Alicia Blum-Ross

Utilising insight journalism for community technology design

We describe the process of insight journalism, in which local amateur journalists were used to generate unique insights into the digital needs of a community. We position this as a means for communities to represent themselves to designers, both as a method of designing community technologies and as a first step towards supporting innovation at a local level. To demonstrate insight journalism, we present two case studies of community technologies that were directly inspired, informed and evaluated by journalistic content. Based on this experience, we evaluate the role that insight journalism can play in designing for communities, the particular characteristics that it lends to the design process and how it might be employed to support sustainable community innovation.

“Sharenting,” parent blogging, and the boundaries of the digital self

ABSTRACT This article asks whether “sharenting” (sharing representations of one’s parenting or children online) is a form of digital self-representation. Drawing on interviews with 17 parent bloggers, we explore how parents define the borders of their digital selves and justify what is their “story to tell.” We find that bloggers grapple with profound ethical dilemmas, as representing their identities as parents inevitably makes public aspects of their children’s lives, introducing risks that they are, paradoxically, responsible for safeguarding against. Parents thus evaluate what to share by juggling multiple obligations—to themselves, their children in the present and imagined into the future, and to their physical and virtual communities. The digital practices of representing the relational self are impeded more than eased by the individualistic notion of identity instantiated by digital platforms, thereby intensifying the ambivalence of both parents and the wider society in judging emerging genres of blogging the self.

Filmmakers/Educators/Facilitators? Understanding the Role of Adult Intermediaries in Youth Media Production in the UK and the USA

The possibilities that making “their own” media might contain for engaging young people in learning has been celebrated in recent years, while the role of adult intermediaries in guiding these projects remains too often obscured. Here, I draw on several years of ethnographic research conducted in the UK and the USA to distinguish among three different types of facilitators: guides who privilege processes over outputs; collaborators who position themselves within an egalitarian team; and mentors, who draw on specialist knowledge to encourage young people to make “high quality” films. I assess the impact of these different modes on the central claims made for youth media as a means of developing skills, critical media literac(ies), and encouraging youth “voice.” Although youth media organizations struggling with sustainability often conflate these practices, these approaches lend themselves to achieving diverse aims and thus differences could be better delineated by facilitators and by funders in order to realize the ambitions proposed by youth media projects.

Analyzing youth digital participation: aims, actors, contexts and intensities

ABSTRACT Participation is often used as a blanket term that is uncritically celebrated; this is particularly true in the case of youth digital participation. In this article, we propose a youth-focused analytical framework, applicable to a wide variety of youth digital participation projects, which can help facilitate a more nuanced understanding of these participatory practices. This framework analyzes the aims envisioned for youth participation, the actors and contexts of these activities, and the variable levels of participatory intensity, in order to more accurately assess the forms and outcomes of youth digital participation. We demonstrate the value of this framework by applying it to two contemporary cases of digital youth participation: an informal online community (Nerdfighters) and a formalized educational initiative (CyberPatriot). Such analyses facilitate normative assessments of youth digital participation, which enable us to better assess what participation is good for, and for whom.