'Kids' Informal Learning with Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Cultures' is a three year collaborative project funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Carried out by researchers at University of Southern California and University of California, Berkeley, the digital youth project explores how kids use digital media in their everyday lives. Read more

The work on this site is licensed under a CC-BY-NC. If you share or re-use any work found on the site, please credit the original author and the Digital Youth Project and link back to the Digital Youth Project.
Photo Credits: Ritchie Ly and Geert Allegaert.
I found myself excitedly rushing to catch the First Annual Vloggie Award Ceremony held at the Swedish American Hall in the Castro district of San Francisco on November 4, 2006. After fighting through traffic and finally finding parking I found a seat in the already dark theater where the audience was assembled and ready for the ceremony to begin. A bank of cameras lined the back wall, and a giant screen adorned the front where the emcees for the evening—Irina Slutsky and Daniel McVicar—introduced the presenters of the awards. Palpable excitement filled the room in anticipation of the event, which in many ways resembled the form and structure of the Academy Awards. In other ways, however, the celebration was quite different. The simultaneous similarities and differences seen in many aspects of the event signify that the vlogging community is in some respects in transition between patterning themselves after old media models while exploring alternative ways of producing, exchanging, and viewing new media content and forms across what some call emerging “internets.”