August, 10, 2013
The relevance of the 7 case studies I will present in my dissertation relies on the ethnographic quality of the descriptions of the everyday lives of these group of teenagers. The idea is to develop an ecological and fluid understanding of their use of digital and mobile media across different settings such as home, school, and after-school. Although my analysis will focus manly in the after-school and home space, some consideration will be given to their in-school use, especially because it will influence what happens in after-school and at home. The settings could also be described as the academic world, peer world, and family world. Each of these settings can be characterized by a media environment that provide different kind of possibilities of participation and interaction. Some of them are more passive that others, some of them require maximalist forms of participation, others minimal ones.
The use of the Internet and the world wide web, both at home and mobile, takes an important part of the dissertation. This use of the internet is in many of the subjects of my study something that is anytime, anywhere. The ubiquity of the web for this teens has implications to the way in way they do school, they do homework, they do entertainment, they listen to music, watch movies, and also how they exchange messages with other peers. The internet is perhaps one of the most important places for understanding the kind of participation that these youth are developing. Some of the interesting sites to document and analyze from the internet are:
- YouTube: tutorials, music videos, jukebox.
- Google search engine.
- Wikipedia.
- Facebook.
- Games
- Flickr
