Digital Diversity: How Circumstances Shape Youth Digital Media Practices
Channel: Connected Learning Alliance
Date: 2019-10-03

While we often think of “digital youth” as sharing common experiences, research is increasingly highlighting the diversity of youth experiences online. Understanding the differences between youth digital participation is as important as understanding how digital technologies have shaped a generation. This emphasis on diversity and difference is particularly important given trends towards political polarization, the proliferation of platforms and affinity networks, and with higher-cost and higher-bandwidth forms of digital engagement such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and 5G networks on the horizon. A broader palette of forms of online participation and affiliation offer new avenues for validating interests and identities for diverse youth. At the same time, these trends open up risks of new kinds of digital participation gaps, echo chambers, and political polarization. This symposium will draw highlight research from two recent books from the NYU Press “Connected Youth and Digital Futures” series that showcase digital diversity: Affinity Online How Connection and Shared Interest Fuel Learning and The Digital Edge: How Black and Latino Youth Navigate Digital Inequality to explore the varied cultural, social, and real life circumstances inflecting the digital practices of youth. How do social, familial, economic, cultural, political factors shape youth digital participation, for example? How do diverse forms of online affiliation and participation support youth agency, voice, and learning? The symposium will feature authors from the two books, Craig Watkins, Katie Salen, and Mimi Ito, and be moderated by Henry Jenkins.