Youth, Technology, and DIY

TLDR

Youth media literacy research has traditionally focused on critical understanding, but the contemporary media landscape expands this to include creative design, ethical, and technical skills as participatory competencies within a growing DIY movement of arts, crafts, and new technologies. This chapter offers a framework and language to understand the diverse DIY media practices youth engage in while producing media. The authors review the evolution of new media and computer literacy, outline DIY media trends, and present a unified framework that examines participatory competencies—especially remixing, reworking, and repurposing—among disadvantaged youth, concluding with equity and after‑school implications for K‑12 education.

Abstract

Traditionally, educational researchers and practitioners have focused on the development of youths' critical understanding of media as a key aspect of new media literacies. The 21 st Century media landscape suggests an extension of this traditional notion of literacy - an extension that sees creative designs, ethical considerations, and technical skills as part of youth's expressive and intellectual engagement with media as participatory competencies. These engagements with media are also part of a growing Do-It-Yourself, or DIY, movement involving arts, crafts, and new technologies. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a framework and a language for understanding the multiple DIY practices in which youth engage while producing media. In the review, we will first provide a historical overview of the shifting perspectives of two related fields—new media literacies and computer literacy —before outlining the general trends in DIY media cultures that see youth moving towards becoming content creators. We then introduce how a single framework allows us to consider different participatory competencies in DIY under one umbrella. Special attention will be given to the digital practices of remixing, reworking, and repurposing popular media among disadvantaged youth. We will conclude with considerations of equity, access, and participation in after-school settings and possible implications for K-12 education.