New media technologies have added a whole new dimension to the way that media is produced, distributed and interacted with. Participatory culture is a term coined by Henry Jenkins (2006) and is used to describe the new ways in which people are using new media technologies. Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace allow users’ to create online profiles and share these with friends. Online games like World of Warcraft allow users to interact in an online fantasy role-playing world with players from around the world. Weblogs and online forums give users with limited programming skills the ability to create and publish their own material to web pages in creative ways. A computer and an internet connection is all that is needed to have the ability to publish and distribute content easily and cheaply. People are no longer just consumers of culture, they are now creating, remixing, sharing and engaging with cultural artifacts at a rapid speed (Jenkins, 2006).
Popular culture has such a large influence on young people’s lives and how they establish their identities (Driver, 2007). As a librarian with a view to work in public libraries, I feel that it’s important that public libraries provide programs and resources for youth which assist them to develop the skills they need to critically engage with their communities and to become lifelong learners.
Film and TV has played a central role in popular culture for a long time and it’s now common for public libraries to include resources which support the use of these media forms. With the development of the internet and communications technologies we are now seeing new media forms becoming established in our communities. Rather than overshadowing film and TV, new digital media is being used alongside older media forms in what’s being termed media convergence (Jenkins, 2006). Texts from popular films and TV shows are, debated in online forums, fan sites, turned into games and remixed into new forms, by both the owners and other users (Marshall, 2010).
Adolescence is an important time when youth begin to gain a sense of self through the exploration of different identities and how these relate to their communities (McMahan, 2009, p. 368). Popular culture and the media plays an important role in helping youth to establish identity by providing a wide range of representations of different communities and what it means to be part of these communities. With the development of new media forms, the way that youth are interacting with film and TV is changing (Driver, 2007, p. 12). Research by Marshall (2010) found that queer youth are using online forums to discuss characters they see in film and TV. This debate allows youth to obtain different perspectives on what it means to be queer with peers from around the world. This type of discussion demonstrates that the internet is playing an important role in providing queer youth with a way of coming together and being part of a community that wouldn’t have been possible before. As educators it is essential that we provide youth with the skills to be able to critically assess these representations.
As I move from being a student to being a librarian my action plan is to stay up to date with new media technologies and how this relates to popular culture by following blogs relevant to both of these topics, including:
Girls are Geeks
Webmonkey
New Technologies Interest Groups Blog
Mashable
Over the semester I have been incorporating the RSS feeds from these and other blogs into my Google reader, which aggregates the feeds and let’s me know when the blogs have been updated. I have found this useful in staying up to date with rapidly changing world of technology and the media. In addition to this, I have set up alerts with a number of database platforms to alert me when articles which match my search terms become available.
More than ever before the media is playing a more important role in our lives. Film and TV are still important forces in popular culture but the way youth are using new media forms to interact with these texts has changed. Therefore, it is important that the community gains an understanding of how new media technologies are being used, so we can get the relevant resources and match these with the right programs. This involves staying up to date with academic research and getting involved and using these new technologies. This type of research will allow librarians to develop services and programs that are relevant to youth and based on research and not on hype. Evidence-based practice also provides libraries to with the ability to justify to the community the decisions they are making about collection development and the types of services they provide.
References
Driver, S. (2007). Queer girls and popular culture: Reading, Resisting and Creating Media. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing Inc.
Marshall, D. (2010). Popular culture, the 'victim' trope and queer youth analytics. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(1), pp. 65-85. Retrieved September 29th, 2010, from http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all?content=10.1080/09518390903447176
McMahan, I. (2009). Adolescence. Boston, MA: Pearson Education Inc.
Jenkins, H. (2006). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. Retrieved from http://digitallearning.macfound.org/atf/cf/%7B7E45C7E0-A3E0-4B89-AC9C-E807E1B0AE4E%7D/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF
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