Digital Media & Learning Series
In 2007, the MacArthur Foundation will publish a series of volumes about Digital Media & Learning. You can access the series title via the MIT Press website here. As of late November, the Series page just shows the web catalog for the six titles; but by December 10 there will be links available to the posted content. Chapters may be separately downloaded.The series, as well as the major funding intiative, is meant to explore "how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life." In keeping with the ambitious scale of the $50 million in funding, the foundation seeks to be help found new field of knowledge and learning. The foundation has also created the Spotlight blog for updates on this new field. Pictured here, some of the authors work on their chapters for the series during a meeting in Newark, NJ in September, 2006.
Chapter 6 - "Race, Civil Rights & Hate Speech in the Digital Era"
Abstract: White supremacist hate groups are present online and this is cause for concern on a number of levels. Hate speech online can do real harm to real people in real life. For committed extremists, the Internet is a resource for showcasing hate propaganda and for communication, command and control (C3) between and among members. Much of this C3 activity occurs behind password-protected privacy walls online and not on the public web. While a good deal of writing, both scholarly and mainstream, voices alarm about “recruitment” as a chief cause for apprehension, in my view, this should be less of a worry about youth who are online than the larger problems of critically understanding the epistemologies of both white supremacy and digital media. This chapter ends with a call for multiple literacies in digital media and critical thinking about race, racism and white supremacy, especially in the U.S. where white people, in particular, tend to be naïve about matters of race.
Download a free PDF version of this chapter here.
Learning Race and Ethnicity
Anna Everett, Editor
Table of Contents: 8 Chapters
Overview/Chapter Introduction (situates contemporary and historical concerns about race matters in the digital age, with a special focus on the significance for youth of digital culture’s engagement with race, ethnicity, identity politics, and the unbearable whiteness of cyberspace)
Part I: Future Visions and Excavated Pasts
1. Dara N. Byrne
Title: “The Future of (the) Race: Identity and the Rise of Computer-mediated Public Spheres”
Despite the hype of and hope for color-blind digital spaces, this essay reveals the fact of renewed interest in and practices of community building specifically dedicated to racial and ethnic identity positions, particularly post-Sept. 11. Using case studies such as Asian-Avenue.com, Blackplanet.com, and Miguente.com, this essay follows these sites' respective discussion threads to understand the persistence of such racialized online communities.
2. Tyrone D. Taborn
Title: “Finding Tomorrow’s Progress in the Past: How Yesterday’s Minority Technology Innovators Stand to Conquer the Modern-Day Digital Divide”
This essay provides an historical overview of key technology leaders and innovators from underrepresented groups, and the importance of excavating and incorporating these often ignored histories into educational programs targeting young people.
Part II: Oppositional Art Practices in the Digital Domain
3. Raiford Guins
Title: “Turn Off That Goddamn Radio: Technicity, Digital Democracy, Internet and Wireless Music Distribution”
This essay explores how contemporary youth culture, particular hip hop music entrepreneurs, increasingly use the Internet to circulate politically conscious rap, and other modes non-conformist messages and images beyond the legal, economic, and social restrictions governing mainstream radio broadcasting, the MTV and other big media conglomerates, and the Big Box distribution chains like Wal-Mart.
Perspective: Humanities, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, African American Literature, New Media Theory
4. Chela Sandoval and Guisela Latorre
Title: “Decolonial Cyber Consciousness: Judy Baca's Digital Artwork with Community Youth”
This essay tracks an important shift in the history of Chicano/a community muralism in California as the popular art practice migrates from the real community spaces to the digital realm. Through an analysis of Chicana mural artists,Judy Baca’s work with Chicano/a youth from the 1970s to the present day, this project considers how under Baca’s tutelage, Chicana girls are empowered to participate in virtual and real life community art and activism usually dominated by Chicano boys and men as popular muralists and taggers. Framed by Chela Sandoval’s influential works on “methodologies of the oppressed”,and decolonizing cyberspace pedagogy, the essay combines digital media theory and praxis as manifest in contemporary Chicano/a communities.
5. Antonio Lopez
Title: “Chakaruna: Bridging Native America and Digital Media Literacy”
This essay considers how media education is being practiced in First Nation or Native-American communities at the moment that the War on Terror functions to redirect funding away from community tech centers among the nation’s underserved minority populations. Of particular interest here is how digital learning occurs not in school, but in untraditional environments.
Part III: New Digital Archetypes: Cyber Hate, Online Gaming, and E-Health
6. Jessie Daniels
Title: “Race, Civil Rights and Hate Speech in the Digital Era”
This essay investigates how “cloaked websites” published by hate groups appropriate discourses and images of racial, ethnic and religious minorities to spread virulent anti-Semitism and other hate propaganda. Among the key concerns at work here is the development of educational strategies designed to impart 21st century critical thinking skills for adolescents who often are unprepared for these new modes of recruitment into regimes of hate.
7. Douglas Thomas
Title: “KPK, Inc.: Emergent Cultures in Online Games”
This essay considers the resurgence of destructive nationalist sentiments in massively multiplayer online gaming (MMOG) even in this age of global media culture. At issue in this study of the MMOG, Diablo II is how racial bigotry becomes the motive force behind American gamers craft strategies to thwart Korean gamers’ abilities to continue gameplay because the American youths blamed the Korean youths for destabilizing the server and disrupting the games pleasure principles.
8. Mohan J. Dutta
Title: “Health Disparity and the Racial Divide Among the Nation’s Youth: Internet as an Equalizer?”
This essay looks at the intersection of technology access and use among minority youth and the pervasiveness of Internet health information. Of particular concern is how online health seeking among the nation’s young adults from underrepresented or minority groups mirror general patterns of health disparities within the national health care system. The essay seeks to build a model of online health seeking that incorporates both general and social divisions and individual uses and expectations of e-health.