CloseUp

Youth Media Closeup

Mindy Faber is the Director of Open Youth Networks, an organization devoted to enhancing youth civic engagement through digital media. She is the author of Listen Up's soon-to-be-launched website Projects of Change and an award-winning independent video producer. Faber has taught youth media for ten years and her students have been awarded dozens of national honors, fellowships and prizes. She is currently producing a documentary called Chicago Youth 2.0 that looks at how urban youth are using digital tools for social activism.
When IssueLab presented me with the opportunity to serve as their guest editorialist for this month's CloseUp on Youth Media, I jumped at the chance. In my ten years of working in youth media, I have long recognized the pressing need for a centralized hub that could aggregate and archive an expansive set of research materials on this dynamic and vastly under-studied field. As the issue of youth and their relation to the media is taking on a new sense of urgency among educators, policy-makers and social researchers, I also knew that this CloseUp edition could not come at a better time. ? what is youth media

That is why I am absolutely thrilled to report that the field of youth media research responded to our call for research in a big way. This CloseUp on Youth Media lists over 70 downloadable reports, including the entire Series on Digital Media and Learning recently published by MIT and funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation! There are many other gems as well, including reports from the Center for Social Media, Pew Internet and American Life Project, National Coalition Against Censorship, McCormick Tribune Foundation, Open Society Institute, Stuart Foundation, and many more.

Some of the topics researched in the body of work, housed together for the first time, include:

  • Findings on the positive impact of after-school programs, the budget for which President Bush has recently proposed a cut of over 50%, despite findings which prove they bring about greater parental involvement in school, student engagement, and student commitment to homework
  • An analysis of how young people are using new media to participate in the electoral process
  • A study of the digital divide between immigrant youth and their native-born peers
  • An examination of policy concerning intellectual copyright, network neutrality, and radio deregulation, each of which give shape to young people's ability to access information and participate in mainstream discourse
  • Case studies of how effective youth media programs within the United States and abroad intersect with a wide range of urgent policy issues

See a complete list of research collected for this CloseUp

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Good LabRats Use Tags
I strongly urge everyone to quickly create a log-in and become a labrat enabling you to create your own tags to track your interests. In addition, we would love to see you post comments and reviews about the research that you read.

Mindy's Tag Taxonomy
To help you navigate the listings, I created a personal taxonomy of tags based on my own orientation as a practitioner.

Case Studies and Evaluation Reports
For example, it is significant that IssueLab has garnered together some very important case studies that look explicitly at the impact of youth media programs on young people and the audiences that view their works.

Tags: casestudy evaluation audience_impact

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Social Media and Participatory Culture
Another set of tags will point you to studies that report on how the expansion of social media and participatory culture tools (blogs, podcasts, gaming, social networking sites, mobile devices, etc.) are redefining how youth learn, create, and participate in the public sphere.

Tags: socialmedia, participatory_culture, online_behaviors, teen_consumption, digitallearning, Internet, mobile, teenconsumer, content_creation, media_education, civic_engagement, citizenship, gaming

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Intellectual Property, Copyright and Public Policy
This is one of the most important policy battles being waged right now with respect to how youth create and consume media.

Tags: copyright, intellectual_property, internet_policy

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Digital Access, Media Consolidation and Community Media: digital_access, consolidation, community_media

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Journalism and News: journalism, civic_engagement, citizenship, online_behavior, media_education

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Digital Identities: race, gender, immigrant, native_american, girls, hiphop

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See a complete list of research collected for this CloseUp

(Subscribe to IssueLab RSS feeds and receive the latest titles from issue areas related to this CloseUp.)