BigShinyThing

For a nice overview of the ‘new reality’ of online youth, check out a recent interview between MIT’s Henry Jenkins and danah boyd. We’ve reported before on boyd’s view that social media sites function as ‘digital publics’ where young people — whose freedoms are heavily constrained in the physical world — can live more freely, via media ‘in which’ (and, crucially, ‘where’, these media being conceptualised and experienced as places) they feel completely ‘at home’.

So — the kids have a new ‘place’ to play. What’s the difference between MySpace and all the other places where generations of young people have hung out to get a bit of freedom — the park, the mall, the video arcade? Maybe the clue is in this quote from Jenkins:

Just as youth in a hunting society play with bows and arrows, youth in an information society play with information and social networks.

Bows and arrows, yes, but fast forward: during the Industrial Revolution, very few children played with live steam and drop forges. During the Atom Age and Cold War, kids never got hands-on with Deuterium-Tritium fusion reactions. But in the Information Age, they’ve got Access All Areas to the most culturally-transformative technologies of our time, and a fluency with them that comes only to digital natives. Children being children, they’ve been getting busy with these toys — people don’t grok where their kids are at because the kids have left the building. They’ve gone. Nobody noticed, while a whole generation bootstrapped itself up and out — offworld, into media-which-is-a-place, where they’re forging a new reality: a vibrant pop culture mashup of late consumerism and virtuality-enabled persona-hacking. And it’s in their world, not ours, that they’re going to learn, invent and grow up. We’ve lost them. Off into elseware. Gone.

Until childhood’s end: we tip 2015-2020 as the period when the grown-up children of this new world start to port their way of being back into our world, enacting their society, their way.

Expect a revolution.