Youth culture: anxiety and hope in the digital age

**i wanted to get this up as soon as possible, the external links are coming soon**

The white paper article examined a variety of qualitative studies to pinpoint the usage of new media in the lives of children, teens, and young adults. The underlying principle of this article was to examine youth in of themselves, and not as products of the future like most academia and society seems to. The vast majority of this summary defining parameters for studying youth by creating a taxonomy of classifications. This provides two overarching areas of peer-focused activities, and interest-focused activities. The first of which include activities that are driven by IRL social interactions, and the latter includes activities that focus on a niche hobby or interest.

When defining how to categorize the youth in the media interactions researches formed 3 classifications: hanging out, messing around, and geeking-out. Hanging out is falls in the realm of peer-focused activities, because the new media engagement at this level serves the purpose of maintaining and creating relationships that they want/have in real life. Messing around is taking the new media and starting to engage and interact with it. The main characteristics of this level of engagement are exploring and discovering. geeking-out is a very high level engagement with new media and takes high skill level or expertise to excel within any given domain.

Both messing around and geeking out are interest-focused activities, but geeking-out is the only one that has any significant contribution to its experience by adults.

When speaking to the anxieties and hopes, the anxieties lie within parents, educators, and a vast majority of society. “They” feel as though investing too much time or effort in the online world is diminishing the skills for real life. Contrary to this belief, this article suggests that not only would parents be hindering a child’s learning ability, but they also determined youth are not engaging in any activities that they would not be engaging in online.

The questions i have are as follows:

1. The authors suggest that the parents do not understand why their children “hang-out” online, yet the children are doing nothing they wouldn’t be doing in real life. With that being said, do you think that if parents or educators involved themselves in the same new-medias, in the same space, it would impact the youth’s experience in a positive or negative way?
2. The researchers say online social experiences emulate real life for youth. Do you feel this is true for adults, if not, what is the difference?
3. There was an underlying theme that building and maintaining relationships has become a norm via social networking sites for youth. In terms of the youth, how do you feel this will impact offline families, communities, and society?