Hashtag: A Sign of the Times (my book title)
Hashtag: A Sign of the Times be the name of my book. It’s not written yet. But on today, Monday, December 3, 2018 at 11:06pm EST, I am claiming the name of my book.
To date, there is only one title with the same name. It’s a Guardian article from 2010: How the # became the sign of our times, which really seems like a hot take on the history of the hashtag/pound sign throughout telephony. Something I wrote about (but better:)
Hashtag: A Sign of the Times is in the SEO now, and it started here FIRST!
Tara L. Conley Racial Literacy Roundtables Talk
On Monday, October 14, 2013 I presented at this year's first Racial Literacy Roundtables talk at Teachers College Columbia University. I presented on my current and ongoing research involving participatory design and working with young people who are involved in foster care and juvenile/criminal justice systems to develop TXT CONNECT, a free mobile platform for court-involved youth in NYC.
Highlights from the talk include:
- Ways to conceptualize and re-imagine participation.
- Reviewing youth demographic statistics in NYC, highlighting, in particular, the disproportionate number of Black and brown youth involved in juvenile/criminal justice systems and foster care.
- Reflecting on what it means to engage multiple stakeholders in the process of designing a technical and digital artifact with and for young people who are often disconnected and lack reliable access to information.
Some notable statistics (references included in slides below):
- 25% of youth (< 18-years-old) in NYC are considered Black/African American, yet make up 65% of the juvenile justice population in NYC, and 59% of the foster care population in NYC.
- 35.5% of youth (< 18-years-old) in NYC are considered Hispanic, and make up 30% of the juvenile justice population in NYC, and 27.4% of the foster care population in NYC.
- White youth make up 25% of the youth population in NYC, yet make up less than 5% of the juvenile justice and foster care population in NYC
This was the first time I was able to present my research, in depth, to my peers and others in the academic community. The conversations that emerged from the chat were inspiring, particularly as it had to do with the ways educators and researchers are currently thinking about how social and digital media can, and ought to be used as meaningful tools in the classroom and beyond.
So often we assume media are something young people simply and only consume, but in fact, we're learning that young people are also integral mediamakers and designers in the "stuff" they use.
Below is a highlight video from the talk.
Tara L. Conley Racial Literacy Roundtables Talk from Media Make Change on Vimeo.
I've also posted my presentation slides HERE.
For more information on my current research, please visit www.taralconley.org
Credits: Lalitha Vasudevan (photography and videography), Joe Riina-Ferrie (videography)
Participatory Design and Young People as 'Possibilities Personified'
Tara L. Conley, Teachers College, Columbia University (March 29, 2013)
This past Friday, I had the opportunity to speak about participatory design and fostering critical connections in our work with young people. Though the talk was meant as a brief audition for TEDxTeachersCollege next month, I was able to share some of the work I've been doing with young people involved in building a text line for court-involved youth in NYC.
As I continue to work with young people on the mobile initiative, I'm beginning to understand why it's important for us, as educators, designers, researchers, and social entrepreneurs to involve young people in the work that we're doing. Particularly if your mission is to actively support communities and young people, it's important to involve motivated young leaders because, quite frankly, they know more than we do about what's best for their neighborhoods, families, and local cohorts. It's sounds simple enough but you'd be surprised at how much we end up not actively involving young people in work that is meant to support their growth.
In this brief 5-minute talk I outline some of the reasons why I believe that participating in collaborative working groups is an effective strategy for community building and social entrepreneurship. I also touch on the idea that the process of building and creating technology platforms with others may result in a kinship formation experience where we not only produce knowledge together but we do so in a way that can yield sustainable outcomes for surrounding communities.
A few key definitions and insights that inform my work thus far:
Participatory Design
"Participatory design is a hybrid experience where participants are neither user or developer but both simultaneously. Characteristics of PD experiences include 'challenging assumptions, learning reciprocally, and creating new ideas, which emerge through negotiation and co-creation of identities, working languages, understandings, and relationships, and polyvocal (many-voiced) discussions across and through differences'" (Muller; 2002).
“‘Believing in the potential of everyone to design is more egalitarian than believing in exclusive talents and specialised roles. However, this is not the same as involving every potential user in every design project, or at all stages, or in the same way as the next person" (Light & Luckin, 2008).
It is not the hand that makes the designer, it’s the eye. Learning to design is learning to see . . .Our experience sharpens our eyes to certain perceptions and shapes what we expect to see, just as what we expect to see shapes our experience. Our reality is perspectival. Although we don’t perceive and sense things that a more experienced practitioner can, we can learn. (Reichenstein; 2013).
Transcript from my talk below.
Thank you.
I’d like to share a quote with you from author Margaret Wheatley, who received her doctorate in education from Harvard University. She wrote in 2006,
“Rather than worry about critical mass, our work is to foster critical connections. We don't need to convince large numbers of people to change; instead, we need to connect with kindred spirits. Through these relationships, we will develop the new knowledge, practices, courage, and commitment that lead to broad-based change”
I recently received a Media Ideation Fellowship grant that will allow me to begin developing a text line for court-involved youth in New York City. The text line will support young people involved in foster care, juvenile justice, and criminal justice systems so that can use their cell phones to access educational, vocational, and intervention support resources.
I’m currently working directly with young people who serve on the text line youth advisory board to develop the mobile initiative.
For the TEDxTeachersCollege conference, I would like to talk about the significance of collaborative working groups between young people and social entrepreneurs, and the exponential impact this particular collaborative cohort has on the broader community.
I want to talk about how we can, as Margaret Wheatley amply describes, foster critical connections through our work and by way of democratic working processes, and through what Oliver Reichenstein articulates as an understanding that learning to design (in what ever form that may take for educators, scholars, and designers) means learning to see. Learning to see.
To that end, I want to discuss how we might envision and situate technology artifacts as points of entry where community building and kinships can emerge. And how we might re-conceptualize the process of building and incorporating technologies in learning spaces with members of communities we wish to serve.
While working with the youth advisory board over the past four weeks, I’m beginning to notice these sort of third space, or hybrid, themes come about, and I want to share these themes with the TC community as a way to inform our teaching, researching, and design practices.
Some of the themes I’ve noticed include:
- The idea that social entrepreneurship is fundamentally participatory
- That participatory design methods as defined by Mueller look more and more like kinship formations
- Also the idea that critical connections yield knowledge production that is local, specific, and sustainable
- And the idea that hybridization does not only apply to theory and practice but also applies to entrepreneurship and learning
- And finally, it is the notion that education is a concept we can actually define through democratic learning processes and, most importantly, through love.
Before I go, I want to share with you a story. I was walking home with one of the youth advisory board members recently. And she told me that when she first heard about the opportunity to be part of the development of the text line she knew she wanted to be involved. She told me that she thought the text line would be a great way for court-involved youth to access resources that were usually difficult to impossible to access. Then she said to me, “You know, when I first head that someone was developing a text line for court-involved youth, my first thought was, ‘Wow! Someone out there actually cares about fosters kids.’”
That was my ah-ha moment. That was when I realized why it’s so important for us to develop strategies and create spaces where we involved young people in our teaching, researching, and design methods.
Because young people are not statistics or bodies to fill up classrooms, residential facilities, or prisons. They are media makers. They are developers. They are designers. Young people, especially the one I work with, are possibilities personified. Thank you.
References
Fouche, R. (2013). “From Black Inventors to One Laptop Per Child: Exploring a Racial Politics of Technology” in Race after the Internet, L. Nakamura & P. A. Chow-White (EDs). (pp. 61-83)
Kensing, F. and J. Blomberg. (1998). Participatory Design: Issues and Concerns
Light, A., and Luckin, R. (2008). Designing for social justice: People, technology, and learning. Futurelab: http://archive.futurelab.org.uk/resources/publications-reports-articles/opening-education-reports/
Muller, M. J. Participatory design: The third space in HCI. In J. A. Jacko and A. Sears (Eds.), The Human Computer Interaction Handbook: Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies and Emerging Applications, Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ, 2002, 1051–1068.
Reinchenstein, O. (2013). Learning to see.
MEDIA MAKE CHANGE Remembers Joshua C. Watson
It is with a heavy heart that we share the devastating news about the passing of Joshua C. Watson. Josh was an inaugural fellow of the 2012 Community Producers Program that MEDIA MAKE CHANGE co-authored with the Beyond the Bricks Project. He was known as one of the most brightest fellows in his Atlanta cohort. Josh is shown in the video below speaking proudly about his work and his hopes for the future. We learned yesterday that Josh was victim of an apparent robbery while walking home from work. He was murdered on Christmas Eve.
From the Beyond the Bricks producers, Derek Koen and Ouida Washington:
18 year old Joshua C. Watson, one of the young men that graduated this past June from the first cohort of Beyond The Bricks Community Producers Program, was murdered in Atlanta, GA December 24, 2012, robbed on his way home from work. I had the pleasure of meeting Josh in person once, I spoke with him a few times over Skype and we awarded him with a certificate for his dedication to the program. The entire BTBP team was horrified to hear the news that yet another young person with so much promise and potential was taken away forever. Josh was the result of hard work, sacrifice and love by a community of people; evident by the way he presented himself to the world. We here at Beyond The Bricks Project struggle to make the message clear, we ALL have a role and duty to give ALL our children brighter futures and the chance to live their life the best way possible. Senseless violence that we see almost daily in news headlines, in our communities and in our schools is destroying this country. In the life of Josh, lest we forget that too much has already been lost.
If the person who took Joshua from this earth can some how come across this message, I would like you to know that this is not acceptable you deserve to be punished and you are redeemable. To you all, we would like to introduce you to Joshua C. Watson.
We share the sentiments expressed by the BTBP team. The news of Josh's death only strengthens our desire to ensure the work that we do at MEDIA MAKE CHANGE benefits young people like Joshua Watson. He was an inspiration, shining light, and a gift to us all. We would like to send condolences to the Watson family and express our deepest sympathies to anyone who had the pleasure of befriending Joshua during his short eighteen years on earth.
You can pay tribute to Josh's memory on RIP Joshua C. Watson Facebeook page made in his honor.
The Need to Educate the Rich Kids of Instagram
From My MEDIAted Life
There is a new Tumblr page that has been getting quite a bit of attention in the last few weeks. It's got an unoriginal, yet strangely catchy title that would cause almost anyone to click on the link: Rich Kids of Instagram. Your finger might hover over the mousepad for a moment--sure that it could not possibly be what the straight-forward label is seeming to describe, yet weary that it most likely is--you wonder if this is what you should be doing with your time? Should you throw a load of laundry in before you make this time commitment for something you might later regret, or worse, that you might absolutely love (but not be able to tell anybody about)? But like so many other viral videos and Internet memes, in which a mere click stands between you andknowing what everyone else is talking about, this site wins over any rational thought, and just like that you feel the pad of your index finger make contact with the cool sensory surface beneath it.
As soon as the URL loads and the site opens, you dive face-first into a scrolling cluster of photographs and hashtags. The images have all presumably been taken by smartphones (most likely iPhones) and have been enhanced through an application called Instagram, which adds different filters to digital pictures and allows them to be uploaded to various social networking platforms (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) instantly and seamlessly. The subtitle of the site is "They have more than you and this is what they do," and the hashtag is #rkoi. The images are first uploaded by the young people who snapped the shots to the RKOI's Twitter account and are then fed onto the Tumblr page for easy viewing.
The pictures are displayed in gold frames, suggesting that they are pieces of fine art and conveying an obvious and assumed air of wealth, high culture, and importance. Below each image we find numerous hashtags that the artists have used to 'describe' their masterpieces: #mansion, #wealth, #yacht, #personalchef, #cartier, #NBD (no big deal). The seemingly endless collection of photographs are obnoxious, yet every time I visit the site I find myself clicking from page to page, thirsty for more, even if I've seen the same images four or fives times at this point. What is going on?!As hard as I try to maintain that I am fascinated by this warped website solely for critically analytical and research-related purposes (I'm making a very serious face while saying this), the reality is that I have been 'trained'--socialized and normalized--for decades now to associate the types of images and messages depicted on this site with notions of what "happiness", "success", "popularity", etc. look like; what they mean. If I am having these reactions as a 28-year-old, we must seriously consider how teens might be viewing this site and think about the kinds of conversations that we as educators, adults, parents, can have with the young adults in our lives.
1. The subtle effects and implications of the gold-frame template:
While viewers might feel as if they've become numb to composition after streaming through dozens of images, there is an undeniable novelty and uniqueness in seeing photographs, not oil paintings, housed in these garish golden frames. Instead of invoking a simulated feeling that we are strolling through the quiet rooms of art gallery or museum--observing these masterpieces interspersed on stark white walls--the juxtaposition of the bold, saturated, filtered photographs with the chunky golden frames instead creates a feeling of voyeurism among viewers. We are outsiders being granted access to certain snapshots, postage-stamp views, of what life in the 1% is like.
What might this voyeurism mean for both the creators and consumers of these images? There is an extreme sense of excitement on both ends: for the creators of these media images and messages--they are sharing their lived experiences and material possessions with their peers (and now with wider audiences). Hell, at 14-, 17-, even at 25-years-old (especially in the age of social media and social networking sites), there is a certain undeniable, almost unavoidable [I said almost] narcissism that runs rampant in users' status updates, photos, etc. It's the nature of the beast, but it doesn't make it ok, or mean that we simply and passively accept that this is just how people can and should act as a result. We still must consider, now more than ever, what effects these displays of wealth, materialism, lifestyle and activities might have on the "99%" who have been socialized to perhaps think this representation is 'covetable', on the "1%" who think this representation is "normal." And what it really comes down to is that we should really be taking into account the possible effects that these representations are having on100% of today's youth. Virtually almost (again, almost) every young person in the US is exposed to and interacts with some sort of media on a daily basis--using a cell phone, playing a video game, surfing the Web, or watching television. Today's youth are growing up in an increasingly media-saturated culture and we have a responsibility to help them learn how to successfully navigate their lives through the unprecedented products, behaviors, and activities now being "the norm" in the 21st century.
2. Understanding digital footprints & increasing awareness about digital citizenship:
On August 10, 2012, an article was published on the Bloomberg Businessweek website entitled, "The Very Real Perils of Rich Kids on Social Networks". The article provides an account of how some recent online activities of Alexa and Zachary Dell, daughter and son of Michael Dell (of Dell computers), got them their 15 minutes of Internet fame as well as a terminated Twitter account after Alexa posted a photo of her brother in their private jet, heading to Fiji on RKOI. It was later discovered that this was just one of numerous photographs and statuses containing personal information about her family's whereabouts and activities that she'd posted over the last few months. Mr. Dell pays almost $3 million a year for security protection of his family, so needless to say, this breach of security from an insider was probably both alarming and upsetting. This article provides a powerful illustration and example not only of how quickly information spreads via new media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, but more importantly how easily this information can directly challenge others' efforts of enforcing tangible security measures. In addition, and most importantly, this article serves as an excellent example of the lack of awareness and/or regard that young people tend to have for the often permanent digital footprints that they create as a result of their online activities, particularly on social networking sites. And while some may argue that there are greater implications when the rich (and not necessarily famous) upload pictures of everything from party invitations with the date, time, and location to license plate numbers (all of which can easily and automatically be geo-tagged) to the Twittersphere, the reality is that this online behavior/activity of constantly over-sharing details about their lives can have very real consequences, regardless of one's social class. In a recent New York Times article on the recent upsurge of 20-somethings sharing TMI (too much information) in the workplace, Peggy Klaus, an author and executive coach of corporate training programs explains,
Social media have made it the norm to tell everybody everything...MANY people blame narcissistic baby-boomer parents for raising children with an overblown sense of worth, who believe that everything they say or think should be shared. When I told a British colleague that many Americans were starting to realize that they reveal way too much about themselves, he gave a full-throated laugh and said, “Finally!”
While our first instinct may be to want to protect youth, the takeaway here is not that we need to shield young people from the media tools and content that might cause them to engage in risky activities and behaviors. Instead, we should regard the situation with the Dell children and the realities of the millennial generation outlined by Klaus as important illustrative examples of the fast-forward-moving trajectory that our society and culture is travelling on. As educators, parents, and adults in the 21st century, we have an opportunity and obligation to use these examples to engage the youth in our lives in conversations about digital citizenship, which can include topics of online safety and privacy, cyberbullying, and copyright fair use of online information; media literacy, understanding how and why media messages are constructed and how they can influence beliefs and behaviors; and digital literacy, how to read and evaluate information online.
Use the images on RKOI to ask youth about who they think the image is intended for, what attracts their attention, what lifestyles and behaviors are represented, how different people might interpret the images and messages differently, and what they think may have been left out of the image and why? A conversation about the composition of both the photographs and the website itself—having students think critically about representation, communication, and production—could be integrated into an English lesson on writing about and showing one’s lived experiences through words and images; a social studies lesson on the powerful images and messages from the Civil Rights Movement, juxtaposing them with the very different content displayed on RKOI (in which case, it would also be crucial and a unique way to address issues of race, gender, and class as they relate to both sets of images and messages); or a computers and technology lesson focusing on the dos and don’ts of web-design.
The bottom line is that we must have conversations, many multi-layered conversations, with each other and with youth about sites like RKOI: about the activities and lifestyles represented, as well as the online and offline behaviors fueling the creation of and participation in such sites. It is ok and very normal to want to protect our youth from the unknown, but we’re doing ourselves and them a disservice if we think that leaving these unprecedented realities unaddressed is better than sinking our teeth into them in order to proactively figure all of this out, and we need to do it together--parents and children, teachers and students, peers to peers, or else we're never going to get anywhere.
Emily Bailin is a doctoral student at Teachers College, Columbia University. She's also an an educator, consultant, and public speaker motivated by a passion and determination to collaborate, create, and sustain culturally relevant and socially just pedagogy with other educators to better serve increasingly diverse 21st century learners. You can follow her on Twitter at @emilybailin