In 2000, Harvard Political Scientist Robert Putnam famously argued in Bowling Alone that the decline of bowling leagues in America signified a deterioration of civic culture. For Putnam, bowling leagues were a sign of social capital, or the connections among individuals – social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them.

What is the state of social capital today? Does the rise of DIY and participatory media make up for the loss of bowling leagues? As part of today’s Annenberg Center for Communication weekly seminar, research fellow Corinna di Gennaro presented survey finding from her work with the Oxford Internet Institute (part of USC’s World Internet Project). The data showed, among other things, that youth between 14-18 are more likely to make friends online but that they are less likely to engage politically both on- and off-line, than members of other age groups.

What is considered political engagement? This is a central question for researcher trying to understand the role of digital communication tools and networks in society. For the purpose of the Oxford Institute study, which focused on responses from nearly 2000 participants in England, Scotland and Wales, political participation meant grown-up politics like voting and signing petitions.

But what about student elections? WOW strategizing? Rating your professor online? In countries where the voting age is 18 (like the US and Great Britain) can we really characterize youth engagement by the degree to which they participate in a system from which they are legally excluded? (This issue was raised during the seminar by Digital Kids researcher Mimi Ito). Maybe traditional political structures and behaviors should not be the litmus test, but in the absence of a clear understanding of how youth engagement translates into grow-up political engagement Corinna’s research gives us some clues about the link between online participation and social capital.

You can read more about Oxford Internet Surveys here. And more on youth and digital engagement here.

Today’s DIY Media series talk on digital tools and the future of education by Bob Stein and Todd Richmond inspired a compelling meat-space discussion on the irrelevance of space and place in the digitized environment.

What will the future of education look like? Considering what Todd calls the “perfect storm” of technological innovation (mp3s, bandwidth, digital tools, social networking and common meta structures) it seems education, like other networked cultural industries, is in a period of radical transition. Todd thinks the future of education will have less to do with physical social space–campuses and classrooms–and more to do with online networks and information flows– Wikipedia and Google (or Googlepedia?). He thinks it will be more about virality than authority.

But what about the social aspects of centralized education systems? The most challenging questions under discussion veered away from technology and toward the role of education in society and the relationship between students, teachers and educational material.

Bob stressed the importance of imagining what we can do with technology to better education instead of focusing on what technology will do *to* education. And Sasha reminded us that educators and theorists like Paulo Freire and Agosto Boal (and I would add Henry Giroux) have long struggled with hierarchy in education and that any plans for the future of education should consider these idea about how to establish structures and practices that are liberating rather than oppressive.

Todd mentioned the buddhist saying “when you lose, don’t lose the lesson” to underpin his belief that education is often stymied by the fear of being wrong. This is particularly the case with educators, who seem for the most part loath to leave the comfort of the system that priviledges their authority. “Resistance is futile,” he says. What we have to to do is optimize the delta.

You can see Todd’s slides here and check out Bob’s work at the the The Institute for the Future of the Book.
Look for Howard’s discussion of their talk to be posted here soon.

The discussion surrounding DIY seminar talks by Mimi Ito and Howard Rheingold last week raised some compelling questions about how to imagine a non-dichotomized architecture for media creation and circulation (as Julian Bleeker put it in his comments below). DIY is not simply an obscure hobby of media activists and enthusiast, or a phenomenon that exists exclusively in opposition to mainstream production practices. DIY, we seem to agree, is an ethos that is increasingly seeping into the mainstream. And as John Seely Brown pointed out, assumptions about leisure and entertainment might be in the process of shifting by virtue of new production practices associated with DIY.

In JSB and Douglas Thomas’s paper The Play of Imagination: Extending the Literary Mind, they describe what happens when leisure and entertainment combine with learning and imagination in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs).

Here is an excerpt:

“While a traditional “game” remains at the core of MMOGs, the rich social fabric that the game produces blurs many of the boundaries that we tend to expect such as the distinction between the physical and the virtual, the difference between player and avatar, and the distinction between work and play. Further, we argue throughout the essay that the learning that happens in MMOGs is tied to practices, but those practices are not solely the practices of game play or even skills such as resource management. They are, instead, the skills of learning how to use one’s imagination to read across boundaries and be able to find points of convergence and divergence between different worlds to understand their relationships to one another.”

This look at the power of imagination in gaming and its potential role in education offers a good model for how to begin to think about (and create) other media genres and modes of production in the context of the shifting consumer/producer relations.

If the widespread availability of networked communication media are enabling profound social, economic, political, and cultural changes, as Benkler, Castells, Jenkins and others have claimed, then we are now in the early stages of a technosocial regime change — a brief and protean interval before the new structures of power harden. If understanding the nature of those changes at this early stage can enable us to influence the shape of the emerging regime, then this seminar could contribute to events beyond the academic disciplines involved. By engaging in face-to-face conversation with thinkers and makers in our seminars and extending the discussion to this online forum, we have an opportunity to frame the most important questions we need to ask in order to understand and act.

The first presentation was mine, about “Participatory Media Literacy. The second presentation was by Mizuko Ito on “Amateur Cultural Production in the New Networked Age.” Video and audio recordings of the presentations and interviews with seminar participants will be available later.

The next two posts summarize each of the two presentations. We invite you to comment, raise issues, suggest key questions, in the comment threads accompanying each post, including this one.

As part of the USC Annenberg Center Speaker’s Series, once a month speakers will discuss issues and practices associated with Do-It-Yourself (DIY) media. These DIY Media seminars are open to Annenberg Center fellows and members of the larger USC community and will focus on the shifting relations between cultural producers and consumers and the rise of participatory media cultures across various industry sectors due to the growing prevalence of digital tools and networks.

In line with the participatory ethos, the seminars are meant to be highly interactive. Short presentations will be followed by discussion, and throughout the session there will be a backchannel for text-based chat. If you would like to participate in the backchannel, please attend with your laptop and be sure to have an IRC client that you can use. Our backchannel will be #diymedia on irc.freenode.net.

During the week following the seminar USC Annenberg Center Fellow Howard Rheingold will post blog entries and invite the larger community of people interested in DIY culture to join in an asynchronous discussion here, and to post photos with the Flickr tag “diymedia.” This online space will serve as a resource and networking site for the key players in this emergent area.

Both the seminars and the online forum are a prelude to the Fall 2007 DIY Media Festival, organized by Mimi Ito, Adrienne Russell, and a committee of USC Annenberg Center staff members and researchers.

Talks begin at 11:00am. The following is the Fall semester schedule for the USC Annenberg Center Speaker’s Series/DIY Media seminars:

September 14

Speakers: Mimi Ito and Howard Rheingold

Mimi Ito’s talk is entitled “Amateur Cultural Production in the New Networked Age.” She is a cultural anthropologist who studies new media use, particularly among young people in Japan and the US. She is currently co-leading a multi-year project on Digital Kids and Informal Learning, with support from the MacArthur Foundation. As part of this project she is conducting case studies of anime fandoms in Japan and the English-speaking online world. She is a Senior Fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication.

Howard Rheingold’s talk is entitled “Participatory Media Literacy and Civic Engagement.” His 2002 book Smart Mobs, was widely acclaimed as a prescient forecast of the always-on era. The weblog associated with the book won Utne Magazine’s Independent award in 2003. In 2005, he taught a course at Stanford University on “A Literacy of Cooperation,” as part of a long-term investigation of cooperation and collective action, undertaken in partnership with the Institute for the Future. He teaches Participatory Media/Collective Action at UC Berkeley’s School of Information, and Digital Journalism at Stanford University. He is a Nonresident Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Communication, and a visiting Professor at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK.

October 19

Speakers: Bob Stein and Todd Richmond

The topic of Bob Stein’s talk is open source academic publishing. He is Senior Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center, and Director of the Institute for the Future of the Book– a project designed to explore, understand, and influence the shift from the printed book to digital publishing. Stein is currently working on SOPHIE– a new software program that will allow artists, scholars, writers and others create digital documents incorporating audio and visual elements, along with text. The underlying goal of this project is to develop software that allows users to create their publications without having to hire a specialized programmer or learn complicated programming techniques. Upon completion in 2006, SOPHIE will be distributed on an open-source basis via the Institute for the Future of the Book.

The topic of Todd Richmond’s talk is open source courseware. He is currently a Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center, and the Center for Creative Technologies at USC. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Interactive Media Division of the USC School of Cinema-Television. He specializes in basic and applied research in the broad field of digital networked media, social networks, and social software. He is currently working on a Hewlett Foundation-funded research project titled “Viral University Education” which seeks to better understand and facilitate the uptake of freely available open educational content on the Internet by using a variety of social software tools and technologies to create viral learning communities and content.

November 16

Speakers: danah boyd and Justin Hall

danah boyd’s [sic] talk is entitled “Creating Culture Through Collective Identity Performance: MySpace, Youth, and DIY Publics.” Danah is a PhD candidate in the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley and a Graduate Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center. Funded by the MacArthur Foundation, her dissertation focuses on how youth engage in networked publics like MySpace. In particular, she investigates how youth formulate a presentation of self and negotiate socialization in mediated contexts where the audience is often unknown. Prior to Berkeley, danah received an AB in computer science from Brown University and an MS in sociable media from MIT Media Lab. She has worked as an ethnographer and social media researcher for various corporations, including Intel, Tribe.net, Google and, currently, Yahoo! She also created and managed a large online community for V-Day, a non-profit organization working to end violence against women and girls worldwide. She actively blogs about social media at Apophenia ().

Justin Hall will speak about “Passively Multiplayer Online Games.” He is a Graduate Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center and a graduate student in the USC Interactive Media Division where he explores alternatives to text publishing online. He is currently developing surveillance-based gameplay online and on mobile phones called “Passively Multiplayer Online Gaming.” He has taught classes and workshops at USC School of Cinema-Television encouraging the creation and distribution of short videos online. He started “Justin’s Links from the Underground” in January 1994 eventually writing 4,800 pages of hypertexted personal journalism before stepping back in January 2005. In December, 2004, New York Times Magazine referred to him as “the founding father of personal blogging.”

December 14

Speakers: Jennifer Urban and Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow is co-editor for the popular technology blog “Boing Boing.”He is also a Senior Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center, and is currently the first to hold USC’s Canada-U.S. Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Public Diplomacy. He actively supports liberalizing copyright laws in order to increase the amount of creative work available to share, remix, and develop. A proponent of Creative Commons, his work emphasizes digital rights management, file-sharing, Disney, and post-scarcity economics.

Jennifer Urban is a Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center and a Clinical Associate Professor of Law at USC. She teaches Intellectual Property and classes related to Technology Law and Policy. She also is the Director of the USC Intellectual Property Clinic, where students learn intellectual property law through hands-on work with cutting-edge, real-world projects. She is a faculty member of the USC Center for Communication Law and Policy.

For more information on these talks or speakers, go to www.annenberg.edu or call 213-743-2520.