Introduction: ‘Kids these Days’ –an Experiment in Ethnographic Correspondence

When I read about the lives and orientations of contemporary children and young people I almost always read something that has been written by adults. And when I research and write about children and young people I primarily do so for other adults. My guess is that most adults rarely read what children and young people have to say about their own lives. Instead, they rely on reporters and various specialists like me to give them a heads up about what’s really going on with “kids these days.”

This dynamic of adults writing about young people for other adults is as pervasive as it is potentially problematic. For me, the main problem with this sort of writing is that it tends toward essentializing and exoticizing the young. When adults read a story about the millennials, or any other label ascribed to younger generations, they are invited to conceptualize young people as a cohesive group that is primarily defined by its presumed differences from today’s adults as well as from youth of the past. Continuities across ages and time periods, as well as differences amongst contemporary young people, are largely erased and replaced by the caricatures of a generational identity. In recent decades, new media technologies have figured prominently in these caricatures, as evinced by the popularity of concepts such as digital natives, the digital generation, the net generation, the Facebook generation, and now the app generation. Once caricatured in these ways, polarized debates tend to ensue. Some see digital savvy youth as saviors for a broken world. Others see them as harbingers of the end of civilization. And when select young people gain access to these debates, many play to the same generational divisions that they aim to correct and enrich. They are called upon, and often answer as, voices of their generation.

This Medium Publication is a humble experiment that attempts to respond to some of these challenges. The origins of this publication were somewhat accidental. As an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego, I was scheduled to teach a class titled Introduction to Digital Media in Society during the spring 2015 quarter. But about a month before the quarter was scheduled to begin I realized that the course had been listed as an advanced elective, which meant that mostly seniors would enroll. Teaching an introductory course to students who were in the final quarter of their undergraduate careers did not make much sense to me so I started to brainstorm alternatives. It was then that I realized that many of the enrolled students had been born around the same time as many of the people who took part in a large qualitative research project that I worked on while I was a graduate student. That project, which ran from 2005–2008, focused on the place of new media in the lives of contemporary children and young people growing up in the United States. The book that we collectively wrote, Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (henceforth HOMAGO), has become one of the most cited academic studies of the so-called digital generation, and it has influenced debates amongst academics, practitioners who work with children and youth, and even policymakers. I am mostly proud of the work my colleagues and I did for HOMAGO, and I continue to think that the book is one of the more nuanced and thoughtful academic books about young people and new media in the U.S. But I also remain uneasy with the position we took as adults telling other adults what contemporary young people were supposedly really like. While the account we put forth in HOMAGO seemed better than most, the dangers of essentializing and exoticizing are still present. It was with these lingering concerns in mind that I thought of an experimental class: What would happen, I wondered, if my students not only read an academic account about their generation, but also replied publicly to that account? What if they had a public say in how well the book appeared to portray their younger years?

This Medium Publication is a partial answer to those questions. 55 students enrolled in the class and we spent the first half of the quarter — five weeks — reading and discussing HOMAGO in depth. Student wrote individual responses to each of the book’s chapters and we discussed each chapter extensively in class. With guidance from myself and the TA, Todd Woodlan, the students spent the second half of the quarter working on two stories that they would eventually publish on Medium. First, I asked each student to write and rewrite a personal vignette about some experience from their childhood or adolescence that involved digital media. I let students decide what they wanted to write about and I gave them the option to publish their vignettes under a pseudonym if they liked. The bulk of this Medium Publication is made up of these vignettes.

Additionally, most students worked in groups of four or five to research and write responses on behalf of the class to one of HOMAGO’s six substantive chapters — Friendship, Intimacy, Families, Gaming, Creative Production, and Work. One group, which we called the Editorial Board, wrote an article in response to the book as a whole. For these articles, I stressed that they were not conducting a systematic study and thus they should avoid making general claims about how any particular media technology was changing childhood, dating, friendship, or any other general aspects of contemporary life. Similarly, I instructed them to avoid the temptation of making claims for their generation and I reminded them they did not have a good way of knowing if their own experiences were similar to the experiences of people they did not know. Instead, I directed groups to focus on how well they felt the book characterized their own experiences, the experiences of other students in the class, and the experiences of people they knew well while growing up. Focusing on how well they thought the book portrayed their own experiences was a valuable contribution to public debates, I argued, even if their responses could not be extended to young people in general.

Given that the purpose of this experiment was to foreground youth voices, I will refrain from providing extensive editorial comment on what they wrote. I will only say that I learned quite a lot from their vignettes and from their various responses to different parts of the book. I also hope the students learned something about reading critically, analyzing a text, making an argument, and writing for a public audience. Perhaps more importantly, I also learned that the problems discussed earlier, which anthropologists commonly refer to as the politics of ethnographic representation, are not solved by simply giving people a chance to respond to authoritative accounts of their lives. While many students expressed that they enjoyed the class, I doubt many would have written these articles if they had not been assigned as part of the class, and a few students even indicated that such assignments made them feel like research subjects. It was a humble reminder that “speaking back” to authoritative accounts is not inherently rewarding for those who have been ethnographically represented. Once again, the concerns of ethnographers are not necessarily the same as those of the people about whom they write, even when the former is trying to give the latter a chance to respond.