Mimi Ito - Weblog

For the past few months, I have been working with a team of researchers in conducting a literature review of new media uptake in different parts of the world. This work has been part of our work with the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Initiative to understand the ways in which new media is intersecting with young people's everyday learning. Our work thus far has been focused on the U.S. context, but now we are trying to understand how what we have learned relates to developments overseas.

We selected a set of countries where there are interesting developments in new media uptake, but there is relatively little research literature available in English. The literature reviews are broken down by country, with Cara Wallis taking the lead on Chiina, HyeRyoung Ok for Korea, Anke Schwittay for India, Heather Horst for Brazil, Daisuke Okabe and I for Japan, and Araba Sey for Ghana. We will be rolling these out in installments starting today and continuing through March. You can find the posts at our Futures of Learning blog.

Although this literature review was conducted primarily to inform our ongoing research, we are hoping that this will provide a benefit to the broader research community by posting our work publicly. We are also hoping that by doing so we can get some feedback, particularly about literature we missed our gaps in our understanding.

It's been over three years in the making, but we are at long last releasing the results of our Digital Youth Project. The goal of this work was to gain an understanding of youth new media practice in the U.S. by engaging in ethnographic research across a diverse range of youth populations, sites, and activities. A collaboration between 28 researchers and research collaborators, this was a large ethnographic project funded by the MacArthur Foundation as part of their Digital Media and Learning initiative. I was one of the PIs on the project together with Peter Lyman, Michael Carter, and Barrie Thorne.

The project has been quite a journey, and has been by far the most challenging and rewarding research project I've undertaken so far. It tested my skills at so many levels -- fieldwork, conceptually, theoretically, and in management. I feel so fortunate to for the opportunity to have undertaken this project with fabulous colleagues and a team of graduate students and postdocs who taught me so much along the way.

I'm particularly proud of the shared report that we have just released, which was a genuinely collaborative effort, co-authored by 15 of us on the team, and including contributions from many others. We took a step that is unusual with ethnographic work, of trying to engage in joint analysis rather than simply putting together an edited collection of case studies. We spent the past year reading each others interviews and fieldnotes, and developing categories that cut across the different case studies. Each chapter of the book incorporates material from multiple case studies, and is an effort to describe the diversity in youth practice at it emerged from a range of different youth populations and practices.

You can find all the details in the documents linked below, and a summary of our report. The book is due out from MIT Press next fall, but in the meantime you can read a draft of it online. Our book is dedicated to the memory of Peter Lyman.

Sadly, I won't be able to attend, but my team will be celebrating the release of our report at a reception at the American Anthropological Association meetings in San Francisco. Saturday November 22, at 6:30-8:00pm, San Francisco Hilton & Towers, Golden Gate Ballroom.

Click here to download a two-page summary of the report.

Click here to download the summary white paper.

Click here to access the full report.

Click here for the press release and video being hosted by the MacArthur Foundation.

Continue reading "Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project" »

Today I got a welcome delivery from MIT Press - two books in the mail that I have had the good fortune to be part of.

The first is Networked Publics, a labor of love that was the result of a year long interdisciplinary research group that I helped organize at the Annenberg Center for Communication. Big kudos go to Kazys Varnelis who did the editing work for this volume. Every chapter is collaboratively written and is a result of a weekly faculty seminar and our engagement with a series of guest speakers. The goal of the book is to provide an accessible overview of some of the broad changes in our senses of place, public culture, politics, and infrastructure that have accompanied the shift towards a networked society. The concept of networked publics is meant to signal the lateral, peer-to-peer connections between "audiences" and "users" and the ways in which these connections are transforming our notions of public participation.

You can find a few chapters, including my introduction to the book online at the netpublics site.

The other book that arrived today is Beyond Barbie® and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming, a book that takes stock of the current state of affairs with regards to girls and gaming. It has been put together a decade after the publication ofFrom Barbie® to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, and revisits the issues raised by the earlier book. Edited by Yasmin Kafai, Carrie Heeter, Jill Denner, and Jennifer Sun, the book includes contributions by game makers as well as scholars looking at girls gaming. Written at a moment where gaming by women and girls has become well established, it chronicles a moment that is quite different from the earlier book, written at the height of the "girls games" movement that was aiming to design products specifically targeted to girls. While many of the issues of gender difference and access to technology persist to this day, the issue is not so much access to games, but access to particular kinds of gaming experiences that constitute a gender divide. The book has also expanded this conversation by soliciting contributions from scholars who work outside of the U.S., and I have a piece in their that discusses the gender dynamics of Japanese games.

It's great to see these works in print now, both outcomes of productive interdisciplinary collaborations that are pushing forward new paradigms in thinking about digital culture.

In honor of back to school week, I am posting a much belated update on various transitions that I've been navigating over the past few months. Over the summer, we wrapped up our writing for the summative book on the digital youth project, and we plan to release our white paper on the findings, and a draft of the book online on October 2. It's been tremendously satisfying to finally be able to step back and analyze all the material we collectively gathered over this three-year project, which involved 28 researchers including myself. I'm finding that the knowledge we gained is providing to be a great springboard for the new work that I have kicked off this summer.

As part of the transition to new projects, I've moved my primary affiliation from USC to UC Irvine. At UCI, I'll be working with both the UC Humanities Research Institute and the Informatics Department at the School of Information and Computer Science. I will still continue to have an affiliation at USC's Institute for Multimedia Literacy, and will be organizing, with Holly Willis, a talk series on multimedia literacy, as part of the Annenberg Research Park Colloquium Series. Our first colloquium will be on September 9, with Liz Losh.

My move to UCI was motivated by my desire to work with David Goldberg and the Humanities Institute, and to build new bridges to colleagues in informatics, CALIT2 and anthropology at UCI. I feel that I am getting the best of both worlds by being able to stay in LA and keep in touch with things at USC, while also developing new relationships and conversations further down the 405. And the commute hasn't been half bad, thanks to my carpooling with my colleagues.

I am starting up a new effort at UCHRI to build plans for a networked studio to facilitate interdisciplinary research collaborations in the area of new media and learning. The project is giving me an excuse to do a good amount of reading in the area, and to visit with people and projects in the field, both in the U.S. and abroad. After being deeply immersed in fieldwork and writing, it's been a refreshing change of pace to pop my head up for a bit and try to take a broader survey of the field and catch up on the work of all my colleagues. I'm super-excited about the next steps that we are taking in our work with the MacArthur Foundation and the potential to build synergies between research, design, youth culture, and educational practice that can really have an influence on the shape of public education.

I'm happy to announce that the Center for Social Media has just released a new best practices document to help video makers and distributors navigate the world of digital and online video, and I'm also proud to say that I had a small part in it as a member of the committee who put the document together. I first learned about the work that the Center for Social Media was doing when they released a similar best practices document for fair use in documentary film making. This new document addresses practices of remixing and reposting in online video, and provides guidelines for the parameters of fair use in these practices.

The code identifies, among other things, six kinds of unlicensed uses of copyrighted material that may be considered fair, under certain limitations. They are:

• Commenting or critiquing of copyrighted material


• Use for illustration or example

Incidental or accidental capture of copyrighted material

• Memorializing or rescuing of an experience or event


• Use to launch a discussion


• Recombining to make a new work, such as a mashup or a remix, whose elements
  depend on relationships between existing works

And if you haven't already, check out their video -- Remix Culture -- for a great visual overview and introduction to remix video.

It was a real pleasure working with Patricia Aufderheide, Peter Jaszi, and the other committee members in putting this together. I learned a lot from the collaborative process, and was much impressed by Patricia and Peter's ability to pull together the insights and expertise of a diverse committee into a super-solid document.