20 Questions With Mimi Ito

Last fall  cultural anthropologist, Mimi Ito published the final findings from The Digital Youth Study, A MacArthur Foundation initiative to discover and document how kids use interactive media. Since then the education and eLearning industry have really taken notice. Much discussed on blogs and educational sites across the web, her work shows the way kids are using these new technologies to find their true peers, explore their creativity, and focus on what may become their life’s passion.

We were fascinated by the subject of your study: how kids interact with new media. What was the impetus for this study?

Mimi: The study grew out of an emerging initiative with the MacArthur foundation which was interested in exploring alternative areas for funding in their educational portfolio. The motivating impulse behind it was the recognition that, clearly, there was a lot of interesting new learning happening around new technology, networking technology, digital media production, and gaming.

And a lot of this, if not the majority, was happening in more informal spaces, not necessarily within the formal classroom. A lot of this activity was youth driven, or driven by popular culture for recreational and social activities rather than what we traditionally think of as educational activities. The Digital Youth Study was an effort to engage in a broad fact finding mission to understand just the baseline of what young people were doing with new technology from a more youth-centered perspective to inform educational interventions down the line.

Your study identified three main categories of digital media behaviors in kids, could you describe those for our readers?

Mimi: We had basically gathered a large number of case studies about young people’s online activities in various social and recreational domains and from that we developed certain “genres of participation”,  different ways that kids were engaging with new media in their everyday lives. We came up with three knowledge categories of these activities. One was what we called “Hanging Out” (we like to use terms that kids use themselves). Hanging out behavior was really that kind of everyday social activity that you see in kids in peer cultures around schools, in hallways or in the cafeteria. We’re also seeing this behavior online through sites, like myspace or facebook, or technologies, like text messaging or instant messaging, that sort of informal social activity.

Another category that we identified is what we call “Messing Around.” This is when kids are, in a fairly unstructured way, starting to experiment with new kinds of technology, learning, or media creativity in a still fairly social peer-centered complex. What’s interesting about today’s media environment is that a lot of that kind of everyday social behavior requires a fair amount of technology and media expertise. We see kids helping each other developing a myspace profile page or figuring out how to link, post, and forward material. That sort of messing around has become a really integral part of kids’ peer culture.

And then the final category which is more in the genre of what we call “interest driven participation” is a way of engaging with technology and media that we call “Geeking Out.” This is much more sort of expertise phased, focused on developing more targeted and passionate interest and delving deeper into domains of knowledge and often constructing a peer group that is centered around those interests or hobbies rather than being part of that local peer culture in school.

Hanging out is clearly social behavior, messing around is seems to be creative behavior, is geeking out necessarily technical? Are those classifications accurate?

Mimi: Yeah, I think hanging out is clearly most prevalent in what we call “friendship driven participation” so that more social kind of context or what we call “given social relations.” All of these activities are social in some way.  Even geeking out really thrives when you have other people who share those interests, when you’re exchanging knowledge and expertise with people who share the same hobbies or orientations. I think you’re right that a lot of the deep technical knowledge tends to cluster around the geeking out behaviors but we also saw geeked out interests groups that were around creative interests such as drawing and photography, digital remix, etc.

Did your study find any gender bias, any role gender plays in these activities or is this just generic teen behavior?

Mimi: Well, I think, as you might expect, there’s still a pretty kind of resilient gender difference in how kids engage with these things where stereotypically girls tend to lead on the more social and friendship side and boys tend to lead on the more technical and geeked out side. What is happening now, that is different, is that because digital media has pervaded so many different aspects of our everyday life, you can’t say anymore that girls aren’t engaged in technology. Even the hanging out behaviors require a fair amount of technical expertise. We’re also finding that a lot of creative domains that tend to be gendered female, whether that’s fan fiction or art have a very strong technical component now. Even though things like hacking and game modding, what you think of as the core computer geek activities, still seem to be dominated by boys, we did see a lot of interest groups that were driven more centrally by girls.

Are these parallel or serial behaviors? Do they lead from one to the other? Do people start by hanging out, and that leads to messing around which leads to geeking out? Are these activities that can happen in any order, or at the same time, or is it just a mix?

Mimi: I think that question about whether there is a trajectory between these different kinds of activities is a really interesting one and it’s actually one of the things we’re trying to figure out in our follow-up research. This is where the learning questions become very important. There definitely is a trajectory that we identified when we talk to kids in the these more geeked-out interests groups, where they use a more informal social nesting activity around technology as a jumping-off point to the more geeked-out activities.  There is a trajectory there for a lot kids who end up in those interest groups. Now, the thing that’s interesting about that is that we also find that kids, who may not have been really invested in the mainstream sort of status and popularity thing that you associate with hanging-out behaviors, often gravitated towards interest groups as their primary social community. These interest groups can become a primary reference point for their friendship and hanging out. This may be different from the peer group that they interact with at school, but it’s an alternative sort of friendship group for kids with these more specialized creative or geeky interests. The trajectory does move in multiple ways. The other thing that’s important to emphasize is that the vast majority of kids are really oriented primarily toward the friendship driven behaviors. It’s really a minority of kids currently who take that trajectory into the more geeked out space, and that’s one of the things that we think could be an interesting space for educational intervention which intersects with how we thought historically about supporting kids interests and enrichment activities, but we haven’t applied as much to the digital space yet.

What part does peer pressure play, as opposed to just natural curiosity, in these processes?  Are kids moving into the messing around or geeking-out behaviors because everybody else is doing it or because they are just naturally curious about a particular subject?

Mimi: I think it is an interesting question. How much of the motivation toward interest driven activity or self directed learning comes from the individual or because there’s a social group that supports it? Now that’s the interesting hypothesis on the table that digital and network media open up access and opportunity for kids to access interest groups that weren’t previously available. A kid who was really interested in video editing, for example, ten years ago it would have been very hard to pursue their interest without a whole lot of support in their local community. Now they have digital editing tools at their fingertips and they can share their videos online and find communities online very easily.  Suddenly there’s a new kind of access to peer groups around specialized interests. We do think that that social context of being able to connect with other people that are at your level… we’re not talking about just looking at professional videos, we’re talking about kids being able to connect with other kids, amateurs or people who are learning and constituting a peer group around interests… we believe that that is a powerful motivator for kids to develop their interests further. This is something that we need a little more evidence to document exactly how that works, but it seems clear that we have seen very many cases of kids who look to the online space first for information. You can lurk. You can, kind of, look around for sources of information that would have been harder to find without the internet. Then, for kids who really take an interest, suddenly you can email somebody, you can connect with an online community, you can give feedback and get feedback from other people, and there’s a whole context that supports peer based learning.

We tend to think of peer pressure negatively as something that is conformity based and that induces kids to do things like their peers are doing, but if you think that suddenly the online world allows kids to find different kinds of peers, those peers can be providing feedback and status and recognition for all kinds of areas of kids identities and interests which may be quite different from how we traditionally think of peer based pressure and support.

So, these technologies allow them to find true peers, not just people they happen to be geographically located near, but actually finding people whose interests and expertise match and enhance theirs.

Mimi: Yeah, that’s right it’s different from a given local community. I think it’s important for kids to play well with others whoever they happened to be thrown into a classroom with, but they also now have the option to seek out more intentional communities that are driven by their interests. I think that’s what’s quite different about the current online environment.

As a young adult we geeked out over computers and programming. With computers now ensconced in our every life experience, does this free kids to geek out about anything potentially or are there specific trends? Are they geeking out about a broader range of disciplines that are being facilitated by computers.

Mimi: I think we are at a moment where, because the technology has pervaded so many more domains of culture and knowledge and social life, that geeking out is a mode of engaging that’s much broader than when we were kids and we thought of computer geeks. We’re kind of appropriating the term “geeking out” as something that can apply more broadly to sort of intense engagement with certain kinds of cultural or knowledge domains. The trend I think that’s really interesting right now is that media, broadly – communications media, as well as popular media of various kinds – are so much more central to our everyday social lives. We exchange videos. We modify photos. We do all of these things with digital media as part of our personal communication. Communicating who we are, what our interests are, what media we like becomes a really important dimension of that. Creating media, exchanging media is much more central. I think that’s the domain we’re really seeing expanding as an area where kids are geeking out.

Do you find different people, moving into different disciplines, put more of an emphasis on certain parts of these behaviors? As we see these kids moving into careers are there going to be careers that you think are more suited for people who were predominantly hanging out or predominantly messing around or predominantly geeking-out?

Mimi: Yeah, I think that hanging out, messing around, geeking out all of these areas are dimensions of social, intellectual, creative development that are important to people. We need to be able to get along with people in our local, given communities. We need to be able to cobble together things as needed in the sort of messing around ways. And we need to be able to develop more intense areas of expertise and specialization. I think some of these relate to professional and career interests, but a lot of this is also just what it means to be a competent social being in the contemporary world that’s saturated with media and technology. For example a lot of the people we spoke to who had developed passionate interest based identities and communities didn’t see it as necessarily part of their professional identities or as a trajectory to a job. They may have had jobs that were very different that weren’t necessarily oriented toward creative or technical work. It became an area where they could maintain a lifelong passion or hobby for example. I think the ways in which people take up these things are quite diverse but we see all three of those classifications as a fourth dimension of learning and development.

Are these behaviors specific to new media? Is there evidence that humans have participated in behaviors like this throughout history?

Mimi: I think the genres of participation we’ve identified are definitely not exclusive to the digital or online world. In fact more and more it’s very difficult to separate activities that are purely online or offline. It’s fairly interpenetrated. For example, with hanging out, these sorts of things that you’re seeing kids do on myspace or facebook or exchanging text messages are completely integrated with their everyday lives at schools and their peer cultures. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to separate out the online world.  I think ten- twenty years ago people tended to think of the internet as a space that was different from our everyday identities. Today, I think it’s completely integral to our school-based professional-based, or real-life-based identities we have and it’s very much an extension of what kids have done socially and creatively, historically, in previous generations as well.

It seems you are uncertain that we want to integrate this into school, that this is just something that kids are doing with new media and it may not survive being made into a strategy in school. Is there something that parents can do to foster geeking-out or is it something we should pretty much leave alone as a behavior

Mimi: I think the question of how we can take those understandings, what we know about kids peer and recreational cultures, and apply them to educational settings is a complicated one. I think there actually is tremendous potential for parents and educators to have a productive role. I don’t think it’s a matter of simply trying to transplant what kids are doing in their informal learning into formal educational contexts. As soon as you start putting in that more competitive and achievement oriented individualized sort of orientation, that a lot of formal education has, it really changes the dynamics of that more informal peer based culture. One of the directions we’ve been thinking would be very productive is to think more in terms of the translations and triggers that can connect the different spaces of learning in kids lives. It’s very important that kids have school based learning. It’s very important that kids have social learning. It’s very important that kids have more self directed interest based learning. Historically, I think that parents have supported interest based learning in the home through enrichment activities, whether that’s music class or science kits or other ways kids are pursuing these more individualized interest based activities. I think the place that we see a lot more potential is whether the school can support linkages between what kids may be learning online, through these more interest based activities, and the kinds of things that get recognized and supported in schools. That’s the direction that, I think, holds a lot of promise. Is there some way in which that knowledge can be mutually supported so that the space where kids are doing that more informal learning can be supported and reinforced across those boundaries of the more peer based and online space, and the school space?

I think the other area that is incredibly important is the fact that there isn’t a lot of adult oversight and participation in those more social hanging out activities. Kids don’t really welcome it. I mean, they don’t like parents looking over their shoulder on their myspace pages and things like that. At the same time I think there has been this sort of vacating of engagement from the point of view of educators, at least in those sorts of activities. Educational institutions have a complicated relationship in terms of oversight of kids peer based popularity negotiations and things like that within the school boundaries. I think the same goes for a space like myspace or facebook. But even if its simply to open up a dialogue about the kinds of socially appropriate behaviors on these sites, privacy concerns, how these sights are related to kids’ broader moral, ethical, and social engagement is something that can legitimately be taken up within the classroom as a space to reflect on your everyday social life. That could be extremely valuable I think.

We look  at something like flickr where, if you were studying photography, that would become a really great resource. But things like Myspace or Facebook it seems that any teacher involvement there would be kind of invading a student’s privacy.

Mimi: Right, it’s not about monitoring these sites, it’s about recognizing that they’re now completely integral to kids peer culture so the same discussions that you might have in school about issues of bullying, about what is appropriate to share with whom – that should be part of the conversation that crosses the online-offline boundary to the extent that it’s okay for schools to intervene in the kids’ peer culture more generally.

That’s on the friendship driven side, on the interest driven side I think kids are more open to adult participation if they’re seen as sort of fellow hobbyists or people who share those interests. In general, most of these interest-based online groups are really driven forward by adult leadership. This is leadership of people who are passionate hobbyists in the domain, and that sort of participation is generally really welcome. That’s where we see a lot of opportunity for intergenerational learning.

So you’re talking about the ability for them to find subject matter experts, not so much tutors, but mentors who can give them advice on how to proceed in that special interest area.

Mimi: Yeah, exactly. It’s that there are more experienced people in every community of expertise and those generally tend to be adults, but aren’t necessarily. Their status comes from their expertise not automatically by age. I think that’s what’s incredibly important, that everybody’s participating because it’s a peer based structure as opposed to an automatically aged-based hierarchy. It’s a very different intergenerational dynamic where everybody is sort of coming in with an ethic of reciprocity and co-participation rather than being automatically structured as teachers and learners.

Is there anything that the eLearning Industry can do either to foster this or to leverage these behaviors to facilitate learning? Is there a possible learning environment that could be developed? Is this just something that should be allowed to develop organically as the Internet has?

Mimi: I think the reality is that a lot of these spaces are highly designed spaces. People have been getting more and more sophisticated about what the mechanisms are that support productive, peer-based learning, communication feedback, reputation building, things like that. A lot of these interest based sites for example are successful because there is a fairly sophisticated online infrastructure that doesn’t look like traditional instructional technology but is instead about effective social media design. That might be a site that’s been built by a grassroots fan group or a site like Deviant Art or Youtube which are commercial sites. These sites that support interest-based and peer-based learning do have a series of mechanisms for that more peer-to-peer kind of communication that I think are very effective and that could really be applied to a lot of learning domains.

You talked a little bit about what your next study might be. Is that driven by your own curiosity or by things that came out of this study. What drives the next study and what are you currently curious about?

Mimi: As a result of the work we did in the Digital Youth study, we really emerge with a whole lot of questions, a whole lot of ideas about what might be useful from an educational perspective. The next round of work that I’m doing is really growing out of the insights of our ethnographic fieldwork with youth. A few of the areas that we’re interested in is making more linkages to explicit educational efforts and interventions. We’ve been working with other projects in the MacArthur initiative that are dealing with more program-building, doing work in schools and youth programs and things like that.

From a research perspective, I came out of this research being really curious about what are the actual triggers, mechanisms, and supports that push kids into more interest-based behaviors and what are the actual learning trajectories that kids go through to get from one place to another. We’re just starting up a new round of research, which is looking in more detail at how kids move across time, across different forms and genres of participation. That’s really a learning question. How do kids develop this more deepened engagement to these different domains of activities in areas that we have a targeted interest; for example, developing reading and writing skills, developing creative production skills.  The third area is developing an orientation toward civic engagement, more engagement with political and social issues. Those are the areas that we’re doing some follow-up research that’s more targeted at kids who are developing these more specialized orientations.

Photo by Joichi Ito

For the next several months Standard Imagination will be devoting its site to covering issues and topics important to eLearning professionals. This will include a series of interviews with important and influential individuals in the industry. If there’s anyone you feel we should interview, please contact us and let us know.