The Digital Edge S. Craig Watkins; Alexander Cho; Andres Lombana-Bermudez ...
2018, Letnik:
4
eBook
How black and Latino youth learn, create, and collaborate online
The Digital Edge examines how the digital and social-media lives of low-income youth, especially youth of color, have evolved amidst ...rapid social and technological change. While notions of the digital divide between the “technology rich” and the “technology poor” have largely focused on access to new media technologies, the contours of the digital divide have grown increasingly complex. Analyzing data from a year‐long ethnographic study at Freeway High School, the authors investigate how the digital media ecologies and practices of black and Latino youth have adapted as a result of the wider diffusion of the internet all around us--in homes, at school, and in the palm of our hands. Their eager adoption of different technologies forge new possibilities for learning and creating that recognize the collective power of youth: peer networks, inventive uses of technology, and impassioned interests that are remaking the digital world.
Relying on nearly three hundred in-depth interviews with students, teachers, and parents, and hundreds of hours of observation in technology classes and after school programs, The Digital Edge carefully documents some of the emergent challenges for creating a more equitable digital and educational future. Focusing on the complex interactions between race, class, gender, geography and social inequality, the book explores the educational perils and possibilities of the expansion of digital media into the lives and learning environments of low-income youth. Ultimately, the book addresses how schools can support the ability of students to develop the social, technological, and educational skills required to navigate twenty-first century life.
This dissertation analyzes the beauty vlogger, who I define for purposes of this project as an individual who produces beauty content across multiple social media platforms as her full-time job. ...Through textual and discourse analysis, personal observation, and interviews with content creators, I theorize the beauty vlogger through the multiple identities that she simultaneously embodies – those of the female entrepreneurial laborer, the public persona, and the social media “influencer.” Not only does this dissertation critically interrogate the beauty vlogger as she exists within the contemporary post-Fordist and neoliberal capitalist context, but it also historicizes the figure of the beauty vlogger by looking to other modes of gendered, raced, and classed entrepreneurialism within and around the beauty industry over the course of the twentieth century. In the current moment, the beauty vlogger exists within a highly commercialized environment, both through her engagement with online video and social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat which monetize the content she creates and through her positionality vis-à-vis the traditional beauty industry. In her role as a public persona and social media influencer who tests and reviews beauty products, the beauty vlogger functions as a critical part of emergent marketing and advertising strategies that capitalize on the relationship the beauty vlogger fosters with her audience. Increasingly, this content has materialized into formalized, paid partnerships between the beauty vlogger and beauty brands, which provides the beauty vlogger with additional revenue streams. The lifestyle that the beauty vlogger promotes online as an entrepreneur, a public persona, and an influencer, is one which others aspire to attain, but it is important to remember the curated nature of the beauty vlogger’s online identity. In this dissertation, I render visible the beauty vlogger’s hidden labor that produces and mitigates her seemingly glamorous lifestyle.
The Digital Edge S. Craig Watkins; Andres Lombana-Bermudez; Alexander Cho ...
12/2018
eBook
How black and Latino youth learn, create, and collaborate online The Digital Edge examines how the digital and social-media lives of low-income youth, especially youth of color, have evolved amidst ...rapid social and technological change. While notions of the digital divide between the "technology rich" and the "technology poor" have largely focused on access to new media technologies, the contours of the digital divide have grown increasingly complex. Analyzing data from a year‐long ethnographic study at Freeway High School, the authors investigate how the digital media ecologies and practices of black and Latino youth have adapted as a result of the wider diffusion of the internet all around us--in homes, at school, and in the palm of our hands. Their eager adoption of different technologies forge new possibilities for learning and creating that recognize the collective power of youth: peer networks, inventive uses of technology, and impassioned interests that are remaking the digital world. Relying on nearly three hundred in-depth interviews with students, teachers, and parents, and hundreds of hours of observation in technology classes and after school programs, The Digital Edge carefully documents some of the emergent challenges for creating a more equitable digital and educational future. Focusing on the complex interactions between race, class, gender, geography and social inequality, the book explores the educational perils and possibilities of the expansion of digital media into the lives and learning environments of low-income youth. Ultimately, the book addresses how schools can support the ability of students to develop the social, technological, and educational skills required to navigate twenty-first century life.
This thesis explores theories of postfeminism and discourses of “can-do” and “at-risk” girlhood as they are enacted in MTV’s teen pregnancy franchise, which I define as including 16 and Pregnant, ...Teen Mom, and Teen Mom 2. Specifically, this project examines how MTV frames the young mothers featured across this franchise as what I label “postfeminist failures.” Within its teen pregnancy programming, MTV exploits the shortcomings of the featured teen mothers. These failures include broken relationships, prison sentences, and subsequent pregnancy scares and pregnancies. Furthermore, these failures all stem from the teen mothers’ initial failure to adequately manage her sexuality, as evidenced by getting pregnant at age sixteen. These failures constitute much of the plot of MTV’s docu-dramatic series and have also spilled over into paratexts related to MTV’s franchise. I contest in this thesis that the rhetoric of postfeminist failure, first articulated and exploited in 16 and Pregnant, Teen Mom, and Teen Mom 2, is then reproduced in the franchise’s paratextual materials. These paratexts range from reunion shows hosted by Dr. Drew Pinsky to tabloid magazine coverage. I also interrogate the celebrity status of MTV’s featured teen mothers, especially those on Teen Mom and Teen Mom 2, and problematize publicity and fame rooted in the failure of these girls to adhere to normative standards of postfeminist womanhood. MTV’s teen pregnancy franchise is categorized as reality television, a genre derided by many scholars as lowbrow and devoid of substance. In order to combat these assumptions about reality television, particularly because this teen pregnancy franchise is promoted as educational for its audience, MTV has fostered strategic partnerships with The Kaiser Family Foundation’s “It’s Your (Sex) Life Campaign” and The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. Through these partnerships, MTV has infused its reality content with pathways to information-rich websites about contraceptives and pregnancy prevention sponsored by each non-profit. Through analyzing these partnerships and cultural discourses surrounding teen pregnancy, I question the assumption by many proponents and critics of the franchise that the content must either be educational for its viewers or purely entertaining programming.
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