(Note: sorry about the length of these posts on the home page, but MT is still messing up extended entries.)

Pop Cosmopolitanism, Collective Intelligence, and Participatory Culture: What Educators Need to Know about the New Media Landscape

see over time a span of skills learned from gaming that are applied to law, etc.

Yoyogi Park, Tokyo – a “fan district”
8–story comic book store!
showed costumes in Toyko Park = “cosplay” which happens every weekend; mostly girls who spend most of their time taking pictures of each other with their cell phones

showed a video of a 17–year old girl who was motivated to learn Japanese and how to sew in order to participate in CosPlay
they go to conventions to be recognized as the character they are dressed as; whole point is to be recognized and photographed
then go on the internet afterwards to find pictures of themselves

— not just consuming popular culture but generating it as well
these kids are integrating this into their identities

showed a clip of the “Yankees” who dance rockabilly dressed as Elvis in the park; one person wears the “red jacket” (James Dean, “the only thing that trumps Elvis”)
see “silent dancing” all over the park; eg, practicing boy band moves

not just Imperialist culture, but integration; see a lot of hybridity; goes both directions

organized reenactments of scenes from The Matrix in Japan

“Pop cosmopolitanism” – contra cultural imperialism; a hunger to escape parochialism

media literacy we’ve been teaching in our schools hasn’t changed since the 1980s – need to rethink this

mass culture is taught as something we consume but don’t participate in; “buy nothing day” leaves us with the option to opt out only – “just say yes” or “just say no”

noted Steven Johnson’s book “Everything Bad is Good for You”

see complexity everywhere in media
– see visual complexity (comic books)
– narrative complexity (Lost)
– paradigmatic complexity (Pokemon)
– cognitive complexity (video games)
– cultural complexity (mixing and matching cultures)

we’ve now reached the point where we feel inadequate to pop culture; now there are people that don’t “get” pop culture, whereas in the past it would have been high culture

distributed cognition: things we would normally offload – example is Tivo, manages TV for you

collective intelligence – we pool knowledge; no one knows everything, everyone knows something; mix and match that information – example is Wikipedia

showed a flowchart of the Zion Underground hierarchy in The Matrix that was created by users; see this in Survivor Fan sites, too

“i love bees” example from halo community - had to work together to solve problems

new kind of competency

corporations are now taking advantage of this – eg Coke lets you participate in many different ways

have to start thinking of children and youth as media generators – grassroots participation; young people will be critical to the change
— eg Joshua Meeter, who created a claymation Star Wars film
— Peter “TheSidDog” Medina, a Sims Moviemaker

“they live across media” - it’s not just digital production

they’re not biased towards any one form

often called “the Napster Generation” because they’re “stealing,” but they are expressing themselves via this mixing; they’re using what’s out there

interesting hybrids of high tech and lo-fi modes — scanning print in order to distribute it digitally

overwhelming number of these kids are home schooled; those that are in school are doing poorly because schools are failing them
— home schoolers use digital technology much more; they’re no longer “cut off from classmates” when being taught at home

Kaiser Family Study:
children under 6–years old spend nearly two hours a day using screen media
83% use any screen media
83% play outside
— study doesn’t ask the right questions, though; what do these numbers actually mean? what do they represent?

parents are given no advice on how to help or shape these kids’ digital tendencies at home
media literacy begins in the crib

Five Key Questions that Can Change the World:

1. Who created the message?
2. What creative techniques are used to attract my attention?

— all based on kids consuming, not shaping, media

21st century learning needs: effective communication, high productivity, digital-age literacy

media literacy should be:
the ability to critically assess information gathered from multiple sources
the ability to appreciate works from many different aesthetic traditions
— give them vocabularies for what they’re already consuming
an understanding of the contexts within which media are produced, distributed, and consumed
the ability to express your ideas through a range of media (which kids already do)
the ability to assess which media is most appropriate for a given purpose (cell phones vs. text messaging vs. camcorders, etc.)
the ability to meaningfully participate in collective intelligence community
the ability to think in multimodal terms (multiple levels of interpretation; the videos of Tokyo Park show more than just sound, audio, or text would)
an ethical framework for thinking about our freedoms and responsibilities as communicators

the participation gap - need to worry for several reasons

the digital divide has been largely closed in terms of access, because most kids have some access through schools and libraries
— not really, though, because you can’t participate in this culture in 15 minutes on a public library computer, so now there’s a “participation gap”

also have the group that doesn’t do this at all and doesn’t even know about it

need to create space where the two groups can interact and learn from each other

media literacy should begin at the crib and should occur at every level of the culture:
– parents
– churches
– organizations (YMCA, etc.)
– schools
– media

Jenny note: libraries aren’t listed  :-(

all of this should be taught across the curriculum, which is a major paradigm shift - same as multiculturalism; integrated this into the curriculum, not just as an add-on module
– media literacy should be the same way

what are we doing through our classes now to build this into instructional curriculum?