Platform futures : an evaluation of the role of new technology in the creative media practice of young people in informal educational settings

This study examines the use of new technology by young people in the context of community media education activity. The research to which it refers was carried out between 2006 and 2011 at Knowle West Media Centre, a community media organisation in the city of Bristol in the United Kingdom. A practice-led participatory action research method was employed to facilitate young people's involvement as co-researchers in the project. The purpose of the research is to identify how the choices young people make in relation to their engagements with new technology, and their capacity to do so, can inform policies and practices developed and enacted by professional practitioners working to support youth media activity primarily within the field of community media and also more widely within informal educational settings. The findings demonstrate the need for community media practitioners to increase opportunities for young people to learn about and to use internet and mobile networked technologies within their creative media practice in order to maintain the relevancy of such activities for young people and to address inequalities in the way young people are able to access and appropriate such technologies for social participation. In order to do so, this study advocates ways in which practitioners can keep pace with rapid changes, both social and technical, that new technology contributes to, and emphasizes the need to develop more effective media literacy frameworks to articulate the imperative to develop young people's critical skills and dispositions in informal educational settings. This study also contends that current discourse with the subject field can be expanded beyond the significance afforded to content production to include the notion of platform creation, in both a technical and figurative sense, as reflecting the dynamics of social media systems and practices and the dialectic nature of educational relationships and processes that are rooted in principles of social democracy.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo