From Tara McPherson – Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected (2008)

“A Rule Set for the Future”

“The six rules or maxims outlined here form a conceptual rule set for an emergent field, highlighting key issues and concerns. While the idea of a rule set may sound prescriptive, in computing usage rule sets are often highly flexible and contingent. They are meant to be tailored and adjusted for concrete applications and to mutate over time.” (19)

1. Remember History
“[Innovation] and its outcomes are not unique properties born of the digital era. Many of the richest studies emerging from [STS and ANT] and related traditions cast an eye to history in order to better understand the present. Such an attitude is in woefully short supply in much of the contemporary rhetoric about digital technologies.” (5)

2. Consider context
“[Careful] attention to context can help us better assess what social practices and technological forms are changing . . . [Technology] is shaped by history and sociocultural realities, and is also a shaper of those realities and of possible futures.” (7)

3. Make the Future (Hands-On)
“[The] pleasures and possibilities of experimenting with digital media technologies . . . include a privileging of process over product, a sensation of mobility and control, a feeling of networked sociality, a heightened awareness of audience, learning by doing or tinkering, and an impression of mutability and transformation.” (10)

4. Broaden Participation
“[Shouldn't we] consider . . . that these market economies may not, in and of their own accord, promote or sustain the most compelling aspects of [digital media]? . . . These are pressing ethical and social questions: we need to create structures and supports — from hands-on tools to open peer-to-peer systems to curricula — that mobilize the gains in imagination, creativity, and hope that our interactions with mutable, variable technologies animate. [As noted by Sandvig and Streeter,] a lack of sustained engagement with policy issues by youthful early adopters was a major factor in the shutting down of the democratic potential of earlier media.” (13)

5. Foster Literacies
“For [Livingstone], literacy is ‘a situated form of knowing that bridges individual skill and social practices.’ She then details how literacy in the digital age poses particular challenges and urges the combination of two schools of thought on literacy: information literacy and media literacy.” 15)

“We should insist that emergent digital literacies (and the learning environments that support them) need to work in the service of democratic engagement and empowered citizenship, which includes an ability to reflect on corporate culture and not simply to aspire to be a part of it.” (16)

6. Learn to Toggle
“[We] need to learn to toggle fluidly back and forth across scales [and must] develop hybrid methodologies.” (17)