The Digital Afterlife of Youth-Made Media: Implications for Media Literacy Education

Abstract

The digital age has fundamentally re-configured the relationship between makers and users. Every networked action by a user has the potential to be reinterpreted by other users. The original intentions of media makers emerge from this process in recontextualized form that I call the «digital afterlife». The phenomenon of digital afterlife has striking implications for youth-made media, which I explore in this article through an ethnographic analysis of behind-the-scenes activities among a group of young people working with Youth Radio, a California youth organization, where they create high-impact media. The case study examined here centers on a major investigative reporting initiative within Youth Radio – a transmedia series on child sex trafficking produced by a 21-year-old reporter in collaboration with veteran editors. The analysis reveals the ways in which youth media ceases to be «youth media», once it moves into its digital afterlife, given the extent to which the content gets re-produced, again and again, by adult institutions with their own histories, agendas, and political economies. The article concludes by identifying key dimensions of literacy that young people invent and deploy through their experiments with social and mobile media, including: discovery, analytics, network mobilization, and platform programming.La era digital ha reconfigurado las relaciones entre productores y usuarios. Las acciones en red son potencialmente reinterpretadas por otros usuarios. La intención de los productores mediáticos adquiere su sentido en este contexto que denominamos «el más allá digital». En este artículo analizamos cómo ha influido este fenómeno en las implicaciones de los medios y los jóvenes. El estudio se lleva a cabo a través del análisis etnográfico de las actividades llevadas a cabo por un grupo de jóvenes que trabajan creando productos mediáticos de gran impacto en una radio en California (Youth Radio). El estudio de caso que se incluye en este artículo se centra en una iniciativa de periodismo de investigación dentro de Youth Radio: una serie transmediática sobre el tráfico sexual infantil producida por un joven de 21 años con la ayuda de editores más veteranos. El análisis desvela la forma en que los medios «juveniles» dejan de serlo una vez que se convierten en un producto digital en sí, cuyo contenido se reproduce una y otra vez en manos de adultos e instituciones con su propia historia, organización y economía política. El artículo concluye identificando dimensiones clave de alfabetización que los jóvenes crean y emplean a través de su experimentación con los medios móviles y sociales, entre otros: el descubrimiento, el análisis, la movilización en red y la programación de plataformas.

Contexts of Digital Socialization: Studying Adolescents' Interactions on Social Network Sites

“…One of the complicating factors in developing digital intimacy involves the public nature of most of the interactions online, which people do not always take into account when sharing private or personal information with others. As Soep [2012] has explored in terms of youth media, the "digital afterlife" of adolescents' online participation can take unintended and unanticipated directions as others repurpose the original material for different communities and in unforeseen ways. For researchers interested in how young people learn to communicate and interact with others in these social spaces, these questions of how they navigate digital intimacy will become a central issue.…”

Adolescent television consumers: Self-perceptions about their rights

“…For example, the high impact social mobilisation that can be generated through the Web, in a very limited space of time. Therefore, the time dedicated to media should be used to advantage to attain a media literacy which should go beyond learning how to use equipment and should focus on the development of skills and values geared towards creating a more just and equitable society (Del-Moral & Villalustre, 2013;Gutiérrez & Tyner, 2012;Soep, 2012). As seen in prior research, the most frequently viewed programmes were series (comedies, soap operas, etc.)…”

Voice, empowerment and youth-produced films about ‘gangs’

“…The internet may have opened up possibilities for exhibition, and these are actively being used by youth media organizations that now commonly place their outputs online on sites like YouTube or Vimeo (Tyner 2013). Yet there is little follow-up about whether young people are in charge of how films are presented and distributed, what happens once media outputs are circulated online or indeed how these outputs are packaged or whether they do reach wide or even narrow intended audiences (Soep 2012). For all the potential for young people to harness 'spreadable media' (Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013), in this example the potential of a global audience remained only imagined.…”