t  
  t -
tt  
 t—
 
   
t ?

Whatever else might be said of teenage bloggers,
dorm-room video producers, or the millions who
maintain pages on social-network services like
MySpace and Facebook, it cannot be said that
they are passive media consumers. They seek,
adopt, appropriate, and invent ways to participate
in cultural production, from musical mashups to
dorm-room videoblogs.

A recent study by the Pew Internet and American
Life Project claims that more than 50% of today’s
teenagers havecreated digital media. Today’s
“digital natives” exchange SMS messages by the
billions, are accustomed to being “always on” and
always connected, and participate in peer-to-peer
creation and distribution of cultural products from
using Napster to YouTube. They do their homework
while keeping five chat windows open, talking on
the phone, and peeking into their massively multi-
player online games. The conflict between peer-to-
peer online file-traders and the recording industry
is about more than theft of music; it’s about the
birth of a whole new mode of production, if Yale
professor Yochai Benkler is right. In their produc-
tion and consumption of culture, their social orga-
nization, and their learning practices, digital natives
already exhibit cognitive and social styles signifi-
cantly different from those of previous generations.

For digital natives, the availability of wireless
Internet access in their classrooms is already dis-
solving the 1,000-year-old paradigm of the authori-
tative, broadcast-only “sage on the stage.” When
the Internet made every PC a potential publishing
house, authorial authority shifted from the producer
to the consumer of knowledge. Readers of tradi-
tional print media trusted publishers, editors, and
authors to vouch for accuracy in the Gutenberg
era, but the Internet has shifted that responsibility
for critical evaluation to the end user. At the same

time, digital video cameras, mobile communication
devices, wireless broadband Internet connections,
and media editing software have put the means of
high-quality audiovisual production in the hands
of millions of amateurs. With YouTube serving up

quarter billion images uploaded to Flickr—the rules
for responsible media are up for grabs. Search
engines do not distinguish between the authentic,
accurate, bogus, and spurious. Critical examination
of the author’s reputation, sources, arguments, and
evidence are required. The result? The capacity for
independent critical judgment is emerging as a key
to success in the networked society.

This emerging literacy could converge over the
next decade with new forms of organization to cat-
alyze transformations in the civic realm. Networked
publics, commons-based property regimes, and
emergent self-organization could restructure the
civic sphere around distributed solutions, increas-
ingly implemented as ad hoc interventions that
bypass traditional government and civic institu-
tions—as we’ve seen with emergent collective
response to natural disasters or with youth-
organized protests against immigration laws.

This transformation is not a given, however. The
counter forces include efforts to limit participa-
tory media production and distribution through
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and techno-
logical changes such as the abandonment of net
neutrality and the digital rights restrictions built
into Microsoft’s new operating system. Equally
important, however, is the role of education in
providing the higher-level skills of advocacy, per-
suasion, and group formation—the discourses of
self-governance that have thus far not kept pace
with the growth in media literacy. The future of
civic literacy will depend to large extent on how
these contradictory forces play out.

A w uth mdia litrac is mrgig. As th authrs f cultural prducts, tda’s ug ppl ar drivig a rapid xpa-
si f participativ mdia—as wll as a shift i th authrit f authrs. Whil this w litrac dmads mr prsal
skills i bth prducig mdia ad valuatig thm criticall, it is als ablig mr cllabrativ ad cmms-basd
frms f civic gagmt. Thus, vr th xt dcad, tda’s mrgig mdia litrac ma wll vlv it a w civic
litrac, as wll.

t  
  t
tt 
  t—
 
 
   t


nological and social drivers. Technology is the key enabler,
particularly video and gaming. Games offer the ability to
participate in what we really only dreamed of ten years
ago—virtual reality, immersive environments. And then
with the explosive use of do-it-yourself video among
young people, clearly we are entering the beginning of a
video vernacular for young people. So those are really two
strong drivers.

The big social driver is the digital natives, the people for
whom having a mobile device on you and having access
to all sorts of online services from social-networking ser-
vices to instant messaging is not something new. For them
it’s just part of the world, just like flipping a switch when
you want the lights to go on. The intersection of this gen-
eration of folks who’ve been growing up with the ability to
create as well as consume media, the intersection of that
generation with very broad availability of very sophisti-
cated tools—that is, not just for rich kids—those are the
drivers that I see.

now of continuous development toward a more partici-
patory culture. As soon as a technology is released into
the market, it’s being taken up and deployed by these
participatory cultures in ways that were totally unimag-
ined by the designers and producers of it. After a while, it
doesn’t matter whether it’s technology that’s fueling the
change or whether we simply have a culture that is push-
ing to participate and is going to seize every available
tool and resource. We’ll do it if it’s hard. We’ll do it if it’s

Young people are simply looking for a way to connect with
each other socially, looking for a way to express their iden-
tity to the world, to participate in larger forms of communi-
ties. What makes YouTube really powerful is not just that
it’s a space where amateurs can post content, but that it’s
a space where all the different grassroots communities—
fan groups, subcultural groups, skateboard communities,
Goths, punk rockers—can post their content. It’s the
cross-fertilization of these grassroots communities, in par-
ticular, that I think is accelerating. These things might have
gone on in small pockets, isolated from each other, hidden
from view. The minute they’re brought into public view,
they learn from each other very quickly. It’s like an enor-

mous burst of energy that comes in and revitalizes a lot
of these communities. So it’s not just the growth within an
individual participatory culture; it’s the growth among par-
ticipatory cultures that is exciting about the present time.

degree to which this culture participates in the U.S.
2008 elections. Are they going to deploy the culture
and tools in the political sphere? It’s a good question,
and we’ll know more about it in 2008.

and other social-network sites that are being used by
young people to organize politically. We’ve already
seen protest marches against the Iraq war inside
massive multiplayer game worlds. But will we start
to see activist use of something like Second Life?
Who’s going to be the first presidential candidate to
create an avatar and go into Second Life to court
youth voters? That’s going to be a really interest-
ing point, because the kind of politics that emerges
in a place like Second Life—which is about broad
experiments and alternative realities, alternative identi-
ties, and exploring in-depth hypothetical social and
political arrangements—is very different from the
language that traditional politics has embraced.

The analogy I’ve drawn to Second Life is Carnivale
or Mardi Gras in traditional societies. These were
places where you took on a mask and a costume, an
identity different from your own. And that allows you
to think about social and political possibilities that
would otherwise be constrained. We know histori-
cally that Carnivale led to many peasant uprisings
throughout Europe. It was designed to control and
regulate subversive energies, but in fact they over-
flowed. And because people could think of new pos-
sibilities through Carnivale, they acted on them in the
real world. Second Life is a fascinating example of
Carnivale, except that in the the case of Carnivale, the
suspension of normal rules and identities was fairly
brief. With Second Life, people are choosing to live in
this alternative reality for much more extensive periods
of time. The question is: will it have that same ability to

Howard Rheingold has been both an observer and champion of participatory media for a long time, but has more
recently begun to look at the curriculum for civic literacy through the lens of youth media. Henry Jenkins, across the
country at MIT, has been tracking games, media, and cultural change. Jamais Cascio brought both of them together
to reflect on the potential for a new kind of civic literacy to emerge from today’s media trends.

is Dirctr f th Cmparitiv Mdia Studis
Prgram ad prfssr f litratur at MIT,
currtl wrkig  issus surrudig th
itrscti f ld ad w mdia.

is a IFTF Rsarch Affiliat ad th authr
f Smart Mobs. H writs  th cultural,
scial, ad plitical implicatis f mdr
cmmuicati mdia such as th Itrt,
mbil tlph, ad virtual cmmuitis.

get people to reconceptualize their place in the world
and to move them to political action, or does it become
more of a safety net for the society, in which all the
subversive energy, the alternative culture, just lives in a
kind of permanent Burning Man?

becomes a 25-year-old, given ten years. And I foresee
worldwide a pretty big change—I don’t know exactly
what that change is going to be—as these digital
natives begin to become citizens and members of the
workforce. They’re going to bring their attitudes and
practices with them.

playing Super Mario Brothers take on their first roles
as teachers, as young professionals, as parents. And
we’re starting to see the impact of that shift in terms of
the serious game movement. Those people are seek-
ing ways to connect their adult identities to a medium
that meant a lot to them as they were growing up. I
think you can see it in the work that John Beck did in
his Got Game book, where he looks at the very differ-
ent attitudes toward competition, risk, personal identity,
and collaboration that emerge and in the workplace as
a generation of gamers begins to take on their profes-
sional careers. People are continuing to play games
later and later in life, much later in life than anyone
would have expected. It’s even spreading upward into
senior citizens who are beginning to play games online
in greater numbers than I think anyone would have
anticipated. Gaming is the real barometer of this stuff
spreading outward.

tion: would YouTube be as interesting or as big without the youth component in it? Today, there’s something in the media culture that’s making a very big splash, and young people have a large responsibility for it being as important as it is.

out there, and a lot of the content that’s generated the
greatest buzz has come from young adults or teen-
agers. We’re seeing amazing work done by teenag-

ers working on their home computers doing special
effects and making their own amateur Star Wars films,
for example, or creating their own music videos. The
Lonelygirl15 phenomenon turns out to have been an
adult project involving youth, but the fact that it looks
so much like other projects that young people were
already making suggests the blurring of lines between
adult-made and youth-made media.

population in Second Life that creates things using its
scripting language, which is pretty interesting, because
it’s not easy to do that. So there seems to be a strong
builder culture at work there, beyond the participation

how do The familiar civic roles of educaTion
and law change? how do our eThics change? is
This an incremenTal change or a paradigm shifT?

strong statement in their white paper for the McArthur
Foundation regarding the changes that are necessary
in education. This is not just shoe-horning another
course in the curriculum on media literacy; it’s a whole
new way of teaching and learning as the availability
of these technologies and the changed learning styles
of young people begin to collide with the educational
establishment. I think that’s the site of potential conflict
and potential change.

I tried to do in the white paper was identify 11 core
social skills and cultural competencies that young
people need to acquire and schools need to embrace
if we’re going to fully prepare every kid in America to
be part of the participatory cultures we’ve been talking
about here. And it really does represent a paradigm
shift in the way education operates.

I think the other sector of change is going to be the
legal culture. We have to rethink our expectations
about intellectual property and fair use as we embrace
a world where amateur-made content circulates
broadly. We can expect that amateurs will respond to
the shared cultural content of their time, and much of
that cultural content still is going to be the content➤