Mimi Ito - Weblog

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.

We are nearing the end of three years of ethnographic work on the digital youth project that I have been helping lead together with Peter Lyman, Michael Carter, and Barrie Thorne. The project has involved a team of over 20 ethnographers, and we have conducted 22 different case studies of youth engagement with new media. These have ranged from studies of specific online sites such as YouTube and MySpace, to studies that focus on a particular neighborhood of afterschool program, to studies of interest-driven groups such as anime fans and hip hop creators. It has been quite a journey, learning from a diverse range of kids and learning from each other on how to work together in developing new forms of ethnographic knowledge and collaboration.

Although we are still a few months shy of wrapping up our analysis and writings, we will be doing our first major public presentation of our work on April 23, at Stanford University The event is organized by our funding organization, the MacArthur Foundation, together with Common Sense Media. We will have poster sessions featuring all of our case studies, and talks by danah boyd, Heather Horst, Dilan Mahendran, and myself. We also have a distinguished panel of respondents: Dale Dougherty editor of MAKE, Deborah Stipek, the Dean of the Stanford School of Education, Linda Burch from Common Sense Media, and Kenny Miller from MTV Networks. Julia Stasch and Connie Yowell from the MacArthur Foundation will also be presenting at the event.

You can find program details and the registration form at the Common Sense Media site.

Videos from the event are available on YouTube.

Since the Annenberg Center closed in August, my email had been forwarding to my new addy at the School of Cinematic Arts, but it looks like those days are over. My apologies if you got bounce backs on my annenberg.edu address in the past week or two. My other addresses should be functional. I guess the Center is officially gone, sniff.

I'm a bit late to blog this, but a few weeks ago the MacArthur Foundation did an official announcement of a new book series on Digital Media and Learning being published by MIT Press. They also announced a new journal, The International Journal of Learning and Media. Both the journal and the book series are part of the MacArthur Foundation's initiative on digital media and learning that I have been involved in for many years now with our digital youth project. For these publication efforts I get to play multiple roles: advisory board for the book series, author in the book series, and part of the editorial board of the journal. We are hoping that this series and journal will be a way of focusing and showcasing the work in the field. My own article in the book The Ecology of Games, edited by Katie Salen is here. All of the content of the book series are being made available in traditional print formats as well as online for free download.

We are moving into the analysis and writing phase on our digital youth project. Here is a short essay reporting on some of my research with anime fans.

One important dimension of our research is to develop an understanding of the diversity in ways that different youth engage with digital media, and what some of the factors are that lie behind this diversity. While broad demographic indicators such as national context, socioeconomic status, gender, age, or race have been analyzed as sources of diversity in digital media adoption, we still have very limited understanding of the specific practices, social contexts, and cultural identifications that inflect digital media use in different ways. For example, while we may know the general demographics and numbers of US teens who have decided to participate in an online site such as MySpace, we know little about why particular youth decide to opt in or out of participation, and what the variables are—personal, social, cultural—that factor into these decisions as part of an unfolding life history. Why is it that some youth decide to participate in some online sites rather than others? How do social categories in youth culture such as “geeks,” “jocks,” and “cool kids” inflect participation online? How do specific hobbies, interests, and friendships factor into young people’s decisions of where to go online? As the palette of options for online participation continues to expand, it is critical that we look at the relation between the diversity in youth culture and the diversity in online engagement. The “participation gap” as Jenkins (2006) has suggested, is not simply about haves and have-nots in relation to universal resource, but about intentional decisions people make between different but equally engaged forms of online participation.

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