Adolescent Interview

I recently interviewed a 16 year old girl from a suburb in Long Island.  For the most part, I would initially describe her as fairly typical in her use of technology and networked media, at least in the common perception, but upon further review I have found her responses fresh and perhaps atypical of people her age, mainly in the amount of time that she uses social media.  Her use and integration of networked environments in her life is fairly utilitarian and her responses have exhibited that.  She has successfully utilized technology so that it is maximizes utility while she appropriately separates it from other parts of her life.  Her success is through a hierarchy of methods of communication that she has created, being that some communicative tools are more appropriate for some situations that others.  

The notion of informality that comes up with text messages is interesting  and the fact that people have different roles in her life with different attachments is also refreshing.  Too many times people blame text messaging and shorthand for the shortcomings of adolescent writing but as of this conversation, I think that there are other factors involved.  I think it is also interesting because as the common perception of students/adolescents is toward their attachment of technology and using it more and more in their everyday life, these young people still have a great anchor in the technologies of the past, books, physical human interaction, etc.  The dialogue that is listed below is honest and telling of how she and other students her age find the application of emerging technologies, the usefulness of them, and the hurdles in their applications in school.

How old are you?
Sixteen.

What are the top 3 forms of social media that you use?
Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr

Do you have a favorite software or app?
Yes, Instagram

How often per weekday do you use social media?
Around once or twice a day

What is one piece of technology you couldn't live without and why?
I can't live without my cell phone because with it I can access news immediately, and I enjoy using it for the occasional welcomed distraction and entertainment.

Do you enjoy being always connected to some kind of network?
Yes, I don't like missing out on stories that my close friends are talking about and the pictures that they post.  Having the ability to always be in the "know" is very nice.

Do you like time without technology and why?
I like it, I think its important to put boarders on technology and its important to spend time with friends and family without distractions.

Briefly name two situations when you wouldn't send a text message to someone, besides emergencies.
I usually don't send text messages to my friends except when something does not require conversation, like confirmations, yes and no questions.  I value talking to people "voice to voice".  I also wouldn't send a text message to most adults because I think it is too informal.

Are you more likely to pick up a book or digital reader?
I am more likely to pick up a book because for some reason, I am hesitant about picking up digital readers because of the fact that I can get distracted by other things on it.

Do you think digital media defines you well or speaks clearly as to who you see yourself as?
I don't let that happen because I fell that people would have a better understanding of who I am meeting me face to face.  I also don't like the idea that anyone on the internet could access information about me.

Would you like to see digital technology used more or less in school?
I would like to see it used less in school because even though iPads make things very accessible, most students do not use them appropriately in class and teachers are hesitant about the switch to a paperless classroom because when there is a problem with technology it seems like it is more disabling than when there is a snafu with papers.  The margin of error is huge with technology.

Word Association:
(We then did some word associations to see what her "knee jerk" reaction was to the following words.)

Friend: Fun
Facebook: Notifications
MySpace: Old
Twitter: Tweet
Book: Read

Media Education

     Let me preface this by saying that this is not my first experience with the idea that the type of media and the media itself are part of the message that is conveyed.  When I first read the Medium is the Message in 2003, I was a bit too young and consequently not serious about the meanings of his work.  I felt as if he were speaking of us living in some dystopian society, but I didn't see my world as such.  Even though I thought he was a bit too abstract and extreme, I realized that there was some truth in what he was saying.  As I go back to what McLuhan has said and the messages that he conveyed, especially in the world today, I am even more interested in the way that as he was describing the media he saw in his day, how applicable it is the to media today.  The more I realize, the more I see that the predictions he made were not just loosely grabbing at the ideas of evolving technology he saw but he has a solid foundation of the ideals of networked media and all they have come to mean.  I can see how technology has a meaning and why an email is so much different from a tweet, how the limits of 140 characters assigns a different meaning to a message that can be pages long, how a Snap chat message and its temporality has so much more meaning than a regular picture taken and saved on a phone.  By this same rationale, I can see how print images, and their freeze of a moment in time is much more different than a commercial.  By this logic, we need to educate our youth so that they fully understand the media around them and how it can be manipulative in its message.      

     I have really become enamored by his notion of the Global Village, and all the connections that he makes in regard to it.  The "globality" of our culture is amazing and I do not think that people realize how connected we really are and how that has shifted to what it was before.  Even the advent of amazing sources of transportation can not even remotely compare to the immediacy that technology allocates to us.  "Push a button and the world is yours" is such a groundbreaking statement, even at this time, because we ultimately have a whole world's worth of resources at our finger tips.  He says, "everywhere is your neighborhood" and the "world is more familiar" now.  Also, as brought out by Olivia Kruger, in her book Gaia, God, and the Internet: The History of Evolution and the Utopia of Community in Media Society, McLuhan likens his metaphorical comparison to a village as oppose to a town because in a village, interpersonal relationship are closer and that is level of closeness that we are with the advent of new technology(p. 154).     

     He also discusses the transition that we went through as a civilization and how books, an old medium/gadget, was as closed a medium aw we could get.  The people that were "with it" understood books.  The reader would sit alone, scan a line, and the ideas are conveyed one at a time.  This activity was private.  In the advent of broadcast television, the world has become more tribal and has moved away from the individual man, and man has lost his private identity.  This loss of identity has made us move toward being part of the conglomerate and tribalizing as a single entity as oppose to everyone being their own single entity.  "We are moving toward a collective, without any individual consciousness," McLuhan states on his interview about the Global Village, and he surmised that there is "no harmony, we are concerned with everyone else's business."  It is for this reason that advertising has become so invasive and effective in our world today.  It is obvious that as we move toward togetherness and what we deem equality, we would seek to keep that equality and advertising manipulates that feeling that we would need to "keep up with the Jones".  

     While McLuhan has been very accurate with the underlying descriptions of media meaning, I would like to ask him some questions and see his responses.  A question that I had, in terms of today's media is what he thinks of how it is steadily dissolving from a top down structure to a bottom up structure where the singularity of message is no longer what it once was.  How instead of corporations having complete control of "broadcast" media, the people are beginning to have that control as content producers instead of mere consumers.  I think that it is possible that he thinks that in a subversive manner those higher ups still have control, but I guess the optimist in me sees a slightly less dystopian society in our future, one where control will live in those who deserve it.  I see us moving out of the Global village, where even though we still have communication over far distances, we begin to close ourselves to more like minded people and make small communities over our networked public.

Marshall Mcluhan Speaks – Centennial 2011, Global Village (1968), Retrieved from http://marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/sayings/1968-global-village.php

Marshall Mcluhan Speaks – Centennial 2011, Global Village (1977), Retrieved from 

from http://marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/sayings/1977-global-village.php

Olivia Krueger, Gaia, God, and the Internet: The History of Evolution and the Utopia of Community in Media Society http://www.jstor.org/stable/27643256