a few quick notes from yesterday's opening keynote by S Craig Watkins at the inaugural Digital Media and Learning DML2010 conference.
Craig Watkins was introduced by Henry Jenkins - see Kelly Page's excellent precis of it here :-)
in a slide entitled 'Creating with Technology' (part of a series which he showed to explain his trajectory from his research interests in hip-hop culture to those in digital media and learning), he talked about how black urban youth have long been applying a DIY aesthetic to appropriate available technologies to claim contested spaces (there was a nice ur-mobile picture he showed of ghetto-blasters being the original representations of 'mobile').
as a geographer, i was interested to see a consistent spatial flavour to his narrative throughout his talk.
a great example of this was when Craig Watkins used the language of migration and urban morphology to talk about perceptions and motivations for the (largely uni-directional) flow of non-white, non-privileged youth away from MySpace to Facebook.
His focus on this latter demographic cohort was deliberate, as the title of his keynote was "Living on the Digital Margins: How Black and Latino Youth are Remaking the Participation Gap". there were a couple of good segues between his talk and Jenkins's introduction, such as in terms of Jenkins's quote of Fiske (see Page's precis - link above - for the context) and in terms of how Jenkins reframed the digital divide more in terms of a participatory divide (dispositions and soft skills, as oppposed to access and literacies per se); so, for example, Craig Watkins showed some charts about how recent Pew studies have suggested that black and latino youth rely more on mobile devices for the social and 'traditional' ( <- my word) internet than do their white counterparts.
in trying to account for this latter point, Craig Watkins suggested that it might be for both preferred and obliged reasons; the former in terms of the more personal and private nature of the interaction with the smaller screens of mobiles as opposed to laptops or desktops, and the latter in terms of the poorer quality of hardware and access issues that are still somewhat characteristic of the home environments of this particular demographic cohort.
one final point which was raised during the keynote - this time by D Fox Harrell during the Q&A, was the paradoxical nature of designing for spaces and interactions, given hip-hop's urban DIY roots - as opposed to the more receptive disposition which members of the establishment ('gated communities', to use Craig Watkins's metaphor) might reasonably be expected to have towards the imposition of external structures on interaction.
all in all, a great start to the conference :-)
[update: papers and presentation files from the conference are now available online :-) ]
