In recent years, otaku culture has emerged as one of Japan’s major cultural exports and as a genuinely transnational phenomenon. This timely volume investigates how this once marginalized popular ...culture has come to play a major role in Japan’s identity at home and abroad. In the American context, the word otaku is best translated as “geek”—an ardent fan with highly specialized knowledge and interests. But it is associated especially with fans of specific Japan-based cultural genres, including anime, manga, and video games. Most important of all, as this collection shows, is the way otaku culture represents a newly participatory fan culture in which fans not only organize around niche interests but produce and distribute their own media content. In this collection of essays, Japanese and American scholars offer richly detailed descriptions of how this once stigmatized Japanese youth culture created its own alternative markets and cultural products such as fan fiction, comics, costumes, and remixes, becoming a major international force that can challenge the dominance of commercial media. By exploring the rich variety of otaku culture from multiple perspectives, this groundbreaking collection provides fascinating insights into the present and future of cultural production and distribution in the digital age.
How online affinity networks expand learning and opportunity for young people
Boyband One Direction fanfiction writers, gamers who solve math problems together, Harry Potter fans who knit for a ...cause. Across subcultures and geographies, young fans have found each other and formed community online, learning from one another along the way. From these and other in-depth case studies of online affinity networks, Affinity Online considers how young people have found new opportunities for expanded learning in the digital age. These cases reveal the shared characteristics and unique cultures and practices of different online affinity networks, and how they support “connected learning”—learning that brings together youth interests, social activity, and accomplishment in civic, academic, and career relevant arenas. Although involvement in online communities is an established fixture of growing up in the networked age, participation in these spaces show how young people are actively taking up new media for their own engaged learning and social development.
While providing a wealth of positive examples for how the online world provides new opportunities for learning, the book also examines the ways in which these communities still reproduce inequalities based on gender, race, and socioeconomic status. The book concludes with a set of concrete suggestions for how the positive learning opportunities offered by online communities could be made available to more young people, at school and at home. Affinity Online explores how online practices and networks bridge the divide between in-school and out-of-school learning, finding that online affinity networks are creating new spaces of opportunity for realizing the ideals of connected learning.
Engineering Play Ito, Mizuko
MIT Press (BK),
2009, 2009-10-00, 2012-02-10
eBook, Book
How the influential industry that produced such popular games as Oregon Trail and KidPix emerged from experimental efforts to use computers as tools in child-centered learning.
Out-of-school time (OST) makerspaces are spaces for youth to engage in exploratory practices and deepen STEM interests in personally meaningful ways. Many youth—especially teens—additionally benefit ...from supportive relationships (e.g., caring adult mentors, peer mentors) in these spaces to help them uncover their interests and translate them into long-term trajectories of maker practice. Using a connected learning lens, this paper focuses on supportive adult relationships at a high school OST program (Sunrise of Philadelphia), and the ways in which practices around interest identification and development within its makerspace entrepreneurship program meaningfully impacted learning trajectories for youth by connecting them to new STEM opportunities, knowledge, and experiences. Through an illustrative case study, we present a portrait-of-practice that shows how OST educators facilitated brokering to connect youth to resources, mentoring, materials, and new communities that transcended their specific program. This manuscript contributes to known practices for translating youth interests in makerspaces, including incorporating youth voice and choice and making cultural connections to entrepreneurship opportunities. This case contributes to an understudied area of entrepreneurship education programs and activities that are needed in educational (K-12) makerspaces.
The tenth-anniversary edition of a foundational text in digital media and learning, examining new media practices that range from podcasting to online romantic breakups. Hanging Out, Messing Around, ...and Geeking Out , first published in 2009, has become a foundational text in the field of digital media and learning. Reporting on an ambitious three-year ethnographic investigation into how young people live and learn with new media in varied settings—at home, in after-school programs, and in online spaces—it presents a flexible and useful framework for understanding the ways that young people engage with and through online platforms: hanging out, messing around, and geeking out, otherwise known as HOMAGO. Integrating twenty-three case studies—which include Harry Potter podcasting, video-game playing, music sharing, and online romantic breakups—in a unique collaborative authorship style, Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out combines in-depth descriptions of specific group dynamics with conceptual analysis. Since its original publication, digital learning labs in libraries and museums around the country have been designed around the HOMAGO mode and educators have created HOMAGO guidebooks and toolkits. This tenth-anniversary edition features a new introduction by Mizuko Ito and Heather Horst that discusses how digital youth culture evolved in the intervening decade, and looks at how HOMAGO has been put into practice. This book was written as a collaborative effort by members of the Digital Youth Project, a three-year research effort funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California.
Machinima in a Fanvid Ecology Ito, Mizuko
Journal of visual culture,
04/2011, Letnik:
10, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The author discusses machinima in relation to a proliferating family of emerging DIY fanvids, remixes, and parodies spawning on the internet today. Like many other forms of DIY video, machinima is ...the byproduct of the creative energies of popular culture enthusiasts, fueled by increasingly accessible digital media production tools and online video distribution. Although machinima’s roots in gaming platforms and cultures make it unique, it shares a history and future with other kinds of DIY fanvids. In this diversified ecosystem, the author concludes, the base of machinima makers will continue to expand, while expert creators will proliferate more and more esoteric niches, some of which cater to the core gaming crowd, and others that cross over to other genres.
Connected learning refers to an activity, practice, or experience that brings together youth interests and learning with academic, career, and/or civic related opportunities – and is supported by and ...through peer interaction. The fundamental purpose of this article is to situate the approach of connected learning, both in theory and practice. To do so, we describe its origins and underlying theoretical principles, as well as the requisite social and material conditions to instantiate a connected learning approach in educational settings in ways that enable the promotion of relational equity. In closing, we offer some examples of connected learning in practice, as well as some of what we consider to be its current limitations and design and implementation challenges.
An examination of young people's everyday new media practices—including video-game playing, text-messaging, digital media production, and social media use.
Conventional wisdom about young people's ...use of digital technology often equates generational identity with technology identity: today's teens seem constantly plugged in to video games, social networking sites, and text messaging. Yet there is little actual research that investigates the intricate dynamics of youths' social and recreational use of digital media. Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out fills this gap, reporting on an ambitious three-year ethnographic investigation into how young people are living and learning with new media in varied settings—at home, in after-school programs, and in online spaces.
Integrating twenty-three case studies—which include Harry Potter podcasting, video-game playing, music sharing, and online romantic breakups—in a unique collaborative authorship style, Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out is distinctive for its combination of in-depth description of specific group dynamics with conceptual analysis.
The Japanese term for mobile phone, keitai (roughly translated as "something you carry with you"), evokes not technical capability or freedom of movement but intimacy and portability, defining a ...personal accessory that allows constant social connection. Japan's enthusiastic engagement with mobile technology has become -- along with anime, manga, and sushi -- part of its trendsetting popular culture. Personal, Portable, Pedestrian, the first book-length English-language treatment of mobile communication use in Japan, covers the transformation of keitai from business tool to personal device for communication and play.The essays in this groundbreaking collection document the emergence, incorporation, and domestication of mobile communications in a wide range of social practices and institutions. The book first considers the social, cultural, and historical context of keitai development, including its beginnings in youth pager use in the early 1990s. It then discusses the virtually seamless integration of keitai use into everyday life, contrasting it to the more escapist character of Internet use on the PC. Other essays suggest that the use of mobile communication reinforces ties between close friends and family, producing "tele-cocooning" by tight-knit social groups. The book also discusses mobile phone manners and examines keitai use by copier technicians, multitasking housewives, and school children. Personal, Portable, Pedestrian describes a mobile universe in which networked relations are a pervasive and persistent fixture of everyday life.
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