Interactive Environmental Journalism

Awkward but full of awesome power

I turned 30 earlier this year and I'm already old enough to feel digitally disabled. Compared, that is, to these up and coming humanoids that appear at the University as freshmen already packaged into local power collectives. Their bodies braille their way across campus while they engage the social information world through their cell phones. In our program, it can feel as though we are clumsily cleaning the house before an important guest arrives. Or rather, trying to hastily finish a bathroom remodel before we sell the house. The next occupant is the teenage civilization of today's digital society. They're the ones who can actually use this stuff, and in just a few years they'll be able to vote and dance all night long too.

This was on the xpresso blog at http://xpresso.blogsome.com/2006/10/23/21st-century-media-kids/. It is an excerpt from an article entitled Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture. It is by Henry Jenkins.

According to a recent study from the Pew Internet & American Life project (Lenhardt &
Madden, 2005), more than one-half of all teens have created media content, and roughly onethird
of teens who use the Internet have shared content they produced. In many cases, these
teens are actively involved in what we are calling participatory cultures.

So these gangly awkward bands of roving teens already assemble into participatory cultures, eh? Well, good for us for trying to build architectures of deliberative participation (phrase donated by deliberative democracy bullshit generator 2.0) into environmental politics at Lake Tahoe. I think the folks whom would be the most likely to use our website and add meaningfully to it may be MySpacers and weird metro climbers who show up at the crag and play Dave Matthews from their collapsible ipod/speaker combination. They can use buttons and text, they can cut records and make movies and still look dim and lazy. We might want to talk to some young undergraduates to get some pragmatic digital networking advice, and some guidelines for how to engage the youth who will be coming online to vote in the near future. They come as a network and they will probably turn into a lint trap. But maybe not. Let's be ready for the best in case things don't go rather poorly.

I had more, but then I started staring off at some undefined point in space for what seemed like forever.

posted by Steve Pinkerton @ 10:50 PM