O’Reilly Webcast: Youth & Creativity

Posted by margerynabors on
Saturday, February 28th, 2009 at 9:25 pm

The O’Reilly Webcast: Youth & Creativity, hosted by Julie Baher and Bill Westerman, presented an insightful picture of youths’ social media activity beyond Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.  Interestingly, Baher and Westerman found that the latter platforms were in fact not often used by “creative publishing” teens to express themselves.  Rather, those teens were using more niche sites like planet renders and imeem that enabled them to “have something to say, or sense of self around their topic of choice.”

Baher and Westerman’s presentation was informed by four in-home studies.  The participants, clearly not a representative sample of American teens, were exceptionally bright and creative online publishers who offered clear insight into their bubbling online subculture.

Taken together, the studies uncovered seven emerging themes in youth digital publishing:

1. Expression: who I am
2. Belonging: micro-communities
3. Velocity: throw away media
4. Inspiration: emulating and following
5. Learning: watching, “doing on the fly”
6. Helping: global apprentice
7. Co-designing: beyond lone designer

It will be interesting to follow these themes as they begin to ripple through mainstream teen culture.  In particular, “belonging” and “helping,” because I believe as an increasing proportion of online teens create public content they will become less tolerant of them being lost & not critqued in broad sites like Facebook.