How the Digital Youth are Impacting Pop Culture
This week was the last week of school. There was not a lot of rigourous learning activities occuring in my classrom at this point in the year and so students had more time to engage in free play. Free play for middle school students typically means one thing: being on their phone. They are either texting, scrolling Instagram, or learning new Tik Tok dances to record. My students are constantly using and producing content on social media. However, I do not believe it is in the same level or type of contribution that Burns imagined when he coined the term "produsage". When pondering this discussion I looked to Youtube for some advice and found this video regarding produsage and producerly.
Essentially, the video focuses on how consuming and producing content on social media is what feeds pop culture. As I am typing this post, I am realizing that I was wrong. Our digital youth DO contribute in similar ways to what Burns imagined. They might not be giving sharing though provoking tweets about the current political climate, but they are creating memes, videos, and trends that contribute to pop culture. The digital youth are ulitmately leading the charge in what is trendy in pop culture through their produsage on social media.
Without their contributions we wouldn't end up with any of those cool Tik Tok dances or gut-wrenching memes. They are the reasons some artists have become more than just Tik Tok sensations and singers. Don't believe me? Just check out this Tik Tok 2020 dance challenge complition,
As for education, knowing our youth are enaging in this produsage (many at a young age), it is important for digital citizenship to be embedded into curriculum. Students don't know the long lasing impact of their digital footprint or that the internet is not their own person journal to share every detail of their life. From personal experience, I have had many conversations with students about deleting posts from their profile include vulgar language, signs, or other inappropriate content. Just as we have to teach them right from wrong, we will have to teach them what does or does not belong on social media.
Thought-provoking post, Micah--your point about how students are contributing to pop culture gets me thinking about how the kind of content they're creating holds the potential to provide them with the skills they'll need to particpate in a content-driven economy. From social media marketing to journalism to eLearning professionals, so many career paths now depend on content creation skills, many of which people are already practicing, in a sense, as they use social media. However, I suppose AI is already disrupting the content economy, but that's a whole other can of worms. Regardless, I appreciated reading about how you've come to think of your students' recreational activities in a new light.
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