Boys' Love, Cosplay and Chinese Fandom: An Interview

Throughout this academic year, I am trying to return this blog to its roots, showcasing emerging research in fandom studies, as the release of a significant number of new anthologies reflects the emergence of a new generation of scholars pushing our thinking in exciting new directions. Among a number of trends, this research is much more transnational than ever before as more translation is occurring across languages in this field. I know most of my own key works on fandom have now been translated for the Chinese market, and I am hearing from more emerging scholars there. 

Over the next few installments, I will be featuring an extended interview with Ling Yang and Jamie J. Zhao, the editors, with Maud Lavin, of Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (Hong Kong University Press, 2017). They visited me at USC last fall, sharing the book as a gift, and I was so excited by what I read that I proposed this interview. Here, they offer an overview of how fandom fits into broader changes in Chinese culture, the specific forms that media fandom takes in different Chinese cultures, and the state of fandom studies in the region. I am certain that this exchange will be of interest to fandom scholars, not to mention fans, around the world.

Your opening sentence sets the stage for the book’s argument, “Chinese-speaking popular cultures have never been so queer as in this digital, globalist age.” How so? What factors have contributed to this change? What roles have digitization and globalization played in this process?

Ling Yang: As we have demonstrated in this book, there has been a proliferation of unconventional, non-heterosexual images, narratives, fantasies, and desires in Chinese-speaking popular cultures in the past two decades or so. As a person who works in the field of literary studies, I am often amazed by the tremendous amount of queer expressions in Chinese popular literary production in the new millennium.

Few canonical Chinese writers in the 20th century had ever dealt with queer sentiments or desires. Yet homosociality and same-sex attraction has become a prominent theme in contemporary popular literature that is produced by and for the younger generations. This kind of queer cultural production and consumption didn’t happen all at once. Some burst onto the scene by chance, like the androgynous idol Li Yuchun who took the Super Girl reality television show by surprise in 2005. Others, such as Boys’ Love (BL), or danmei, as it is commonly known in the Chinese-speaking world, has gradually made inroads into mainstream culture through decade-long expansion. This volume intends to offer a glimpse of this growing trend in the Chinese-speaking world and pull some of the related cultural issues together.

As implied in your question, digitization and globalization have been two of the key players in this process and they converge and contribute to each other. The development of the Internet, mobile technology, and social media have greatly facilitated cultural flows to bypass legal restrictions and freely cross national and linguistic boundaries. In China, for example, the distribution of foreign cultural products is all subject to government regulations and censorship. Without grassroots distribution of transnational cultural content on the Internet, it would be impossible for Chinese youth to access queer media products from overseas.

The Internet has also facilitated the building of fan communities and the emergence of new glocalized and hybridized expressions. For instance, early online Chinese BL forums were established to share Taiwanese BL stories and translated Japanese BL manga and novels. It is through consuming and imitating these cross-border BL works that Chinese BL fans learned the trick of the genre and embarked on creating their own stories.

Today, original Chinese BL novels and their spinoffs have won followers from all over the world. The low-budget, based-on-a-novel BL drama Addicted, briefly mentioned in our book’s introduction, is even one of the highest-rating Chinese dramas on the multi-lingual video streaming website Viki.com. 

The human flows brought by globalization has also been instrumental in the diffusion of queer popular cultures in the Chinese-speaking world. Chinese students who study abroad usually continue to engage with their fan communities back home and make use of their access to information outside the Great Firewall to bring new ideas back to China. Those overseas fans are particularly useful in Chinese slash fandoms of Western media, as they are more skillful at reading the gay subtext of Western shows and could translate Western fans’ reading on Tumblr or Twitter into Chinese. The rapid growth of slash fandom in China owes much to those fan cultural brokers.

Another factor I’d like to mention is the LGBTQ movement. The development of queer popular culture in the Chinese-speaking world cannot be separated from the local and global LGBTQ movement. While progress made by the movement in the real world, such as the legalization of same-sex marriage in the U.S. and Taiwan, has often been discussed in queer fan communities and bestowed more legitimacy on the production and consumption of queer fantasies, the iteration of queer fantasy has also enabled thinking outside the heterosexual matrix and fostered more acceptance of nonnormative sexuality.   

To what degree does this popular culture (and the fandoms that have grown up around it) contribute to shifts in social attitudes towards homosexuality in the Chinese-speaking world?

Jamie J. Zhao: Today’s Chinese-speaking queer pop culture and fandoms have very close yet extremely complicated relationships with the globalization, glocalization, and translinguistic and geoculturally crossing travelings of sex knowledge related to homosexuality. We actually used parts of the book’s introduction to explain the intricate connections between Chinese-speaking queer fan practices and the information flows within and about inter-Asian and global LGBTQ politics, subcultures, and movements.

For example, the English word “gay” was imported to Hong Kong in the 1970s and was later creatively reinvented and widely used in other Chinese-speaking societies. The commonly used term, “ji,” in Chinese-speaking BL fandoms to refer to queer reading positions or homosocial relationships, in fact, derived from the Cantonese (HONG KONG) transliteration of the English word “gay.”

We can also see a lot of “Chinglish” or “Sinophone” LGBT-related words being frequently used in today’s Chinese-speaking fan cultures, such as “zhai” and “fu,” which were appropriated from Japanese BL/GL fan cultures, and “les” or “lala” or “T,” which were “mutated” from the English terms “lesbian” and “tomboy.”

In addition, as some chapters in our book show, mainstream industries have been carefully tantalizing the audience’s queer desire by adding queer-loaded content in TV dramas or variety TV shows. Indeed, mainstream media practitioners, celebrities/performers, and media consumers and fans have either explicitly or implicitly explored LGBTQ cultures in these processes.

Yet, the flourishing of this pop culture does not necessarily indicate an enhanced public visibility or “acceptance” (or even “tolerance,” which might sound a bit like speaking from a heteronormative position) of LGBTQ communities in local societies and mainstream cultures. It also does not evidence a homosexuality-centered cultural imperialism or cultural homogenization. Instead, similar to the non-confrontational relationship between Chinese-speaking LGBTQ cultures and dominant, largely heteronormative societies, this queer-natured pop culture has always been in negotiation with mainstream capitalist logics and social-political powers on both local and global levels.

For one thing, while the scientific knowledge surrounding the term “homosexuality” and other related concepts and identity politics, such as “gayness” and “lesbianism,” was certainly imported from the West, there has been abundant evidence showing the wide existence of same-sex homoerotic and homosocial intimacies in traditional Chinese culture, even within heterosexual, polygamous familial-marital relationships during imperial China or in the gender-erasing, seemingly desexualizing period of the Cultural Revolution era of Modern China

 Although our book mainly focuses on the burgeoning digital (or cyber) Chinese-language queer fandoms, it should be noted here that in premodern and modern Chinese-speaking societies, literary and theatrical portrayals or connotations of same-sex homoeroticism and androgynous personas were quite common. The queer fan cultures rising along with these media representations back then were definitely not rare.

In this sense, there was a long tradition of queer culture and fan practices in Chinese-speaking societies before the rise of the Internet, yet I would not valorize this local tradition as a “homosexuality-friendly” or “queer-supportive” one either. More often than not, these queer cultures were highly class-based and the fans involved often belonged to the elitist groups. These same-sex fannish fantasies were certainly not labeled as homosexual but as “sentiments” or forms of artistic appreciation. They were “tolerated” or “ignored” by mainstream society and its heteropatriarchal familial system as long as the fantasies and intimacies did not disrupt dominant heteronormative structures at the time.

For another, during an era of new media and globalization, as some of the case studies in our book showcase, Chinese-speaking fans have been enabled to actively translate, revise, and recirculate Japanese and Western LGBT-themed media.

Moreover, there have been more and more Chinese-speaking androgynous celebrities manufactured in film, TV, and music industries, as well as a growing number of entertainment media texts that are queer in tone. In the meantime, homosexuality has been gradually depathologized and decriminalized in Chinese-speaking societies since the late 1990s. LGBT film festivals and gay parades have been held in major cities, while same-sex marriage has also become a possibility for some Chinese-speaking people. 

Against this backdrop, some of the Chinese-speaking androgynous celebrities are also brave enough to publicly come out and stand up for LGBTQ and feminist movements in Hong Kong and Taiwan. I do not deny the fact that many LGBTQ-identified fans of these celebrities (and of queer media in general) have been encouraged by this phenomenon and have found their own social networking, emotional support, and desire-voicing spaces through these processes. Nevertheless, we can also see many media productions use stereotypical representations of LGBTQ people as effective ways to draw public attention and create public gimmick. Same-sex intimate behaviors and androgynous personas have also often been performed in public by heterosexual-identified celebrities for entertaining their fans. Similar practices can be found in K-pop as a fairly common element in what is referred to as “fan service.”

This commercialization and fetishization of queer images in Chinese-speaking media industries, on the one hand, seem to imply a relatively friendly gesture of mainstream public cultures toward homosexuality. On the other, it also points to an intentional “depoliticizing” and “fictionalization” of LGBTQ-related images and performances as pure amusement. The struggles, pains, and difficulties faced by LGBTQ people within a heteronormative society are rendered even more invisible. Even within queer fan communities, some fans tend to differentiate queer fantasies (which is believed to be fictional role-playing) from homosexuality (a form of nonfictional sexual identification that carries derogatory meanings in mainstream society).

I agree there has been a greater degree of social awareness and acceptance toward homosexuality in Chinese-speaking societies, though to varying degrees. The rise of Chinese-speaking queer pop culture and fandoms, facilitated by the wide use of the Internet and digital media, and these relatively improved sociocultural situations for the survival of LGBTQ people have been mutually shaping each other.

Nevertheless, I would caution against a hasty galvanization of the general public’s attitude toward homosexuality as friendly. In some of my journal publications, I have termed this pop culture that proliferates queer representations yet differentiates itself from LGBTQ identity politics and realities in Mainland China as a form of “queer sensationalism.”

LY: Peiti Wang of National Central University in Taiwan did an online survey in December 2016 about BL fans’ reaction to the legalization of same-sex marriage in Taiwan. She collected a total of 4,050 responses and found out that over 90% of BL fans support same-sex marriage. In comparison, only 54.2% of Taiwanese citizens are in favor of same-sex marriage according to the results of 2015 Taiwan Social Change Survey conducted by Academia Sinica. Some smaller surveys conducted in Mainland China have produced similar findings. For example, in a survey of 240 female undergraduate students of Yangzhou University conducted by Dai Fei in 2013, 77.9% of the 86 self-identified fujoshi (female BL fans) accept homosexuality, whereas merely 5.2% of the 115 non-fujoshi share the same attitude.

There have been debates about who are true fujoshi and who are fake ones within Chinese BL community. The true fujoshi must meet two criteria. First instead of valorizing male homosexuality in the fantasy world, they must also accept real-world gay men. Second, apart from BL, they must also tolerate Girls’ Love (GL), or femslash, and accept real-world gay women. However, fan attitudes towards homosexuality vary from fandom to fandom. Surveys about queer celebrity fandoms have yielded less optimistic results. We may need to discuss this issue case by case. 

Ling YANG is Assistant Professor of Chinese at Xiamen University, P. R. China. She is the author of Entertaining the Transitional Era: Super Girl Fandom and the Consumption of Popular Culture (China Social Sciences Press, 2012) and the co-editor of Fan Cultures: A Reader (Peking University Press, 2009, with TAO Dongfeng), A New Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture (Beijing Normal University Press, 2011, with ZHAO Yong), Celebrity Studies: A Reader (Peking University Press, 2013, with TAO Dongfeng), and Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (Hong Kong University Press, 2017, with Maud Lavin and Jing Jamie Zhao). Yang has published extensively on Chinese fan culture, BL culture, Internet literature, and young adult fiction. She is also the chief translator of Stardom: Industry of Desire (Peking University Press, 2017).

Jamie J. ZHAO is a PhD candidate in Film and TV Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. She holds another PhD degree in Gender Studies from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her work examines queer-natured Chinese entertainment media, grassroots publics, and fan cultures in a digital age. Her academic writings can be found in a number of English-language journals, such as Feminist Media Studies, Intersections, Transformative Works and Cultures, Journal of Oriental Studies, The East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, Media Fields Journal, and MCLC. She is also a coeditor (with Prof. Maud Lavin and Dr. Ling Yang) of and a contributor to the anthology Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (HKUP, 2017). She is currently working on two English-language monograph manuscripts, tentatively titled From Super Voice Girl to The L Word: A Queer Occidentalism in Contemporary Chinese Pop Culture and A Queer Sensationalism of Post-2010 Chinese Formatted Variety TV.

Millenials, New Media, and Social Change (Part Three)

Are they worried about concepts such as their privacy?

It's a bit of a myth that this current generation doesn't care about privacy. Most contemporary research in the U.S. indicates quite the opposite - that young people are deeply concerned about privacy and control over information, but they don't always understand the mechanisms by which their privacy is being violated and they don't often feel that they have any means of altering trends in the society, which are leading toward a surveillance state on the case of the government and increased encroachment of businesses into their personal data sets online. They've come of age in a world of data mining and a post-9/11 society, and the two combined creates a kind of fatalistic sense that whatever concerns they have about privacy, they are going to be overridden by institutions much more powerful than they are. But for many of them, Edward Snowden is a hero.

I think one of the reasons young people's relationship to privacy is so often misunderstood is that they draw lines in different places. I don't think that we can think about privacy without also thinking about publicity. We can't think about information we exclude from public circulation without thinking about information we disclose, and the politics of disclosure has been central to many of the political movements over the last thirty or forty years. If we think about feminism and the slogan "The Personal is Political," the consciousness raising sessions of the 1960s were precisely moments when women spoke out about issues that had been locked away behind closed doors for so long - they talked about domestic violence, they talked about inequality of pay, they talked about sexual harassment in the workplace, they talked about reproductive rights,  and these issues were ones that made many people uncomfortable when they were first addressed in public, but were central to political agendas over the last several decades. The same would be true of the modern LGBTQ movement, with its "Silence Equals Death" slogan, and the idea of coming out of the closet about one's sexuality. Again this was about violating things people once felt should remain private, and insisting that they were public matters that should be discussed so that we could share collective experiences and form common cause around the process of social change.

So, young people today are simply embracing different notions of sharing, different ideas about what kinds of information can be discussed in public and why. They're more likely to disclose health related information, for example, as they seek out online communities of patients who are speaking behind the backs of their doctors and trying to identify and pursue their shared interest in the face of an increasingly bureaucratized and impersonal medical system. They're likely to be more open about transgender issues than their parents had been, and indeed are much more accepting of the idea of more gender fluidity in the restroom, an issue that seems to be a dividing line between the generations in the United States at the moment. So, publicity is part of the politics of privacy as they understand it. Privacy is not an absolute - no one wants to remain private to the point that they are invisible in a networked society. Rather, as danah boyd has noted, privacy is about control over information, knowing what information you're releasing, to whom, and under what circumstances. Being able to dictate the terms in which your information is used is central to the way this generation understands privacy. We might think of it as a transactional model. And so privacy in this case comes hand in hand with transparency, full disclosure - which groups are tapping our information, for what purposes, and what they're doing with it - and privacy comes hand in hand with mechanisms of control. They want opt-in systems, systems where they have to actively choose what information to disclose, rather than opt-out systems where if they don't know that their information is being tapped, they can be exploited without regulation. So that's where I think the issue of privacy has been going in recent years and why it is so central to understanding the millennial generation.

They appear to be a generation that uses and takes part actively in digital networks, but:  What do they think about intellectual property?

The first thing I think one has to recognize about the millennial generation is that they've come of age with an expectation of meaningful participation. I often talk in my work about participatory culture - by which I mean the culmination of several hundred-plus years of struggles for everyday people to gain greater access to the means of cultural production and circulation. In a participatory culture, people create media, tell stories, and produce culture together for the purposes of expressing their personal and shared interest. The line starts to blur between commercial media producers and so-called amateur media producers, and indeed as Yochai Benkler notes, a fully participatory culture has many layers of cultural production, including government, education, activism, religion, and various non-profit and semi-commercial producers. We're seeing some fluidity of young people who may start out as fans or gamers producing amateur content and increasingly becoming YouTube stars as part of this process that David Craig and Stuart Cunningham are calling community-based entertainment.

Young people have been central to the struggles for a more participatory culture, and they tend to see connections across issues such as net neutrality, copyright control, media literacy education, and surveillance by both corporate and governmental powers as all part of a larger struggle over the terms of their participation. We see different attitudes emerge among those who have become media producers and circulators of digital content and those who have not. They certainly are aware of a kind of double standard where corporations are expecting them to be restrained in their use of commercially owned intellectual property, and yet young people's cultural output is rarely understood as intellectual property, but, much more likely to be read as user-generated content, is often freely used by corporations in the service of their own ends. So as they are starting to assert their identity as producers, they want to opt into some form of system that protects their rights over the things that they create.

That said, they also have moved into a kind of folk economy where it is expected, as media properties circulate across the internet, that people will modify them, remix them, appropriate them and build on them in a variety of ways. It's a highly collaborative culture. It's a culture where one subcultural group's media properties can quickly be adapted for other purposes. Memes operate as a kind of shared language, where the same image gets recaptioned and recirculated many times for many different purposes and can often go back and forth across ideological divides in the course of its lifetime. They recognize as artists the need to build on a larger cultural reservoir. So I think copyright is understood as a much more fluid system for these millennials because of the forms of cultural production and consumption they've been part of, and this often frustrates or confuses corporate rights holders who want to be ever more expansive in the ways they regulate what people do with their IP.

We could look, for example, at struggles over fan filmmakers in the Star Trek community, where fans there are acutely aware of the economic value they generate for media producers and see their cultural output primarily as publicity rather than as infringement. Fan filmmakers for thirty years have made amateur Star Trek films with varying degrees of visibility, and only recently has the studio sought to regulate what kind of fan films might be produced and how they might be distributed. They were pushed to do so by the case of Axanar, a fan-made film which was highly professional in its technical qualities, which told an original story set in the Star Trek universe, and which was funded through crowdfunding via Kickstarter. Axanar becomes an issue when the amount of money being raised by fan media makers exceeds anyone's understanding of what the budget of an amateur film might look like. Axanar becomes the test case for a blurring of the lines between amateur, semi-professional, and professional media production.

So it's not that young people don't value the creativity behind intellectual property, it's simply that they have a different model of creativity than has governed the industry over the last few generations. Their assumption is that creativity is fueled by what we borrow from other artists, that appropriation is not exploitation, that appropriation is simply a natural part of the creative process, and that we need ways that we can build on each other’s work. I particularly note that if politics among the millennial generation of activists is shaped by a civic imagination informed by popular culture, then the right to appropriate symbols, characters, narratives from mass media and deploy them for political purposes is a fundamental free speech issue. Struggles over intellectual property and copyright control by corporations are completely bound up with struggles over censorship by government as it's understood by this generation.

Millennials' attitudes to copyright are also shaped by a strong sense of ethics having to do with sharing information and resources within a community. A networked society is one where people count on each other to be there to provide the information they need on an ad hoc or just-in-time basis, and things that block the flow of information, that block the exchange of resources within the community are seen in much more negative terms than might have been seen by a generation that saw all of this as more privatized, as more exclusive.

Secondly, it's shaped by a sense that they generate revenue, visibility, and support through other means beyond that of their purchasing power. Young millennials often feel like they don't yet have the fluid capital to be able to buy into the consumer system, but because of their social skills and their understanding of how networks operate, they both provide data to corporations that drive future design decisions, and they provide visibility for corporate products among their peers, which increase the circulation of that material. So, it's a different understanding of the economic value they bring to the relationship that I think is fundamental to the ways they are thinking about copyright.

A third factor is they often feel a much closer relationship to artists and have a common cause against corporate right holders, so as more and more artists go independent, as more and more artists directly court their fan base through what Nancy Baym calls "relational labor," or relationship-building labor, the alignment is with the artist and there is a growing sense that the middlemen merely get in the way. So it's not that they wouldn't support artists producing music, it's that they don't want the heavy tax on their income necessary to sustain the entire bureaucratic and corporate infrastructure that supported the music industry up until this point in time. So it's a different way of understanding how artists might relate to their public that drives a lot of millennial thinking about copyright.

In your frequent travels: Have you observed any noteworthy differences in attitudes across different cultures?

Most of my comments here have been focused on American youth. This is not because I don't care about global dimensions of youth culture, but because I'm reluctant as an American to make generalizations about other people’s cultures. Most of my own research has been US-centric, because that's where the funding from various foundations and other supporting institutions has come from, but in recent years, as you note, I've been traveling more and more around the world trying to engage with conversations about the forms participatory culture is taking elsewhere.

A big step in that direction occurred last summer, when I spent three weeks at the Salzburg Academy for Global and Media Change. The Salzburg Academy brings together young people from roughly thirty different countries around the world for three weeks of intensive focus on media literacy and civic change issues. We lived together, we worked together and we created media together all living in a schloss in Salzburg - and it was a profoundly moving experience for me and the other faculty that participated. We were of course dealing for the most part with the digital elites from those countries, people who had the financial resources to send their children to Salzburg for the summer, and it's worth keeping that in mind, but what was striking was the enormous fluidity with which these young people could instantly form relationships with each other, find common ground, discover shared culture and begin working together. Certainly, they brought some historic conflicts with them to the space, but they also brought with them a sense of a global youth culture that provided the frame of reference for the work that they were doing. In that context, the kinds of work my team was conducting around the civic imagination resonated particularly strongly, and there were moments of sheer transcendence. Sangita Shresthova, my research director, did a workshop on Bollywood dance, and watching students from the Middle East, from Latin America, from Europe, from Africa, dance to the beats of Hindi music was particularly powerful - the sense that the body transcended a lot of the borders that we try to erect around it.

Indeed, the focus this summer was on refugee and migration issues and it was striking how many of the young people were simply hostile to the very notion of fixed borders and boundaries, insistent that the freedom to travel from place to place was a fundamental right for the twenty-first century. And I think this may have been shaped by the degree to which they've come of age with a communication system which made it relatively easy to communicate with people elsewhere around the world. Within their social networks, they already had friends in other countries, already had regular contact with people outside of their own environment. They'd come of age consuming popular culture, not necessarily within national boundaries - so they grew up watching Bollywood movies, consuming anime and manga, dancing to K-Pop, watching telenovelas, and so forth. This is what I call pop cosmopolitanism, the idea that if previous generations turned towards art or music to escape the parochialism of their own culture, young people today are more likely to turn towards popular media to serve those functions, and for a variety of reasons popular media from other parts of the world is simply more readily available than it was before, whether it is music, comics, or television. These are not young people seeking out art movies, but they're young people watching transnational media content as a taken-for-granted part of their generational experience.

At the same time, I was struck by the sense that people in that space felt unequal entitlement to the resources of popular culture. There was a young woman from Argentina who felt that Argentina didn't produce popular culture, that it had folk culture and high culture but that the popular culture was culture imposed on it from outside, that popular culture was American, and that they had to define their identity in opposition to American mass media in order to gain a sense of what it was to be Argentinian. I also was struck by different degrees of hope or optimism among this generation. Many of the young people from the Middle East struggled with how to maintain any hope for political change, having had their expectations raised through the Arab Spring movements, and then dashed by the failure of most of those movements to bring about real democracy and real cultural and economic shifts within their borders. So I saw people there struggling with how they could become part of the mechanisms of social change I've been discussing throughout this interview. Just because they're global elites that feel some connection to each other doesn't mean that they have equal opportunities for participation, equal access to resources, equal sense of entitlement and empowerment, and equal access to mentorship and adult support for the kinds of learning they need to achieve their goals. So these are very real issues.

I've also had some encounters in recent years in some of the poorest communities in the planet, going into the slums in Mumbai and the favelas in Rio and watching young people there struggle to get access to the means of cultural production and circulation. I sat in a small one-room squat that had ten people living in it in Mumbai and talked to young people who had made their own videos and put them out via the web, talked to young people who were making their own online newspapers using WhatsApp to report on the activities of their own community. These are young people who against all odds are finding a means to become part of the emerging participatory culture that has been so important to many millennials around the world, and we need to do more research to understand the mechanisms by which they've been able to do this. Sometimes it's tied to family and cultural traditions. Sasha Costanza-Chock has written about the ways that young Mexicans have helped their parents figure out how to maintain contact with the families they left behind, producing home videos to share via the internet, and that through these means they acquired skills at media production and distribution that they then turned to their struggles for the rights of undocumented youth. Sometimes, it's illicit - the young people in Mumbai I met had produced a video paying tribute to one of their peers who had died of a serious poverty-related illness, and they had snuck into one of the young people's workplaces at night and used the office computers there to produce and circulate their video. Most often, they're creating together. It's not a do-it-yourself but a do-it-together ethos that shapes the participatory culture that so many millennials participate in. This is a case where those who have more skills and knowledge pass it along informally to those who are learning, and in that process the community is strengthened by its ability to share.

Millenials, New Media and Social Change (Part Two)

What cultural contents define Millennials in the United States? Which cultural events have had the greatest impact on them?  What cultural reference points does this generation have?

With all of the reservations expressed above, we still have to say that one of the defining markers of the Millennial generation is that since 2000 (and a bit earlier), we’ve been in a period of profound and prolonged media change, marked by the proliferation of new communication platforms and practices, which are impacting every aspect of our lives. These technologies are increasingly taken for granted and incorporated into the texture of our everyday lives. It is not that every Millennial has had access to these technologies but they have all lived in a world that is defined by the possibility of access, a world shaped by their presence. These technologies create new contexts for socialization and learning that may or may not be embraced. Class, for example, determines different degrees of access to the technological infrastructure -- what we call the digital divide -- and access to the opportunities and resources that enable meaningful participation -- what we call the participation gap.

Class matters not simply for the obvious economic reasons -- some can afford different degrees of access than others -- but also because of different underlying parenting styles and different access to the kinds of community resources that might provide youth with effective mentors and different degrees of understanding of how these online experiences do or do not connect to other kinds of educational and economic opportunities. So, at the risk of reducing things too much, there’s a distinction between the involved middle class parent who seeks to shape the world around their child in order to maximize opportunities for success and the working class parent who places greater obligations on their children to serve the collective needs of the family. There’s a difference between the kinds of schools -- public and private -- which middle class youth can access which often embrace more open-ended, more flexible, more innovative, and more accommodating forms of pedagogy and the schools that are more common in working class communities, which have a much more hierarchical and discipline-focused approach, that focus on workplace preparation more than on cultural enrichment or civic engagement as the ultimate goal of their digital instruction. All of these insights come out of the work of the MacArthur Foundation’s Connected Learning research network which seeks a better integration of learning opportunities across all aspects of students lives and which is calling for more equitable access to the resources required to confront and overcome technological and cultural gaps.

What I observe when I meet Millennial students in my classroom at University of Southern California is that this generation has been caught between two totally contradictory impulses. On the one hand, there is the kind of learning which takes place within affinity spaces and participatory culture, and on the other hand there is the model of learning which has lead to such a strong emphasis on preparation for standardized testing. The opportunities on offer from the online world could have produced a generation of risk takers and game changers, students who are encouraged to set and pursue their own goals, who are highly motivated to learn based on their own interests and to apply what they learn in conversation with others who share those interests. This is what many of us saw as the promise of learning in an era of networked communication and participatory culture. On the other hand, the regime of standardized testing has produced students who are highly risk averse, who want to know the rules of the game going in, who want to be taught only what is required to succeed on the test.

But the Millennial generation is defined by more than their relationship to digital technology, having lived through a more or less equally tumultuous period of geopolitical transitions. This is the generation that has grown up post-9/11, living in a world marked by anxieties about terrorism, by a willingness to accept limits on privacy and observing the rise of new forms of surveillance, and by forms of racial and ethnic profiling, especially Islamophobia, which stems from a kind of “see something, say something” ethos that distrusts anyone different from us.  This generation has been more or less in a state of constant war since birth, although the war can often be so far removed from the everyday experiences of most Americans that it disappears from our thinking for extended periods of time. Their understanding of how democracy works has been shaped by a more or less permanent state of partisan gridlock and by some of the sharpest ideological divides in American politics since the Civil War and Reconstruction. Many older millennials cast their first votes for Barack Obama and thus their sense of whether or not government can work in their interest has been held hostage by the hopes and disappointments surrounding this particular political figure. For younger millennials, Obama has been the only American president that they have known (or at least been conscious of). 

They have, as such, been shaped by conflicting messages about race -- the claims of a post-racial society that surrounded Obama’s election, the struggles over immigration represented by the Dreamer movement on behalf of undocumented youth, and the sense of danger and risk for youth of color that has found its fullest expression in the Black Lives Matter movement. The Millennials are on the front lines of a major demographic shift in America, which over the next two decades will result in a Minority-Majority nation, and to confound things, a growing percentage are mixed race and of mixed cultural background so they are blurring the racial and ethnic categories through which we have historically organized our understanding of the society.  And they have been much quicker to embrace LGBTQ rights issues, such as marriage equality or transgender rights, than their parent’s generation had been. There has across much of this period also been a growing awareness of wealth inequalities, of limited opportunities and diminished expectations, which first found its expression through the Occupy movement and later through the campaign of Bernie Sanders, both of which have attracted massive numbers of millennial participants. Looking beyond the specifically American context, we would want to account for the impact of the Arab Spring movements, their short term success and long-term failure to transform governance in the Middle East, again, representing movements heavily shaped by the participation of youth in those countries and observed closely by young people elsewhere. 

Culturally, this generation has been shaped by the expansion of opportunities to create and circulate media -- what we call participatory culture -- and thus the breakdown of the monopoly of corporate producers on the kinds of media that they regularly consume. They are a generation whose expectations about what constitutes entertainment has been shaped by their access to computer and video games and not simply hard-railed games with limited options but the more open-ended forms of gaming represented by The Sims, World of Warcraft, and Grand Theft Auto at the start of this period and Minecraft at the current moment.  It is a generation that has been shaped by the kinds of heroic but often dystopian fantasies on offer through Young Adult novels -- that is, the generation informed by their shared engagement with Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, and a broad array of other stories of often empowered young women who take on powerful social and political structures to change the world around them.

They have been shaped by what people are calling the plentitude of contemporary television -- a period of “too much good television,” even though many of them have cut the cords to cable and may watch television primarily via streaming and downloads on their computers. As we look back on television across this period, we would want to specify the emergence and sustained interest surrounding reality television, the popularity of cult serialized dramas such as Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead, and the increased push to represent racial and ethnic diversity in both comedy and drama. Over the past year, some key markers of generational identity would include Hamilton and Beyonce’s Lemonade, both of which use hip hop, a style of music that has provided the soundtrack of their lives, to comment on racial politics in America.

Having recently seen Rogue One, I was struck by how many of the markers of Millennial popular culture it embodies. We can start with the fact that Millennials have been drawn to large transmedia franchises, which unfold over many different texts, over extended periods of time -- the return of Star Wars, yes, but also the Marvel Extended Universe or now Harry Potter, operate according to these principles. And Rogue One really represents a big step forward in terms of its play with backstory, its shifting of focus from primary to secondary characters, and its emphasis on world-building over narrative development. Second, Rogue One has an ensemble cast which is being celebrated for its inclusion and diversity as defined both by U.S. and global standards, including black, Latino, Arab, and Asian performers in key roles. Third, it has a “strong female protagonist,” similar to those found in YA novels, and reflecting a larger move in the Disney pictures towards heroic women who can handle themselves in action situations. And finally, the whole plot hinges on an act of  media transmission -- the uploading of the data files on the Death Star -- which brings us back to the centrality of digital media to the identity and experience of many from this generation. Other generations had stories about getting messages through in wartime, but not based on the kind of remote networked communication that is so central to this narrative. It’s not all about the digital where this generation is concerned, but the digital informs almost every other topic on their political and cultural agenda.

You’ve been looking closely at their political lives in recent years. How do these various factors shape the forms of citizenship and activism that has evolved there?

Over the last decade, I've been part of a multi-disciplinary research network created by the MacArthur foundation on Youth and Participatory Politics. Our mission was to better understand the political lives of American youth, combining quantitative and qualitative methods. My team's involvement consisted of doing ethnographic case studies of a number of different networks that have actively involved young people in the political process. The networks we looked at were mostly youth-centric, mostly started by people thirty or under, mostly spaces where young people could play very active roles in shaping the tactics and messages, and in many cases they were built around themes that really concern young people's entry into the political process. Altogether we interviewed more than 200 young activists, and what emerged there was a fairly consistent picture of the ways that a generation that had come of age in response to participatory culture was making the transition into political lives. For the purpose of the study we were dealing with youth defined in political terms -- we looked at people of an age who were too young to vote to people who were too young to run for public office - both very specific ages in the American context - people roughly seventeen to twenty-nine.

The first thing that emerged there was the idea that politics was being conducted by any media necessary. The phrase is a play on Malcolm X’s desire to bring about racial justice by any means necessary -- if you look at his speech defining this concept, he both calls for active recruitment of youth into the political practice and the use of a range of grassroots media to get protest messages out to the world. The tendency is to focus on the digital because that's what's new, and digital tools were certainly important in expanding who got to participate in the political process, and what participation meant for this generation, but the more closely we looked, the more it was clear that traditional tactics were also being used. Some of the young activists told us that they had access to very limited resources, and so they tapped whatever they had access to in order to get their message out. They also seemed conscious of the fact that a purely digital strategy would not help them reach older generation voters, and so the need to form coalitions meant they also worked with print media, with radio, did street protests, and used many other tactics that we might associate with other generations of political change. There are striking differences between the generations - research on African American youth, for example, finds much fewer of them engaging in boycotts, which had been a standard method of the Civil Rights movement, and a higher percentage involved in "buycotts," using their purchasing power to support groups that they think have made the right decisions and are doing the right thing. And that's a sea change, I think, in terms of what African American politics looks like in the United States.

What new media has meant has been an expansion of voice. Many of the young people we talked to had discovered their voice through largely cultural activities, participating as fans or gamers in online communities, but they were learning through these activist networks ways to translate those skills into new forms of political participation. So, for example, we were very interested in the work of fan activist groups, such as The Harry Potter Alliance and The Nerdfighters, that explicitly were seeking out young people who were culturally active but not yet politically active and helping them channel their energies into campaigns for social change. The Harry Potter Alliance is very interesting as large-scale organization, with more than 1,000 participants devoted to a range of different political issues, and with the variety to launch many different campaigns in the course of a year. They've involved everything from gay rights to hunger relief in Haiti to fair-trade chocolate to the labor rights of fast food workers in the South as well as issues of minimum wage and issues of environmentalism. So, unlike traditional activist groups, which tend to choose a single issue and focus on it, they tend to work with a shared cultural framework and deploy that to deal with a whole range of issues that their young people care about.

The Harry Potter Alliance led us to think very closely about what we're calling the "civic imagination." Building on a phrase from J. K. Rowling, they urge us to “imagine better,” by which they mean both do a better job imagining and imagine a better world and work to build it.  There's a tendency, especially on the Left, to think about policy in terms of facts, and that information will set us free, but we're seeing that imagination plays a crucial role in the political process. Before you can change the world you have to be able to imagine what a different or better world looks like. You have to be able to imagine what the process of change is, to imagine yourself as a civic and political agent capable of making change. You have to have a sense of an imagined community that you're a part of, a collective larger than yourself that is capable of being mobilized towards political goals. You often need some sense of empathy, or concern for people whose realities are different from your own. And for many who are marginal there is a leap of faith where you are imagining yourself as equal before you have had any direct experience of equality or reciprocity through the political process.

We find that these goals of the civic imagination get performed differently in different contexts. Historically, say, the founding fathers of the United States ran the civic imagination through allusions to ancient Rome and Athens, whereas the black civil rights movement in the 1950s conducted its business through the language of the black church and especially the story of Moses and the promised people's journey to freedom from the Egyptians. Young people today around the world are tying into the kinds of popular culture references we talked about earlier. They're fighting in the name of Harry Potter, they're using the three-finger salute from The Hunger Games as a sort of shared political marker across generations of activists around the world. They're dressing up like superheroes or putting on the Guy Fawkes mask, which in the United States really connotes V for Vendetta, to conduct their politics.

They do this because they're very invested in reshaping the political language. Many of the young people we talked to said that they found the language of contemporary American politics repulsive and exclusive. The rhetoric of American politics is repulsive in that it came in already encoded and partisan narratives that prevented people from finding common ground and common sense solutions, and exclusive in that if you were not already invested in policy discourse there were few points of entry for young people to enter into the political process. What we found was that young people wanted to actively shape the language of their political participation, that there was not a one message or one size fits all sort of rhetoric, and that the creation and circulation of memes is an important part of political speech for this generation. The meme is a shared language or discourse that many of them recognize and feel an affinity with. There's a kind of 'forthelulz' style of politics, which is a bit irreverent - all of which serves to increase their voice but doesn't necessarily increase their influence with earlier generations of political leaders. The messages that speak to millennials do not necessarily speak to the adult population, and so this where I think some of the crisis point is going to come for this generation. Lots of moments of misrecognition and misunderstanding across generations in terms of how people are pursuing their political agenda. It's important that these forms of activism are networked. Messages travel really rapidly from one site to the next, which allows success stories to be duplicated by activists not only around the United States but across the world, and many of the protests that have mattered for this generation do start out as global protesting. We can think about the Occupied movement as maybe the prime example of the kinds of politics that emerge in a global networked society.

Millenials, New Media and Social Change (Part One)

Last year, I was interviewed by José María Álverez Monzoncillo from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos for a report he was preparing Telefonica, Millenials. La Generacion Emprendedora.  The transcription of the interview was published in Spanish so I asked him if I could reprint the English language original here for my readers, and he was happy to agree. This question about how digital media may or may not have shaped the first generation to have come of age with no exposure to a pre-digital world has generated interest from educators, parents, and policy makers around the world. The report makes some recommendations to business who deal with millennials as both consumers and employees.

You can get a sense of the report from what the back cover says:

Who is part of the Millennial generation? What differentiates them from other generations? Do digital natives have new skills? How are they informed and entertained? Have they buried the couch potato forever? Will your personal information become merchandise of data analysts? What vision do you have about life? What are your expectations? How do you define success? Do they have problems adapting to companies organized hierarchically and vertically? What do companies expect from them? How is the relationship between Millennials and Baby-Boomers? How do they face the clash between television and the Internet, rent versus ownership, passivity versus participation, transparency vs. privacy, together vs together alone? Are the environment and technology the keys that differentiate generations? How do they innovate? What do you want to be when you grow up? Are they as collaborative as they say or maybe the property does not interest them? Is flexibility their key? What are the key success factors of this generation? Do they have a hacker ethic? Who are they?

We are facing an ambitious book that reflects on these issues. There are answers, more questions and especially debate. Since William Strauss and Neil Howe coined the term "Millennial" at the end of the 1980s, to refer to the demographic cohort that would come of age in the year 2000, academics, consultants and institutions of all kinds have carried out studies that They try to understand this cultural group. The reader will find an in-depth analysis of the existing bibliography and three specific studies that offer original research results. For this we have focused on a concrete effect: the growing entrepreneurial current shown by members of the millennial generation in our country. To do this, the environmental factors are analyzed to determine if this effect could be conjunctural or was influenced by a structural change, but also intrinsic aspects of the generation itself.

The figure of the Millennials is approached with a central objective: to better understand the minenic entrepreneurial initiative. With a qualitative research approach, we conducted in-depth interviews with a group of Millennials, and subsequently, we developed a survey to expand our knowledge of some of the key success factors that were appearing during in-depth interviews. So the importance of knowing another language and having lived in another country, the motivation to undertake, the level of education or the impact of family support, mentors or acquaintances, were aspects that helped us to better understand how Generation Y undertakes in our country.

But this is a collective work. To complement the aforementioned nuclear study, this book has varied perspectives that significantly enrich the analysis: from the consumption of information, its level of training, its attitude towards unemployment and the new way of working, its capacity for adaptation, etc. To conclude, an interview with Henry Jenkins is offered, which offers a more international perspective of a generation that enters its maturity and that during the next decades will be of vital importance to understand how the present century evolves at the doors of the third industrial revolution and its socio-cultural and economic challenges.

In short, a book of great novelty and interest, written in a pleasant way. We wanted to be original, and offer a different vision of a generation often misunderstood in our country, and above all more committed and entrepreneurial than the topics imply.

The following quote (which was translated from Spanish) gives you some sense of the position taken by the authors of the report:

"It is a wrong perspective to think that the digitization of companies is to introduce the Internet in some of its processes, when, in reality, it linked to a change in corporate culture, and implies a constant process of renewal and improve to provide a better service or make a better product. The innovation involves intergenerational collaboration. Experience and a new impulse new in a technological paradigm shift is a good basis for restructuring many small and medium enterprises. Our analysis of the key factors of success (FCE) makes us think that there is a need to integrate the skills of different generations" (p. 364).

With this context, I will now share over the next few posts my responses to the questions these Spanish researchers posed to me.

A personal question: Why do you think you have connected so well with young people and have become a reference for them in spite of belonging to another generation?

My work has always focused on the ways that ordinary people deploy new media and popular culture resources in the context of their everyday life. This focus emerges from strong traditions in British cultural studies that have stressed that “culture is ordinary” and that forms of cultural expression are a normal aspect of how we interact with each other and with powerful institutions in our lives. These assumptions inform any work I do on children, youth, and new media. Often, there is an autobiographical dimension to my work -- my attention is drawn to forms of culture that are immediately around me, that have touched myself, my family, my students, or other important people in my life.

My earliest work on children and media, thus, involved me working through some of my concerns as a parent about the place that media played in my son’s life, starting with the ways that television programs became raw material for his play and social interactions with his friends and, in turn, thinking about what it means to play with television content as opposed to other kinds of cultural identities and traditional materials. I saw links between his backyard play and accounts in classic children’s novels which saw Anne in Anne of Green Gables, Jo in Little Women, Tom Sawyer, and others re-enacting stories that loomed large in their culture in the nineteenth century. I wrote about how video games might duplicate some of the processes of forging masculine identity through bonding via competition, risk, and mastery that had been identified by historians and sociologists looking at other generations of children at play. As my son got older, my interest shifted from children and media to adolescents and later college students as they interacted with new media. I was interested that his first girlfriend was an online relationship with someone who lived on the other side of the country, and later the other side of the world, or that his strongest social connections were with communities of shared interests that were not necessarily geographically bound by his school or neighborhood. These observations led me to read more deeply into work on learning and education, but also adolescent socialization processes and, more recently still, on how young people acquire political and civic identities.

A second source of my insights for much of the past twenty years came from my experiences as a housemaster in a MIT dormitory, living and interacting with some 150 undergraduates of diverse backgrounds, most of whom were well ahead of the adoption curve in their use of new media platforms and practices. Walking the halls and interacting with students offered me many glimpses of what they were doing with new media and why, and these encounters also inspired some key insights in my work. For example, watching international students share their own media traditions with their contemporaries, or for that matter, seeing murals on the walls of the dorm of anime and manga characters, inspired my interest in pop cosmopolitanism -- the idea that this generation is defining their identities in opposition to the parochialism of their parents’ culture by embracing popular culture from other parts of the world. At the same time, I was interested to see international students listening to podcasts or streaming radio from their mother countries, maintaining closer ties to the world they left behind than would be characteristic of earlier generations of students studying overseas.  Our dorm was  a place that accepted and embraced diverse subcultural, ethnic and sexual identities, so it was a place where I could learn more about goths and gamers, see new and emerging forms of fan culture, and develop a deeper appreciation of how these young people were communicating via social media even amongst people living side by side in the same building.

Part of what has allowed me to make such discoveries has been my openness to popular culture. I have always defined my identity in relation to fandom and so I do not dismiss forms of popular culture that are meaningful to the young people in my surroundings. Too many academics and educators are cut off from the realms of popular culture that matter in the lives of youth, do not appreciate why or how they are meaningful, and so often do not see what is right in front of their faces. As someone trained in cultural studies, we start from the premise that people do not engage in meaningless activities. We may not instantly understand why something is meaningful to someone else, but we have an obligation to identify its meaning and its fit in their cultural context, rather than simply dismissing it as trivial.

How do Millennials differ from other generations? How are Millennials similar to other generations?

I have to admit up front that I have a deep suspicion of the concept of the digital native, which runs through so much writing about contemporary youth around the world, and insofar as the concept of the Millennial becomes another way of expressing that same underlying paradigm, it produces a similar degree of discomfort. For example, consider the language framing a recent call for papers at an academic conference:

“Members of the millennial generation, or Generation Y, were born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s. Therefore, most of them are offspring of the baby boomers. They are also known as the most technologically savvy generation. Even though Generation X’ers were known to heavily consume electronic media because they were born when the Internet was in its infancy, the millennials were born into a media-saturated and consumer-driven culture. Moreover, unlike the members of the previous generations, they were surrounded by digital media technologies since they were infants. In a way, they live in a digital media ecology and in fact are known as “digital natives”....Since they live in digitalized platforms, millennials are often disconnected from the members of the previous generations. For the most part, rather than being community oriented, they are self-centered and self-absorbed. Perhaps, this why they are known as the “Generation Me.” ”

This passage sums up all of my concerns in a nice package.

Initially, digital native had some use value insofar as it encouraged adults to recognize and value young people’s unique relationships with new media. It encouraged educators and policy-makers to question taken-for-granted preconceptions about what they might value about formal education, what forms of cultural expression and experience were meaningful, and what activities would prepare youth for their adult lives. Young people, we were told, learned differently as a consequence of access to and familiarity with different media platforms and practices, though here, the argument already starts to veer into a technological determinist argument that video games made them smarter or Google made them stupid. Insofar as the term opened our eyes and minds to new possibilities, it had some constructive impact, but quickly it has become a way of shutting down questions through making universal or general claims rather than being attentive to the particulars of diverse young people and their lives. 

We cannot generalize across all of the members of a generation even in the U.S. context, let alone a global context, and assume that everyone had equal access to the resources, experiences, and knowledge required to meaningfully participate in the new media environment. Access has in fact been unevenly and inequitably distributed across this generation just as other technological and cultural resources have been unevenly and inequitably distributed across prior generations. Not all millennials, even in the industrialized West, grew up with easy access to networked computers, high speed bandwidth, mobile technologies, or game systems. Not all of them spent time with social networking technologies or playing massively multiplayer games. Not all of them wrote fan fiction or mucked around with Minecraft. So a key concern here is that the language we use to talk about millennials or digital natives is not sufficiently attentive to the diversity and inequality in the ways different young people access and learn through these various new media platforms and practice.

A second concern is that the language of the digital native tends to erase the process of learning -- we need to be attentive to the ways that engagement with these practices and platforms enables people to actively master skills, acquire language, and not just assume that these skills come naturally as a consequence of being in the vicinity of computers. Researchers are more and more attentive to how different communities playing with the same technologies may have differing degrees of learning, may or may not be able to articulate what it is they have learned, may or may not be able to transfer that knowledge to other contexts, and may or may not be able to meaningfully deploy such knowledge and skill in relation to educational and economic opportunities. These have been central concerns animating researchers in the Connected Learning tradition that has come out of the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning initiative. No one lives exclusively in a digital environment, so the effects of these early experiences with new media get shaped through the larger context of young people’s lives, whereas the rhetoric of the digital native tends to exaggerate digital media’s influence and often dismiss the active agency of those who have sought to build meaningful lives for themselves in relation to the online world. At its worse, the digital native rhetoric tends to focus on what media does to young people and not what young people do with media.

A third set of issues centers around the implicit and often explicit contrast between the digital native and something else -- what sometimes gets described as the digital immigrant, the adult population that came of age prior to the widespread introduction of networked computing. This framing tends to deny the value of what adults bring to the table -- the kinds of skill and knowledge they can transmit to the younger generation. In reality most of the sites of informal learning that have excited educators about the online world are places where adults and youth participate together, often with different, more fluid relationships than those found within traditional families, schools, churches and other institutions. Here, learning is more reciprocal than hierarchical. Adults learn from youth as well as the other way around. Researchers tell us that most youth lack access to adult mentors who can help them understand the ethical choices, risks and opportunities that they encounter in their online lives, and this lack of adult mentorship has consequences in terms of their ability to fully integrate learning with educational and economic opportunities. We should be encouraging more fluid intergenerational experiences online rather than seeing digital literacy as the natural byproduct of a generation that has come of age as the feral children of the Web 2.0 wolf pack.

The use of generational terms to describe media literacy potentially blurs another set of questions we should be asking about whether what we are observing reflects a particular life stage which shapes what people do with networked computers at particular ages as opposed to some permanent traits of a generational cohort that grew up at the same historical moment. For example, someone writing about the Baby Boomer generation in the 1960s might have defined it around the counter-culture and campus protests of the period, which certainly was one formative set of experiences for this generation, but fifty years later, we’ve seen that generation develop other traits and identities over time, and often, see the protests as specific experiences of adolescents and students living in a particularly charged period of American history. It is too soon to make lifelong generalizations about who millennials are, what they value, what their personality type is, etc. Does their media literacy reflect generational differences or simply the kinds of opportunities offered them as people in their teens and twenties in a specific historical and cultural context? It may tell us less than we think about long-term dispositions that come out of this early access to media.

Finally we need to be attentive to the commonalities across generations created around shared experiences of class, race, religion, geographic location, nationality and ethnicity, etc., all of which shape us in powerful ways, perhaps even more powerfully than can be accounted for by generational differences. At the end of the day, these young people share much in common with the older generations in their families and communities.

Ed Tech and Equity: An Interview with Justin Reich

From time to time, I have featured here the work of Mimi Ito and others from the Connected Learning Research Network. Along with danah boyd, Mimi and I wrote Participatory Culture in a Networked Society and we've collaborated on a broad range of education-related ventures. So, when Mimi flags something to my attention, I listen and respond. Last October, Ito sent me the copy of From Good Intentions to Real Outcomes: Equity by Design in Learning Technologies, a report she had written with Justin Reich, currently in the department of Writing and Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Having featured Ito several times here, I wanted to put the spotlight on Reich, all the more so when I learned he was now teaching through the program I helped to establish at MIT.

What he has to say here gives some provocative glimpses into what these two researchers found, challenging the discourse of technological disruption and inevitability, which shaped so much early thinking about the ways new media would impact education. In a classic meeting between technology and culture, they find that the culture of schools, much more conservative than even many skeptics imagined, wins out most of the time, resulting in a world where lowered expectations and diminished resources for some youth keep them from enjoying the benefits imagined by those who introduce new media tools and platforms. But, what he shares here scratches the surface. There is no substitute for doing what Reich urges at one point: "Read the report!"

Your report identifies three core myths about technology and education. What are they? Each of these seems to boil down to a form of technological determinism. How do we help people to understand the social and cultural forces that shape our relations with technology?

To provoke people’s thinking on edtech and equity, we argue that there are three myths out there that are worth rethinking

The first is that technology disrupts systems, when very often, culture domesticates technology. From Clayton Christensen on down, we have a whole mythology about the power of technology to reorganize human systems, but what we see over and over again is that schools and other learning ecologies are great at taking new technologies and putting them in service of existing goals and intentions. From slate to chalkboard to overhead projectors to document cameras to projectors to smartboards, we’ve had nearly a dozen display technologies in classrooms and overwhelming they are used to display notes that students are supposed to copy or summarize. I was at Google recently and someone involved in the Classroom team was explaining how they were so successful at scaling up so quickly, and the “secret” turned out to be helping the system do everything it was doing anyway. Generally speaking in schools, it’s a good bet that if you introduce a new technology, it will be used to extend existing practices, and it won’t be a catalyst for disruptive innovation. 

The second myth is that open equals equitable, but more commonly, free technologies disproportionately benefit affluent folks with the financial, social, and technological capital to take advantage of free innovations. I’ve studied this in several contexts now, at the end of the 00s I was studying classroom uses of wikis, and found they were used more often and for more interesting purposes in affluent schools. In the last few years, I studied MOOCs, and found that U.S. residents lives in neighborhoods about a half of a standard deviation more affluent that typical Americans. 

If you want to make a safe bet about any new tech in schools, bet that it will be used to extend existing practices, and most adoption and most of the interesting practices on the margins will happen in affluent schools or in the upper tracks of schools with more affluent kids. 

The third myth is that we can close some of these digital divides through expanding technology access. In reality, social and cultural exclusions are much more difficult to overcome. This is an old lesson, but we understand it better with each passing year. I was first exposed to some of these ideas from the sociologist Paul Attewell’s work on the two Digital Divides: the divide of access and the divide of usage. You can wire everyone up the same with the same devices, and young people from more affluent neighborhoods will have more opportunities to use tech for more creative and production-oriented uses with more support from adults and mentors. Henry, your own work on the Participation Gap—the gap between who has access to new technologies and who actually participation as producers in creative networks—is another source of inspiration for this kind of thinking. 

One overarching lesson from all this is that if you want to build great edtech, you ought to have folks with social and cultural expertise on your team. The tech is just table stakes, it’s really about the integration into the learning ecology. 

I’ve been teaching undergrads at MIT this semester, and most of them are Computer Science concentrators. A big part of how startups encourage developers to think is to focus very closely on a particular and well-defined interaction: think of how Uber tries to create the experience of tapping your phone have having a black car come pick you up and whisk you away like a celebrity. Focusing on a particular interaction makes design tractable, but it also means you aren’t paying attention to the large context and system.                                                   

It might be technological determinism, but even if it’s not the result of strictly deterministic thinking—maybe just a kind of techno-optimism—we think there are real limitations to how much technology alone can shape systems. 

As to your questions about how we help people understand more about how social and cultural forces shape tech, Mimi and I are starting a whole project related to this. Over the past year, we’ve had three meetings with folks from venture capital, philanthropy, and edtech trying to have a good old-fashioned consciousness raising conversation. I think the research on the challenges we face is pretty stable and robust at this point, and the more exciting work ahead is to figure out how we can learn from the exemplar projects out there that are doing great work to close opportunity gaps. 

An underlying argument is that despite our high hopes and best intentions, “evidence is mounting that these new technologies tend to be used and accessed in unequal ways, and they may even exacerbate inequity.” What are some of the indicators supporting this claim?

 I mentioned two of my studies on this, about wikis and MOOCs. Let me describe for a minute some commonalities of both of these studies. First, these technology platforms operate at a global scale and collect massive amounts of data. There are many serious privacy concerns about this kind of data collection, but if you want to understand edtech and inequality, you need to gather enough data to understand how subgroups use technology indifferent ways. In both of these studies we connect log data from the platforms with national datasets about demographics—in the case of schools we use school level data from the National Center on Education Statistics and for the MOOC study we used data derived from the Census. 

For the wiki study, we found publicly-viewable, education related wikis used in U.S., K-12 schools, and measured where they were created, how long they were used, and how rich and collaborative the learning experience was. We then gathered socio-economic status data about the schools themselves, so we could compare how wikis were used differently in school serving different populations. We found that wikis were more likely to be created in schools serving affluent kids, that wikis created in affluent schools were used longer and with more student involvement. 

For the MOOC study, we had all of the data about HarvardX and MITx enrollments and course completions, and we had folks’ addresses, which we could use to identify their census block group, a neighborhood of about 1200 individuals. If you know something about someone’s neighborhood, you can make a good guess about their own level of affluence, There, we found that people who register for MOOCs live in neighborhoods about ½ standard deviation more affluent that typical Americans, and for young people who register, students from more affluent neighborhoods are more likely to complete courses. 

There is lots of previous research on edtech and inequality, Paul Attewell did observational studies in homes and schools. Other researchers have used surveys; Harold Wenglinsky used NAEP surveys in the 90s to identify that Black and low-income students were more likely to use computers in math class for drill and practice than for more cognitively complex math work. For the methods nerds, the observational work had great validity, but problems with generalizability, and the surveys probably had low validity, but good generalizability. The virtue of some of the newer work examining whole systems is that it has high validity, since we can peer closely at exactly what people do, along with the generalizability that comes from massive, international platforms. But all this work points in the same direction- people with more financial, social, and technical capital have a greater ability to take advantage of new innovations, even free ones.  

This is a rather dire finding for people who have spent the last few decades trying to bring new media platforms and practices into schools. I can imagine it was hard won. Has it force you to rethink some of your earlier work in this space?

Hard won, for sure: I started working on this is 2008, and 2017 was when I felt confident to get together with Mimi and say “Look, we know what’s going to happen when the next piece of edtech comes out, and we have to start avoiding some of the same mistakes.” Each little brick takes years to stack up on the foundation, but at this point we have thirty years of work with computers, and 100 years of work on signals technology going back to radio—we can make good bets about how edtech will affect equity when in context. . 

I started my work in edtech in affluent private schools as a history teacher, and I thought teaching in 1-1 environments there was fabulous—16 kids, computers for everyone, batteries always charged, networks always working. When I started into research, I was pretty sure that the things that worked great for me in the world’s best teaching environment weren’t going to work other places. But that was the real start of the Web 2.0 era, and there were all kinds of calls that social media and peer production tools were going to democratize education, my instinct was that wasn’t going to happen because even though the tools were “free”, the infrastructure to make them valuable was very expensive. So I was right from the beginning.

What are some of the factors that result in this reproduction of unequal relations?

 My favorite story about this comes from an observation in a school in rural New Hampshire. The teacher was preparing a lesson using wikis, and all the kids had laptops, the batteries were charged, the broadband was coming into the building, the internet was reaching the wireless access points and connecting to the computers, the projector had a bulb, and the introductory slides were all ready to go. The teacher went to plug in the projector, and the electrical outlet fell behind the dry wall, and the teacher needed to rethink everything. Getting technology working in schools requires the maintenance of a complex logistical infrastructure, that includes outlets, wires, wireless access, power, batteries, policy, and pedagogy. It takes a big investment in staffing to keep all that running, and it’s easier for affluent schools to make those investments. 

Mimi’s student Matt Rafalow has some great research about how cultural perspectives at schools also reproduce structural inequalities. To oversimplify, when rich white kids play around with technology, they are treated as hackers, and when poor black and brown kids play around with technology, adults treat them as slackers. Adults can treat very similar behaviors differently based on the demographics of the students engaging in the behavior. 

Maybe one other important point is that there are some sectors where introducing technology does lead to certain kinds of reducing of inequalities. I’ve seen data about agricultural prices in rural parts of southeast Asia where before cell phones, prices are very volatile, and after the widespread introduction of phones, prices stabilize dramatically. Or even something as basic as cameras, which were the provenance of the elite for many years, but recently have played a crucial role in documenting police violence and so forth. So I understand why people might have an intuition that free technologies would be particular good for people without a lot of resources, and certainly sometime they can be, but it’s unusual in edtech for new technologies to disproportionately benefit low income students. When it happens, it happens because designers are very intentional about that as a goal. 

Even when educational materials are free and open to all online, they tend to draw the most use from those who are already educational and informational haves. I can imagine frustrated designers and educators throwing up their hands and saying, What more can we do? What steps can we take to decrease or even reverse this process of inequality in educational opportunity? Do you have some good exemplars of what this better practice looks like?

 So that’s the second part of our paper: From Good Intentions to Real Outcomes. There is great work that’s happening out there, and terrific researchers, developers, and funders and finding out all kinds of important strategies for making technology work for the students furthest from opportunity. 

There are a number of great strategies that folks have identified. Ricarose Roque’s Family Creative Learning and Boston’s TechGoesHome both get families involved in learning more about tech so they can support their kids learning… if it takes a village to raise a child, then let’s teach the village. The folks at OpenStax at Rice University realized that there were something like 20 college courses in the US that were responsible for over half of all enrollments in universities: Calculus I, U.S. History, etc. So they got donors to fund the development of really great open source textbooks books on these topics that they target at the community college market, where textbook costs are a substantial burden on student budgets. This seems to be a case where free things do the greatest benefit for the students furthest from opportunity. 

In the paper, we offer four types of strategies to get people started. First, co-design with learners and communities. Make sure that your development teams include people and have close relationships with the learners you most want to serve. Second, align home, school, and community—get parents and families involved and build their capacity alongside students. Third, building on all the great work in the Connected Learning community, leverage the interests that students bring from their cultures and backgrounds. Fourth, measure the impact of new technologies on different kinds of learners, and really try to understand how innovations get picked up differently by different communities. There is much more in the paper we released about each of these strategies, but what they have in common is the call for people to think about the context of edtech, not just the tech. 

Here’s one thought that I’ve been playing around with in teaching my undergraduates: one question that edtech developers and advocates might ask is: “What is the human-human interaction that you hope results from the technology that you are developing? Before, during or after an interaction with edtech, what kind of conversation will a kid have with an adult or with another kids because of the technology.” That might be a simple way to get people to start thinking more about the broader context of edtech. 

What advice do you have for people trying to develop ed-tech for use in the current cultural and educational climate? What should they do differently if they want to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem?

Read the report! I guess that’s sort of a boring researcher answer, but we wrote the darn thing to help people find their first steps. 

We think that step one is getting a handle on the basic findings of 30 years of research into education technology and equity. If you are working on a project that’s trying to make education more equitable using tech, there is a long history to suggest that it’s really hard to do that. 

Step two is looking out there at the great examples out there, many of which we describe in the paper, that are finding creative and clever ways of partnering with learners and other stakeholders to build equitable edtech. 

Step three is getting your team together and saying, “OK, we haven’t done as well as we wanted to as a field on this over the last 30 years. From our own vantage, what could we be doing in the next 30 days or 30 years to make some improvements.” This New Gilded Age that we are in is a very difficult place to finds ways of connecting innovation and equity, but the challenge that we face shouldn’t dim our hopes. Education is a great place for people who maintain hope in the face of structural adversity. 

What are the next steps for you and the other researchers on this team?

Mimi and I have some schemes that we’re working on. We’d like to continue to find ways of engaging the venture capital, philanthropic, developer, researcher, and practitioner communities around this. There aren’t that many people in the US who are gatekeepers to what kinds of edtech projects get started and what gets adopted. If we could educate and engage a good portion of those folks, I think we could start a new conversation across many different actors in the field. 

While we have some good early exemplars of how to think about edtech and equity in sophisticated ways, there is much, much more work to be done. We’re hoping to find a way to have the technology industry come together to fund some of that research collaboratively, so it’s not just something coming out of one foundation or one research lab, but it’s something that the edtech industry takes on itself to better figure out how to serve all kids, especially those who need us most. 

Justin Reich is an educational researcher interested in the future of learning in a networked world. He is an Assistant Professor in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an instructor in the Scheller Teacher Education Program, a faculty associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and the director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab. The Teaching Systems Lab investigates the complex, technology-rich classrooms of the future and the systems that we need to help educators thrive in those settings.