The Emergence of Youth Culture, and the Way it is Changing the World

The current generation of youth is living in a globalizing world being transformed by the constant innovation of the digital age, the likes of which has never been experienced by their predecessors. There are still socio-economic disparities running deep in various regions, but contemporary developments may generate opportunities to alleviate inequalities (Asthana).

The Pew Research Center recently painted a data portrait of the Millennial Generation. In a comprehensive survey conducted in association with the PBS documentary series “Generation Next,” their report focused on comparing the behaviors, values, and attitudes of the Millennials with those of today’s older adults (Kohut, Taylor, Keeter, and et al).  What they found was that if every generation had a personality, the Millennials would be self-expressive, upbeat, liberal, and “open to change.” More ethnically diverse as well as less religious, members of the Millennial Generation are also less likely to have served in the military. The Great Recession has set their first jobs and blossoming careers harshly back, yet they are more upbeat about their individual economic futures as well as the overall state of the nation (Kohut, Taylor, Keeter, et al).

 

The youth today are poised to become the most educated generation in American history. The first “always connected” generation has a multitude of digital tools at their fingertips, and over eight out of ten say they sleep with a cell phone nearby. A fifth of Millennials have posted a video of themselves online, and three quarters have also developed a social media profile (Kohut, Taylor, Keeter, and et al).

Young people learn about themselves and the world by engaging with the media. In doing this, it allows them to explore issues while bringing in their unique perspectives and knowledge. A study by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization on the innovative practices of media as it relates to youth participation found that media mixes nurture the adventurous and innovative ways in which participants explore different aspects and possibilities of media, as well as allow content creation (Asthana). Participants can then learn viable skills while bringing cultural knowledge into an international dialogue. This could mean that youth involvement in participatory media can positively shape the future of education, nutrition, political engagement, the political process, and the way we use digital tools.

Mapping Memories serves as an example of this objective. As an ongoing, collaborative media project, Mapping Memories seeks to use personal stories, as well as a range of media tools, to better understand and share the refugee youth experience in Montreal with the online community so they may correspondingly better understand a different cultural perspective. The Canadian Council for Refugees, in collaboration with Montreal Life Stories, has formed this project to help build a communal and global understanding of Montreal’s refugees who have been displaced by war, genocide, and a variety of human rights violations. Their objective is to produce multimedia pieces that will prospectively influence the education, policy, art, and lives of the refugee youth involved; this work will then be showcased online (Norman, and Luchs). Using the globalized online world of multimedia, can projects such as Mapping Memories make a fundamental difference in policy and perspective?

 

Despite the difficult situations faced by many youth around the world, youth participation in a variety of diverse social processes has increased. The current youth have seized communication tools, putting them to work while speaking up in ways that defy the common and dominant understanding of politics (Enghel, and Tufte 262). A study done by the European Journal of Communication sought to investigate the affect of news and social media use in politics as it related to age. The study aimed to determine whether social media could serve as a leveler in terms of political interest and participation between old and young citizens (Holt, Shehata, et al 29). In citizens between the ages of 65 and 74 years old, approximately 79% say they are “very” or “somewhat” interested when it came to politics, while only 50% of the youngest citizens cited that same level of interest (Holt, Shehata, and et al 29).

 

This study found support for the idea that different mobilization has an effect across the varying age groups. Offline political participation (i.e. signing a petition, writing a letter to the editor, etc.) and political interest both increase with age. There are a few exceptions: arguing one’s opinion, signing a petition, or participating in a political demonstration are more common among the young. In respect to using social media for political purposes, the youngest group uses social media significantly more than the older age group. Concerning attention focused on traditional news sources (i.e. television news, newspaper, radio, etc.) the patterned is reversed (Holt, Shehata, et al 29).

The results concluded that although younger people spend less time focusing on political news in traditional media forms than older people, they simultaneously use social media for political purposes more frequently. Therefore, the youth’s greater use of social media for political purposes may in fact compensate for their lack of interest and attention to traditional forms of media. The results of the study further exhibited that social media could thereby serve as a leveler of both political interest and offline political participation between the youth and the older citizens. Essentially, the lament of the declining use of traditional news media outlets does not suggest that young people are not participating. They are simply participating in an entirely new way (Holt, Shehata, and et al 29). If all of this writing and sharing of multimedia projects and ideas is helping to serve as a voice for youth in order to shift the political directions of nations, perhaps it can shape the future of education. That is exactly what Andrea Lunsford, scholar of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, decided to find out.

Professor Lunsford collected over 800 freshman composition papers from 2006. When comparing them to papers written in 1917, 1930, and 1986 to see if the digital age had done any damage to students’ writing patterns, she found seemingly opposite results. The more recent composition papers by freshman have “exploded in length and intellectual complexity (Thompson 1-3).” Although students did minimal recreational writing outside of studies in the last century, Lunsford’s research revealed that student’s non-academic writing done outside of class is 40% of their writing participation overall. This “life writing” can include anything from message boards to video game forums (Thompson 1-3).

 

 

Is all of it great writing? Probably not, but in the process of sharing our thoughts with the world, it is actually changing the way we think. It’s what is known as the audience effect – social scientists have discovered a change in our performance if we know other people are watching us. Brenna Clarke Gray, an instructor at Douglas College in British Columbia, assigned her students to create Wikipedia entries in an effort to observe whether or not they would be more serious about the assignment. Before the experiment, Gray noted that assignments would often be turned in without proper citation. With the Wikipedia assignment, the students carefully sourced their writing, re-working their entries and paying astute attention due to the fact that the entire Wikipedia community would be scrutinizing their information. (Thompson 1 – 4).

If writing for an audience is changing the way we think and develop our ideas, can participatory media also change the way we think about what we eat? Netflix has endless lists of food documentaries and multimedia efforts, such as the documentary project The Weight of the Nation, which featured case studies on the damage that obesity is doing to our national health. The Institute of Medicine partnered with HBO and, in association with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, sought to confront America’s obesity epidemic (“The Weight of the Nation”).

The constant changes in the United States food system, along with projects such as The Weight of the Nation, have created interest in shifting dietary habits among youth. In response, many schools and communities have developed programs such as Lunch Love Community. While it has taken citizens in Berkeley, California over a decade to change the way area youth learn about food and gardening and to provide nutritious school lunches to their student populations, Lunch Love Community functions as an ongoing documentary project that is so innovative and new in terms of multimedia it could potentially be dubbed a “continuous documentary.” Currently, the project is pushing documentary boundaries by offering a suite of short films to watch as well and share in an evolving medium dubbed by the project spearheads as “open space” documentary. Lunch Love Community not only utilizes film to showcase how teachers and students can benefit from school lunch reform but involves the students in the process. Using cross-disciplinary learning, students are able to have hands-on experience with gardening and food, taking part in the overall process from seed to plate with programs such as “school under the sky.” In getting outside and getting their hands dirty, it allows the youth to kinesthetically experience and learn about food and nutrition with all of their senses engaged. The results and experiences are chronicled with film and shared on the project’s site, with options to then virally spread across an array of multimedia platforms. This program provides resources for educators, parents, policy makers, and anyone wanting change the way their school lunch program functions (De Michiel, and Constantinou).

Lunch Love Community: The Whole World in a Small Seed

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stRnVU4uE1c

Do programs such as these have the potential to influence dietary behaviors in a positive way? A study conducted with focus groups comprised of inner-city youth in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota sought to explore how community gardens could influence youth dietary behaviors, beliefs, and values, as well as their cooking and gardening behaviors. The study compared those who were involved in a youth garden program and those who were not. The findings of the study indicate that the youth who had participated in the garden program were more willing to consume nutritious food, as well as try unfamiliar foods, than the youth who did not. The study also found that youth garden participants were more likely to garden and cook on their own and indicated a stronger appreciation for other cultures and individuals than those who did not participate in the youth garden program. The research indicated that garden programs impact youth garden habits in a positive way, including their social skills, food choices, cooking skills, and nutrition knowledge (Lautenschlager, and Smith 245 – 258).

The idea of youth constituting themselves as a particular social group is a recent phenomenon. Youth around the world are acting as agents of change and, as a result, are experiencing and contributing to social change for the first time in contemporary history that is, to a degree, unprecedented in our time (Enghel, and Tufte 262). Along with social perspective, education, and political change from inside their community and in the world, youth are also shaping the way our digital products are designed and distributed. There are instances when users generate technical improvements or social tools to make sharing easier. In Charlie Gere’s introduction to Digital Culture, he references French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, who said, “The machine is always social before it is technical. There is always a social machine which selects or assigns the technical elements used (Gere).”

Hashtags are a perfect example of this. Most people assume the Twitter (and now Instagram and Facebook) feature was part of the original design, but Twitter actually initially rejected the idea. A Twitter user named Chris Messina, hoping for a better “eavesdropping experience” on the social media site, first had the idea. On August 23^rd, 2007, Messina tweeted: how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups [sic]. As in #barcamp [msg]? That is how the hashtag came to be (Zak). Born just after 1980, at 32 years old, Messina is still considered a part of the Millennial Generation and therefore part of the youth culture shaping new digital media and the way we use our online tools (Kohut, Taylor, Keeter, and et al). The hashtag is now a useful micro-blogging tool that allows users to group subjects and issues for an easier discussion online.

Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake perfectly exemplify the use and perhaps overuse of the hashtag:

Another full-on participatory media form and digital tool more concentrated in youth culture is video game beta testing. Beta tests for video games act as a trial run, typically focusing on the gameplay, compatibility, user interaction, and performance of a pre-released game. While there are a variety of ways to beta test games, public betas are currently the most common model, inviting a large number of participants. Beta testing allows for user feedback so the game can be changed or adapted before its final release; data can also be gathered on the game’s server performance (“Centercode”).

 

Multimedia platforms such as social media and beta testing are enabling a new paradigm of consumption, entertainment, and sharing. Not only do individuals have more control over the genre and range of music they consume or the games they will play, but they are able to merge into networks of other individuals with similar interests (Gere 214 – 215)

However, as with many dimensions of youth culture around the world, access to the media is not always readily available. The possibility to participate in political, economic, and cultural life of their local communities is not equal for all youth (Enghel and Tufte 262). As of this year, 2.7 billion people are using the Internet. This means that 39% of the world population is online. The developed world hosts 77% of that population, compared to only 31% in the developing world (Sanou). This shows that there are still many people excluded from the benefits of the online world.

Nonetheless, there are those who seek to change this. Governed by MIT and Harvard, edX seeks to offer courses and content to anyone wanting to better themselves through education.  Additionally, they research how students learn, the ways in which technology can transform learning, and better ways to teach in the future. They list their goals as expanding education access to everyone, enhancing both learning and teaching on campuses and online, and advancing both learning and teaching through research. They are a non-profit with their goals and principles aimed at becoming a leading worldwide resource for success in learning (“We’re Empowering Learning in the Classroom and Around the Globe”). Projects such as Edx and their educational goals, Mapping Memories and their refugee story sharing platform, and Lunch Love Community’s desire to change the way students obtain nutritious meals in schools are all helping to shape youth culture as it continues to grow in the digital era.

The future of youth culture and thriving multimedia projects developed for positive social progress seems bright. The world of online media is changing every day, and after passing the user mark of two billion, the United Nations recently proposed that access to the Internet should be a human right, stating, “The Internet has become a key means by which individuals can exercise their right to freedom and expression.” While the entire world may not be equally connected quite yet, projects such as Mapping Memories and Lunch Love Community can and will serve as participatory models for the future, inspiring the emergence and participation of youth culture online and around the world for years to come.

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Works Cited

 

Asthana, Sanjay. “Innovative Practices of Youth Participation in Media.” United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. (2006): 1 – 13. Print. <http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/files/22831/11593413569UNESCO_Innovative_practices.pdf/UNESCO+Innovative+practices.pdf>.

 

“Centercode For Video Game Betas.” Centercode. Centercode, 2013. Web. 6 Nov 2013. <http://www.centercode.com/beta/types/games/>.

De Michiel, Helen, and Sophie Constantinou. “What is this project all about?” Lunch Love Community. 30 Leaves Productions, Citizen Film, Media Working Group, n. d. Web. 3 Nov. 2013.

 

Enghel , Florencia, and Thomas Tufte. “Citizenship Practices Among Youth.” Exploring the Role of Communication and Media. 262. Print.

 

Gere, Charlie. Digital Culture. Expanded Second Edition. London, England: University of Chicago Press, 2002, 2008. 214 – 215. Print.

 

Holt, Kristoffer, Adam Shehata, et al. “Age and the effects of news media attention and social media use on political interest and participation: Do social media function as a leveller?.” European Journal of Communication . (2013): 29. Web. 5 Nov. 2013. <http://ejc.sagepub.com/content/28/1/19.abstract>.

 

“Internet Society.” Why The Internet Matters. Internet Society, 2013. Web. 6 Nov 2013. <http://www.internetsociety.org/what-we-do/why-internet-matters>.

 

Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media. New York and London: New York University Press, 2013. Print.

 

Kohut, Andrew, Paul Taylor, Scott Keeter, et al. “Millennials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change..” Portrait of Generation Next. (2010): 1 – 2. Web. 6 Nov. 2013. <http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2010/10/millennials-confident-connected-open-to-change.pdf>.

 

Lautenschlager, Lauren, and Chery Smith . “Beliefs, knowledge, and values held by inner-city youth about gardening, nutrition, and cooking.”Agriculture and Human Values. 24.2 (2007): 245 – 258. Web. 6 Nov. 2013. <http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10460-006-9051-z>.

 

Sanou, Brahima. “The World in 2013.” ICT Facts and Figures. International Telecommunication Union, Feb 2013. Web. 6 Nov 2013. <http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFactsFigures2013.pdf>.

 

Thompson, Clive. “Thinking Out Loud.” WIRED. 1 – 4. Web. 7 Nov. 2013. <http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/09/how-successful-networks-nurture-good-ideas/>.

 

Thompson, Clive. “The dumbest generation? No, Twitter is making kids smarter.” Globe and Mail. (2013): 1-3. Web. 7 Nov. 2013. <http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/how-new-digital-tools-are-making-kids-smarter/article14321886/?page=1>.

 

“We’re Empowering Learning in the Classroom and Around the Globe.” edX. MIT and Harvard University. Web. 7 Nov 2013. <https://www.edx.org/about-us>.

 

Zak, Alana. “How Twitter’s Hashtag Came to Be.” Wall Street Journal[New York City] 03 Oct 2013. Web. 6 Nov. 2013. <http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/10/03/how-twitters-hashtag-came-to-be/>.