I tend to get better energy being on the creative/trailblazing side of things rather than the arguing with the skeptics side. Though I’m super grateful for people like Henry who are able to do that role so well, after I graduate I somewhat left that role to them. Instead I was doing things like working with a Fortune 100 company to program an app to help kids in Latin America to create, tell and record stories.

I guess, even when starting the whole paper writing process, I didn’t fully understand what it was and where it could go. I think it’s really stunning for me to think back retrospectively about actually writing the paper. At the start, I don’t think I actually understood what the term “Media Literacy” meant or how to articulate it. I got “21st Century Skills.” But, even half-way through writing the paper, if you had told me “People think about ‘Literacy’ as the ability to read a book or write a paper. But, it’s really the skill of taking information in from society and producing information to contribute to society. You need to be able to take information in from more than just books and create more than just papers in order to really be ‘Literate’ today or have a voice.” I would have responded “Wooooah! I totally never thought of it that way!!!” But, piecing it all together while writing it -- it was a crazy journey to think about how that all came together.

I guess maybe to back up a bit. Originally, I don’t think even Henry knew that the paper was going to be such a big scope or the core focus it ended up being. I got the sense, originally, at the very beginning, that this was kind of my project personally and that maybe he would come in at the end, do a bit of fine touching and what not, but, fundamentally a simple paper I was to write about 21st Century Skills. I had written over a hundred pages of the original first draft before anybody had seen anything. Then, it started to evolve with more discussions from the Foundation and become clear that we were going to turn it into a much more involved paper. Henry was able to step in and pull together the huge gaps in my understanding of the field at the time and take my hundreds of pages, and really expand then edited it into just a much more polished and comprehensively articulated work. Originally, though, it started with a very different scope before evolving to what it became.

Looking back on it, one really unique thing about the paper for the time was the way it involved having multiple people writing it simultaneously. It's something we take for granted nowadays, having such easy access to Google Docs, but, I think the tools used for collaborating really impact the content of the writing. Perhaps one reason the paper was received so well is because of how unified the different voices of the authors felt compared to other papers at the time. And perhaps one reason for that was because it was one of the first papers of its scope to be written entirely in an online collaborative environment. At the time Google Docs didn’t exist. There was a small startup tool called “Writely” which I had identified and thought could be a good tool for this paper. It was still in beta at the time and incredibly buggy. I knew it was a big ask for all these academics to take a tool as fundamental to them as their word processor and ask them to replace it with the totally new way of doing things in the midst of a project with important deadlines. And the interface was totally unintuitive. I remember how frustrating it was for Henry: at one dinner someone made a comment about what a genius he was and he replied something like “I’m no genius, I can’t even figure out how to operate my word processor!” But, I really admired his willingness to give it a try, to show humility in always asking me for help learning to use a new technical tool and navigating through all its quirks and bugs. I think most people would have just said “Just send me a Word Docs with track changes turned on like I’ve been doing for 20 years. We’re in the middle of a big project. This isn’t the time for me to be learning this Writely thing that you’re fixated on [and is making me feel inept].” Perhaps it’s because they would have felt embarrassed to be the one to say that given the content of what we were writing about. But, for whatever reason, we persevered and I think the level of collaboration we had as a result really changed the tone and voicing of the paper for the better and was a first for its time. Writely was eventually acquired by Google and became Google Docs, so, nowadays it’s essentially the standard way of writing a collaborative paper. But, at the time of Writely Beta -- or ‘Writerly’ as Henry kept calling it -- it was unique.

After I graduated, I then moved from the media literacy side of Henry’s department to the educational video game side. I worked as a research manager in the Education Arcade lab, then for a spin-off, for many years focusing on educational video games design. I had a fellowship in Germany for almost two years teaching classes and meeting with various government officials for discussions about how technology can enhance language learning & education. Then, eventually, I moved to California and have been working largely in the tech industry here, gaining a lot more programming skills and more the technical side of media development. Some more work in educational games, but also just in general industry --  web programming, mobile app development, things like that. When I first got married, I needed to focus really on income and so I was working for an artificial intelligence company creating tools for doing financial audits. Now that my wife is further in her career, I have more flexibility to kind of go back into Educational design. I started making some content for Coursera. I’m hoping someday there’ll be more opportunities to utilize my tech background for more Media Literacy work. Perhaps once I’m a parent I’ll find a way of creating more creative activities and apps for parents and kids. But, currently Media Literacy is more just a hobby. Like, a week or two ago, I made a little video I posted on my facebook page discussing religious texts and what it means for someone from today's literate society to try and interpret something from an oral tradition 2,000 years ago and apply it to their life. I’ve been putting out little videos and things on those kinds of topics and constantly discussing it with people in my religious community, and work life. So, even though I’ve left academia, it’s still a discussion and a movement I love at heart and hope all my different backgrounds will intersect again someday.

Ravi Purushotma currently authors videos, games and apps for clients looking to use digital media to make learning & instruction more engaging.

Next time, We will consider the publication of the report and its subsequent impact on our understanding of media literacy.

Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture (Fifteen Plus Years Later) (Part One)

The white paper, Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture, was published by the MacArthur Foundation sixteen years ago. This document, prepared by Henry Jenkins and a team of researchers at MIT, offered an important reframing of media literacy which reflected the shifting realities of the digital era -- new affordances, new practices, and new opportunities were leading to new forms of informal learning that were playing an important role in the lives of many American youth. Educators were often slow to recognize the value of these new spaces as a site for developing new skills or the ways literacy changed in a world where young people were creating and sharing media with each other in record numbers. 

Across this series, we are going to provide an oral history of how that report came to be written and what its impact was at the time of publication. In this opening segment, we speak to Connie Yowell, who headed the Digital Media and Learning Initiative for the MacArthur Foundation; Mimi Ito, who was a second pillar of the initial research for the Digital Media and Learning Initiative; and Henry Jenkins, who was the primary author of the Participatory Culture White Paper. Long time media literacy advocate Tessa Jolls conducted the interviews.

Connie Yowell:  In 2004, we were coming out of a $30 million initiative and district reform that was focused on teacher professional development and evidence-based approaches to teacher professional development. It was state of the art. It was a really thoughtful, forward looking set of commitments we had made revolving around the notion that the teacher was going to be the core unit of change in transforming schools and that we needed to focus on professional development. We were in three districts doing district wide reform, and within three years, we cycled through 11 superintendents and made almost no progress. 

The MacArthur Board was paying attention. They said, there’s got to be something different we can do. We had John Seely Brown on our board, the former head of Xerox. John said we should be looking over the horizon and thinking about the impact of digital media, and these new tools that are coming out, and what they mean for learning. I was like, well, I don’t do that. I’m a hardcore educator. I don’t believe in technology making a difference.  I’m out of here. 

What we decided in the meantime was to split the difference, because MacArthur didn’t want me to leave, which I appreciated, and to do three exploratory pieces of work. Henry’s piece was one of the three. Another one was Mimi Ito’s research. We asked her, with her group of 25 researchers, to do an ethnographic study of how young people were using digital media outside of school. We had Nicole Pinker in Chicago, who’s a computer scientist, and we just said, “you’re in our backyard”. It allowed us, the staff, to be able to come and spend some time with teachers and kids to see how they were doing intervention with technology.

Great. But neither of those was the conceptual piece. Neither of those pieces were really grounded. In reading Henry’s stuff, I was really coming to understand the transformation in the culture. We needed somebody who really understood the relationship between culture and media and what it means for thinking and production and creativity and all the things that Henry focuses on. Then, the third piece was for Henry to really dive deep conceptually to help us and to help the field understand what was happening both from a theoretical and a more practical perspective. He was able to understand the media in a much different way and explain a new set of literacies. We were looking for Henry and his team to really conceptually, intellectually drive that work I mean, he’s got all those literacies. His team has all those literacies. He’s deep in it, but to have him start writing about it and really make explicit what the combination of these new digital tools plus culture was going to create. 

That was the genesis of the work. We had brought Henry with Mimi and Nicole to be our consultants to help make us be smarter. It really became clear that we needed him to be our intellectual center, and his team to really push that thinking to the world of education, because this new thinking wasn’t going to come out of the world of education. 

Tessa Jolls: I think that’s a really important point and something that I don’t know how we can shift education easily. I mean, it’s a real challenge, but I always felt that this work was really important in terms of holding up this mirror for where we were and trying to help educators see that we needed to move in a different direction. 

Connie Yowell:   Yes. In order to do that, educators, we all do, need a conceptual frame. We need to know the categories and the buckets that matter in this new world and why they matter. A big piece of the work that Henry was doing and his team was doing, from my perspective, was coming up with those key conceptual categories that are grounded in pop culture.  In our vision of innovation, we needed to go deep on the adjacencies to education. We weren’t funding directly within the education space; instead, we were funding all of the adjacent places where new ideas were coming to life then figuring out what they would mean for education and for learning. Henry’s work is clearly a core adjacency that needed to become infused inside education. 

Connie Yowell is currently serving as Senior Vice Chancellor of Education Innovation at Northeastern University and was founder of LRNG.

Henry Jenkins: This was my very first opportunity to work with the MacArthur Foundation. We've been working with them continuously for the last 15 years since the report was written.  I was midway through my time co-directing the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT. We had launched the program with the goal of providing a new kind of master's program in media studies, one that was committed to preparing people to go out in the world and make a difference in industry, journalism, public policy and academia. It was a program that would have a very strong applied logic to it. We wanted students to take what they were studying in their classes and to apply that in an immediate way to pressing problems in conversation with real world stakeholders. Project New Media Literacies was one of our major research initiatives but one among others. We were also researching games-based education, games and innovation, global media policy, civic media, and the creative industries. Each of those projects allowed a mix of students to engage in an active research process based on their own career goals and commitments. 

 As we were reaching out to identify what those research opportunities were, I was in a dialogue with danah boyd, who took some classes under me when she was a master's student at the MIT Media Lab. She was advising Connie Yowell at MacArthur, about the launch of some new initiatives around digital media and learning. Through her intervention, I was invited out to San Francisco for a conference at the old Exploratorium, where we were to present some insights into the current media environment, with the idea of impressing the MacArthur leadership, and hopefully getting some grant funds out of it.   As I was doing that first presentation, something went wrong with the PowerPoint. It was basically shuffling the slides randomly throughout the entire presentation. So I had a rich deck of stuff prepared to share, but on the fly, I was having to adjust my talk to reflect the images on the screen, with no sense of what might pop up next. No one ever dared to say to me, was that a random presentation or did you plan it that way? But it must have been strong enough because that launched one of the most important relationships of my academic career.

Connie had situated me next to the President of the MacArthur Foundation on the bus trip back to the hotel, and asked me to explain to him why media literacy should be part of their initiative. I did so. I don't remember anything I said in that conversation. By the time we got off the bus, he was sold on the idea that media literacy should be part of MacArthur’s agenda. Everyone, all the staff at MacArthur seemed really thrilled that I somehow convinced him of this. I was asked to both write a white paper and to do some proof of concept demos.

I was already dabbling in media literacy. I'd written the column for Technology Reviewthat you and a number of other people had seen and responded to. I was starting to get invitations to speak at media literacy conferences in the New England area. We had begun to do a series of conferences called We’ve Wired the Classroom -- Now What? They were designed for local educators to think about the next steps towards online education -- what kinds of curricular materials and professional development were required, what new projects were emerging.

Right now, we’re suddenly relying on online education nationwide, but a lot of the work we were advocating then never took place. Many of the challenges we now confront were being discussed at these conferences decades ago. 

Many of us saw a need for advocacy for the digital realm, something like National Public Radio or National Public Television that was going to generate content, develop curricular materials, take advantage of the experiments that were going on, and bring the teachers along. As the conference title suggests, it's not enough to wire the classroom and just assume that everything else falls into place because it doesn't. The wires are the least of it. The Clinton administration at that time was pushing them to wire all the classrooms in America, saying this would close the digital divide, and we knew it wouldn't.

The main thinkers of that period were passing through MIT— like Howard Rheingold who was doing groundbreaking thinking about the virtual community, and regularly speaking at MIT. Sherry Turkle was a colleague at MIT who was raising important questions about online conversations, identity in a networked world, and the blurring of reality and the imaginary online.  We had great students like danah boyd passing through MIT. She was shaking up our thinking because she was so grounded in the youth culture and what they were doing online. 

Part of our mandate from MacArthur had been to look across the research that had been done on learning and fandom and gaming spaces. This helped us gain insight into learning in other online communities and bringing that back to schools. Throughout that report are signs of the conversations we were engaged with MIT on games-based learning. Alongside the work we were doing for MacArthur, we were doing Microsoft-funded research making the educational case for how games might serve educational purposes.  We called that initiative Games to Teach and as we expanded our funding, it became The Education Arcade.  Kurt Squire, the original Research Director for Games to Teach, left MIT and ended up at University of Wisconsin-Madison with James Paul Gee. It’s no accident that two of James Paul Gee's students are on the team that wrote the Macarthur white paper with me. So, there was a cross-pollination with one of the major centers for thinking about games-based education. I am still seeing the importance of that pioneering work even as I fear that this language of gamification has rigidified a lot of the creative experiments that were going on into the narrowest possible version of what games-based education could look like. I am very pleased to see this new book Locally Played by Benjamin Stokes who was, at the time, one of my foundation officers at MacArthur and later became my PhD student at USC. Ben’s new book stresses how games played in real world spaces can enhance community building. 

 I don't think that report could have come out of any place other than MIT. Being at MIT left us ahead of the curve in the midst of ongoing conversations about the social and cultural impact of emerging platforms and practices. I was housemaster in an MIT dormitory, and I could walk up and down the halls, and just see what students were doing online. That was part of my night job, so it wasn't even necessarily formalized research. But there were lots of insights that made their way into that report that grew out of just living in an MIT environment with those students.

Tessa Jolls:  Yes, and I think that's fascinating how all of that came together at this special time. How then was that connection made in terms of, hey, we need a report, we need this theoretical framework outlined?

Henry Jenkins:  As Connie Yowell describes in her interview, she was working with Nicole Pinker. She was working with Mimi Ito. She was working with me. There were conversations amongst us about how we were progressing. I certainly was following Mimi Ito’s research. She invited me to participate in discussions with her research groups at multiple points along the way, and vice versa. I think it was very clear that we needed a shared vocabulary to talk about learning in this environment. I also felt that we needed to make the case to educators for why the kinds of informal learning that were taking place in young people's lives outside of school were in fact pertinent to what teachers did in their classrooms. 

Mimi's work was really documenting youth digital practices out in the world. She ended up using youth vernacular to frame her theories. She talks about “hanging out, messing around, geeking out”. Those are terms that emerged organically from the young people she interviewed. My task was the opposite: to take what we knew from research on informal learning, fan communities, gaming communities, and write it up in a way that would speak to teachers, to principals, the school board members, the state policymakers, grant funders. So I was giving academic terms to practices that probably would have been described rather differently by the young people themselves. 

As we got into it, it was also clear that young people were being taught to devalue their own experiences, to devalue the ways they were learning and what they were learning in these informal spaces. I've come to recognize the importance of helping young people think about why it's important to take seriously those opportunities, as alongside helping teachers think about how to incorporate those skills and practices into the schools. 

Tessa Jolls: Yes, absolutely. You really were at this confluence of all of these ideas swirling around. Fortunately, it seems, like, I know and talking with Connie and with Mimi, they saw a need to really articulate more of the theoretical foundations and then turn to you. It was just incredible timing, well, not really coincidence, but definitely you were the man of the time and that really made all the difference.

Henry Jenkins is currently Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts, and Education at the University of Southern California and is the Principal Investigator for the Civic Imagination Project (funded by MacArthur).

Mimi Ito: Henry was focused on writing a more conceptual summative piece and then around the same, we had started fieldwork on what young people were doing in the digital landscape. We were looking at kids who were on Myspace and instant messenger primarily and had not really made the leap to text messaging, which is hard to believe.  The US was very late to text messaging compared to the rest of the post-industrial world. The US was an outlier, so kids were still using a lot of instant messengers around then. This is pre-iPhone. Sometimes I get my chronology wrong ... yes, it was definitely pre-iPhone. MacArthur deciding to look at the online world as an arena for understanding learning was ahead of the time. John Seely Brown had just joined the board and it was a bold move at that time. 

Tessa Jolls: Yes, it certainly was. It was interesting, too, because the emphasis was certainly on the education, but not education in schools. It was really centered around the technology and, of course, that was rapidly developing. We didn't even have a clue about what was coming, but I guess that isn't quite fair. We did have some clues, but nevertheless, when we really didn't have, as you said, the adoption of the social media and so on, but what did you feel then was your major challenge in terms of the research you were doing? 

Mimi Ito: I was in that post-doctoral phase when all of this started. I had been studying how kids learn with video games and socializing and other things.  I was an educational researcher as well as a cultural anthropologist by training.  I wrote the first dissertation about digital culture in our anthropology department, but a lot of the perspective came from youth culture studies and so on. 

I was very familiar with Henry's work because there weren't really many people doing work in the States. Henry had written an early paper on videogames and had been one of the few senior media study scholars who would look at video games at all. At that time, I don't think Henry was that deep into learning and education.  I was delighted that he was brought into the MacArthur initiative and was writing the paper around literacy, which is obviously a great bridge to the education side. I was always the black sheep of educational research because I looked at what kids did for fun, like play videogames. I had just finished the study of Yu-Gi-Oh!, which is a post-Pokémontrading card game and I described what kids learn from playing those kinds of complex games.  Early networks, multiplayer games, text-based games were really the only environment at the time that I could see kids connecting socially via digital media because none of this other stuff had taken off yet. I had done research on mobile phones and texting in Japan, but the MacArthur Initiative kicked off right at that time when those things were starting to converge.

Henry was writing his book on convergence culture and suddenly you were at the beginning of seeing rich digital media in a social environment and games turned into real-time multiplayer network for the first time. ... there was a five-year period when all of that was converging, which was also that period that this paper that Henry was working on was pulled together and our digital youth study started. 

For me, it was very much an extension of work I had already been doing theoretically and conceptually, but suddenly, it became a big thing in the world… I had just spent two years in Japan studying the birth of camera phones and the mobile Internet and these weird videogames that were very social and then suddenly the rest of the world got interested.   That was when MacArthur stepped in, yes. I was starting to write about this stuff, suddenly the whole world was interested. I had already seen how youth culture was an incubator of trends around the digital. By 2004, people were paying attention to the mobile internet. It wasn't just high school girls in Tokyo. 

I was pretty confident in the topics I was choosing that they were going to become global phenomena that transcended ages. If you were an observer of the digital environment, you knew this was going to explode. That part was not surprising. I think the question of whether educators would pay attention, that was not preordained. MacArthur had important influence supporting a counter-narrative. Henry's paper was really instrumental in that. 

Tessa Jolls: Interesting, yes. Again, the impact on the different audience, splinters, educators versus the technology people and so on is really interesting because traditionally the education segment has always lagged and not necessarily been there. It was really important to have some impact on that particular audience and I think these reports did. That was something very different. 

Mimi Ito:  MacArthur’s choices of scholars were not in the educational mainstream. Bringing people like Henry into the conversation around education was an interesting move because Henry has credibility within the media and gaming space. That helped knit those worlds together, I think, in an important way. 

Mizuko “Mimi” Ito is a Professor in Residence at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of California, Irvine.

Next time, we will check in with Henry’s co-authors on the project to see how they are living with those insights in their professional and personal lives today.