Kids on YouTube: Technical Identities and Digital Literacies [Hardcover]

The mall is so old schoolthese days kids are hanging out on YouTube, and depending on whom you ask, they're either forging the digital frontier or frittering away their childhoods in anti-intellectual solipsism. Kids on YouTube cuts through the hype, going behind the scenes to understand kids' everyday engagement with new media. Debunking the stereotype of the self-taught computer whiz, new media scholar and filmmaker Patricia G. Lange describes the collaborative social networks kids use to negotiate identity and develop digital literacy on the 'Tube. Her long-term ethnographic studies also cover peer-based and family-driven video-making dynamics, girl geeks, civic engagement, and representational ethics. This book makes key contributions to new media studies, communication, science and technology studies, digital anthropology, and informal education.

Kids on YouTube goes beyond the hype about digital youth, using fine-grained ethnographic studies to describe the collaborative social networks kids use to negotiate identities and develop digital literacy.

For years I have been recommending Lange's work to those interested in the anthropology of YouTube. Throughout her research she has bravely presented her preliminary findings about YouTube on YouTube itself, immersing herself in the medium and community. Now we are invited to see the final results; a careful analysis of kids on YouTube that avoids and often upends conventional myths about youth in the digital world.

Michael Wesch, Kansas State University

YouTube has redefined 'learning in public' for its users. Youthful participants create videos, form communities of practice, and display their ever-morphing identities. Patricia Langes exciting new book digs deeply into the practices, productions, and postings of kids online, redefining what it means to be digitally literate. If you want to understand how kids create, and then live with, a dazzling array of videos, Kls°