Institute For The Future

Culture: Digital Natives, Civil Spaces

A new youth media literacy is emerging. As the authors of cultural products, today’s young people are driving a rapid expansion of participative media—as well as a shift in the authority of authors. While this new literacy demands more personal skills in both producing media and evaluating them critically, it is also enabling more collaborative and commons-based forms of civic engagement.

Whatever else might be said of teenage bloggers, dorm-room video producers, or the millions who maintain pages on social-network services like MySpace and Facebook, it cannot be said that they are passive media consumers. They seek, adopt, appropriate, and invent ways to participate in cultural production, from musical mashups to dorm-room videoblogs.

The rapidly growing digital participation culture is being shaped by the interests ad needs of youth—and perhaps shaping how we all see the world.

Want to learn more? Check out TYF’s 2007 perspective, Culture: Digital Natives, Civil Spaces. There you will find an interesting interview with Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program and professor of literature at MIT, and Howard Rheingold, IFTF Research Fellow and the author of Smart Mobs. This perspective includes discussions on commons, collective behavior, participation, youth, and much more.