Walk into any classroom today and you’ll find a mix of smart phones, tablet computers and smart boards – for reading, viewing, searching and connecting. Walk into any family home today and here too you cannot fail to observe the plethora of screens and other digital paraphernalia – personally and collectively
owned – again, for reading, viewing, communicating and connecting. At school, pedagogic and policy debates have seized upon the ubiquity of new digital devices and contents to speculate about changes far wider than
the mere import of technologies into the classroom, transformations in the nature of learning and literacy, the relation between students and teacher, and he positioning of curricular knowledge and pedagogic practices in the wider community. In the home, public and policy debates are often more pessimistic – bemoaning the loss of authority between parent and child, the array of risks associated with screen and networked cultures, the sense of changes happening too fast for social and ethical norms to keep pace. Yet in the home too, there are
excited predictions about new informal opportunities for children and young people to learn, participate, create and connect. Indeed, in the early twenty first century, it seems that a core societal value
is that of connection. In our public and private lives, at micro and macro levels, getting more connected is called for, planned for and celebrated. Connections are heterarchical, agentic, creative. They can overcome barriers and blockages to facilitate interaction, hybridity, flexibility and flow.
Connection has been an important idea in many programmes of institutional reform, including in education, especially given the groundswell of opinion that schools are broken or that a twentieth century education is no longer fit to provide for twenty first century jobs (Selwyn, 2013) – i.e. that the Livingstone, S. (2014) ‘The Mediatization of Childhood and Education. Reflections on The Class’, pp. 55-68 in L. Kramp/N. Carpentier/A. Hepp/I. Tomanić Trivundža/H. Nieminen/R. Kunelius/T. Olsson/E. Sundin/R. Kilborn (eds.) Media Practice and Everyday Agency in Europe.
Sonia Livingstone structures of society no longer serve. It’s also an important idea for childhood studies, since the sequestration of children in late modernity (James/Jenks/ Prout, 1998) – the cultivation of innocence as an indicator of affluence – is being taken to such a degree in the global north that it’s becoming a problem. Given parallel claims that families too are broken, communities dissolving and the workplace highly uncertain, efforts to build bridges across these sites of learning and socialisation abound. By implication, the barriers that prevent
the flow of ideas, knowledge and interest across institutional and everyday sites are, it is feared, holding children back, and undermining their potential. Now that digital networks underpin and enable social networks, it seems
that the logic of the digital age dictates that connection is good and, therefore, disconnection is bad. In relation to young people, the hope is that the affordances of digital, networked technologies can be harnessed to connect disaffected youth with exciting learning opportunities, or disillusioned teachers with new ways of engaging their students, or marginalised families with forms of knowledge usually available only to the privileged.
Inspired by this idea, the Digital Media Learning initiative, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, is exploring possible solutions to the various ills of public education in the Global North, building on young people’s interests in digital media to find new connections between home, school, community and workplace. A multitude of projects, including digital media learning centres in schools, libraries, after school and online, reveals the benefits when kids get together as fans and storytellers, as makers and creators, as coders and geeks, as community builders and civic campaigners. As part of this initiative, the Connected Learning Research Network, led by Mimi Ito at the University of California, Irvine, has taken this agenda of problems and possible solutions as its test bed for examining the realities of children’s learning across diverse contexts and domains of knowledge (Ito et
al., 2013). What’s emerging is a structuration approach (Giddens, 1984) that places its hopes in children’s spontaneous agency and interests, and seeks to reshape societal structures from their current offer of overly narrow paths and unequal opportunities. This means putting a lot of effort not only into designing digital media learning opportunities but also rethinking learning, teaching, institutions, literacies, pathways – in short, reshaping the social, pedagogic and economic infrastructures of children’s lives. However, much of this work so far as focused on the experience of those at the leading edge – youthful digital creators, hackers, civic participators, activists and budding entrepreneurs – for these actualise the vision of the digital media learning community. Yet as surveys repeatedly show, they remain a small minority, with most youth viewing but rarely creating, downloading not uploading, following rather than setting the trend (e.g. see Livingstone/ Helsper, 2007).
For this reason, The Class was an ethnographic study of one year in the
lives of a class of ordinary 13-14 year olds living in a socio-economically and
ethnically diverse London suburb. Conducted at LSE by me and Julian Sefton-Green,
the project asked the following questions:
How are children’s digital media activities embedded in daily practices
and regimes of learning and leisure?
Do digitally mediated activities and networks enable or impede young
people’s connected learning or opportunities in society?
How do / could the wider opportunity structures of peers, school, family
and community enable engagement, expertise and efficacy?
We hope to offer insight into how social, digital and learning networks enable or disempower, answering the often-asked question – what’s changing now that our lives are full of digital technologies – not by offering any simple or
dramatic answers, but by tracing the contextually-meaningful but often small shifts in the meanings, practices and values people take for granted or try actively to reshape in their everyday lives. The wider purpose is to capture the texture of the social and digital worlds of young people living and learning through the heightened anxieties and uncertainties of what Ulrich Beck calls the “risk society” (Beck, 1986/2005) or, as others dub it, late or reflexive modernity (see Giddens, 1991; see also Bauman, 2001), or the network society (Castells, 2009; see also Appadurai, 1996); a society in which established structures are fading in importance, individuals
are disembedded from tradition, collectivities are crumbling and new uncertainties and indeterminacies assail us on all sides. The school we studied was perfectly ordinary and in many ways could be described as successful. Yet in terms of the young people’s learning, we found that experiences of narrow aspirations and blocked pathways were far more common than those of creative connections and new opportunities, and that digital technology uses had become part of a largely pragmatic and instrumental culture of learning.
At home and elsewhere, we did find that some young people were exploring their identities, relationships and networks more creatively but still, the expectations of civility, the limits of interface design, and the ubiquity of surveillance by anxious adults proved constraining. To make sense of these and other observations from the fieldwork, I shall draw on the theories of mediation and mediatization to frame the analysis and to help us understand, in particular, the question of media-related social change.