Work

Lead Author: Mizuko Ito

In her research on Silicon Valley families, Heather Horst writes about the Smith family, who “view digital media as a tool for their children’s personal and professional life.” One of the two daughters is a budding musician who writes her own music and performs at local venues. Her older sister is an accomplished dancer and writer who uses the skills learned while attending The Girls Technology Academy to help her father digitally record, edit, burn, and distribute CDs of her sister’s performances. For the Smith family, digital media production is a creative hobby that they engage in together as well as an activity that is intimately tied to future career aspirations for the children (Horst 2007). Another Silicon Valley teen, a 19-year-old Filipino and Japanese American, has been a leader of a fansubbing group since high school. At the time of our interview, he was taking time off from college to help out in his technology-related family business. “If I didn’t stop school and help out, we’d be in serious trouble now,” he explains. At the same time, he is still continuing his unpaid “work” in fansubbing, managing a team of more than a dozen staff who churn out subtitled anime every week for eager fans. His technical expertise serves him across multiple domains of work, some paid, some unpaid.

These examples of engagement with new media point to certain domains of practice that have not been covered by the other chapters in this volume. The focus of our project has been on learning in relation to youth practices of play, socializing, and creative experimentation. As we have pursued this research, however, we are finding that new media also have important implications for how young people engage in activities that they see as “serious” or productive work, or that have a role in preparing them for jobs in the future. The promotion of new media use among youth is often justified in terms of skills training for “competitiveness” in the twenty-first-century workplace (Drucker 1994; Florida 2003) and parents, educators, and kids often describe their relationship to learning and new media in these terms. In addition to this educative, future-oriented role of technology engagement, new media also have an important influence on the here-and-now of at least some of the more digitally mobilized youth we have met through our research. One of the important roles that new media play in the lives of youth is in providing access to experiences of volunteerism and work that give them a greater sense of autonomy and efficacy than those avenues of work that have previously been available to U.S. teens.

This chapter describes these different dimensions of new media and work: how new media engagement operates as a site of “training” and preparatory work as well as how it becomes a vehicle for new forms of volunteerism, nonmarket labor, and new media ventures. The effort is to capture those new media activities characterized by a productive or seriousness of purpose, where play, socializing, and “messing around” begin to shade into “work,” “real responsibility,” and economic gain. We draw primarily from studies that look at the everyday lives of youth in families (Katynka Martínez, Computer Club Kids and Animation around the Block; Christo Sims, Rural and Urban Youth; Lisa Tripp and Becky Herr-Stephenson, Los Angeles Middle Schools), and studies of gaming and fan production (Rachel Cody, Final Fantasy XI; Becky Herr-Stephenson, Harry Potter Fandom; Heather Horst and Laura Robinson, Neopets; Mizuko Ito, Anime Fans; Patricia Lange, YouTube and Video Bloggers), and youth media production (Judd Antin, Dan Perkel, and Christo Sims, The Social Dynamics of Media Production; Dilan Mahendran, Hip-Hop Music Production). After first providing a conceptual framework for our understanding of the relationship between new media, youth, and work, the chapter describes three categories of work-related practice: training, entrepreneurship, and nonmarket work.

Work, Youth, and Media

Our understandings of what work or labor means in relation to children and youth are diverse and contested within different scholarly communities. Although it is not our intention here to review this body of work or to formulate our own definitions, we would like to take a moment to contextualize our descriptions and outline the boundaries of what we address in this chapter. In the United States, youth are largely shut out from the primary labor market, but they still engage in a wide range of activities that are could be recognized as work, varying from schoolwork to chores to part-time jobs in the service sector. Researchers have argued that we run the risk of erasing youth contributions to our economy and productive labor if we insist on categorically excluding certain forms of youth activity from our definitions of work (Orellana 2001; Qvortrup 2001). Activities such as “helping” at home or in class often are not counted as work, although they are clearly productive labor (Orellana 2001). Our definitions of work are further complicated by the fact that even play is often defined as “the work of childhood” (Seiter 1993), and “serious” extracurricular activities such as volunteer activities, music lessons, and sports can also be considered “work” by children and parents. Narrow definitions of work would limit the discussion to activity that has clear economic outcomes, while broader definitions could include activity that is more general to any productive or compulsory activity, such as the work of education (Qvortrup 2001). Educational, preparatory work is what Jens Qvortrup (2001) has argued is the most important kind of economically productive activity that children engage in—preparing themselves as future workers. While we might hesitate to call schooling and extracurricular activities “work” in the traditional sense, it is important to acknowledge the ways in which this “prep work” is part of the cultivation of skills and dispositions that will serve youth as they move into jobs and careers. These diverse accounts of what constitutes work are all important reference points in understanding the discourses and practices of work that we encountered in our case studies.

Children and youth represent a special case in discussions of labor and work. As with other industrialized countries, the United States has a well-established set of laws and social norms that limit children and youth’s access to certain categories of work. The shift toward education as defining the primary work of teens was a constitutive element of the definition of adolescence as a unique life stage (Hine 2000). Although teens may have the right to take jobs, they do not always have access to the jobs that they imagine for themselves in their future as adults. Jim McKechnie and Sandy Hobbs (2001:10) have argued that compulsory education did not force adolescents out of employment. Rather “it has moved the main forms of employment from full-time to part-time and changed the nature of that employment.” They point out that the majority of youth in industrialized countries work in a part-time capacity, often negotiating tensions with their “primary” occupation as students. Phillip Mizen, Christopher Pole, and Angela Bolton (2001:19) describe the work available to adolescents today as “unskilled work around the edges of the formal labour market,” typically retail, distribution, catering, and fast food. The United States is characterized by a dual track in terms of youth relationships between schooling and work. While more privileged youth typically engage in “low intensity” work and give priority to an academic pathway, lower-income youth more typically take a pathway that “leads directly from high intensity high school employment to full-time adult employment” (Hansen, Mortimer, and Krüger 2001:133). These structural conditions of youth and labor are an important backdrop to kids’ engagements with new media work.

New media add some unique wrinkles to our understandings of youth and work. For starters, in public debates surrounding education and new media, the issue of job preparation is often central to the discourse. These approaches are framed by the expectation that education should be the primary work of childhood, and new media learning is validated by the expectation that it will translate to job-relevant skills in the future. All of the structured educational efforts around new media that we observed are justified, at least in part, by the argument that they are helping to develop job-relevant skills. Programs that have an equity agenda are often funded as efforts to provide disadvantaged children and youth with remedial access to high-tech skills. At the same time, there is a growing recognition that digital media skills are largely cultivated in the home and other more informal and social settings (Seiter 2007). Schools are not the dominant sites of access to these forms of preparatory “training” with new media and information technology. Privileged homes take new technology for granted, integrating computer use seamlessly into their everyday routines and domestic spaces. They see new media engagement as part of a more general stance of participation in public life, not necessarily those that are focused on job skills. By contrast, low-income families struggle to keep up with the rising bar for participation in an increasingly high-tech ecology of culture and knowledge. These ways in which new media play into practices that participants see as preparatory for jobs and careers is the first descriptive category for this chapter. This is a set of practices we call “training.” This includes learning activities that are pursued in both formal and informal educational settings, though our focus is on the latter.

The second set of work practices that we have encountered in our case studies are those that are directly tied to economic activity. This would include jobs that rely on digital media and small economic ventures that were started by youth. Because of our focus on informal learning, most of our cases are on the latter—youth-driven forms of economic activity that we call new media “entrepreneurism.” In other words, digital and networked media have opened up opportunities for economic activity for young people that are not part of the existing ghettoes of youth labor, but rather involve young people’s mobilizing and “hustling” to market their new media skills in a more entrepreneurial vein. These new forms of accessibility to entrepreneurial opportunity are the second wrinkle that new media add to the landscape of youth and work. While some of these activities are tied to existing genres of youth labor—such as the marketing of youth “talent” or getting paid for “helping” in the local and community setting, other enterprising youth are disrupting expectations about the categories of economic activity that youth should engage in. In all of these cases, though, the substantial technology expertise of some young people challenges the assumption that youth labor is necessarily unskilled or preparatory, demonstrating that they can make contributions that exceed the capacity of many local adults.

Much of the productive labor of childhood is in the domain of what we call “nonmarket work”—volunteerism, helping in the home, noncommercial production, labor in virtual economies, and hobbies. Although not tied to economic gain, these activities involve commitments that participants consider in the vein of “jobs” and “serious responsibilities” to produce work and contribute labor. For kids in lower-income and immigrant households, nonmarket work is often dominated by domestic labor, and girls shoulder a disproportionate amount of these forms of work (Orellana 2001). For more privileged youth, it tends to have a more preparatory dimension. Many of the in-school and organized extracurricular activities that young people engage in are not directly tied to job and career aspirations but are part of what Annette Lareau (2003) has described as “concerted cultivation,” as described in the chapter on Families. These are activities that immerse children and youth in cultures of competition, achievement, and public participation that are key to certain modes of social success. Although this chapter does not deal substantively with school-based work or practices of concerted cultivation, these preparatory activities are a backdrop and often a trajectory into nonmarket work.

This last set of practices introduces what is perhaps the most intriguing and significant wrinkle that new media bring to young people’s experience of work. In digital-culture studies, theorists have been describing the growth of various types of unpaid digital work, including open-source software development (Weber 2003), “non-market peer production” (Benkler 2006), “crowdsourcing” (Howe 2006),[1] virtual economies (Castronova 2001; Dibbell 2006), and other forms of noncommercial free culture (Lessig 2004). In many of these kinds of new media work practices, the unpaid labor of youth is a significant factor. Our case studies describe how these practices are being driven forward by the interests and social practices of youth from wired households. The opportunities that youth have to participate in new forms of creative work was discussed in the chapter on Creative Production.

Here we look more broadly at the range of different ways that young people work in virtual worlds and with new media, motivated by reputation, learning goals, a sharing ethic, and their own satisfaction rather than economic gain. Although the free time and online activities of youth are certainly not the only factors driving free culture online, it is one integral component of what theorists have identified as a trend toward exploiting free labor in digital economies (Terranova 2000). Andrew Ross notes how networked media have initiated a process “by which the burden of productive labour is increasingly transferred on to the user or consumer” (Ross 2007:19). Our ethnographic material describes some of the specificities of these trends by describing the unique alchemy between the marginalized role of youth in the labor market and the development of nonmarket forms of collective work. The story cannot be reduced either to a simple equation of empowerment or exploitation as youth gain nonquantifiable social benefits, though they may not be reaping economic ones.

In many ways, the current practices of youth engaged in new media–related work complicate our existing assumptions about youth, labor, work, and the role of educational institutions to prepare youth for the workplace. First, the cases we describe challenge the assumptions that the appropriate role of youth work is in preparatory educational contexts or in unskilled labor. Youth media production and ventures, when combined with the distribution capacity of the Internet, means that the nonmarket work of childhood is channeled in broader networks that can challenge the authority of existing industry models. New media practices are becoming a vehicle for some youth to exercise more agency in defining the terms of their own work practices. The new media skills and talents that these kids are exhibiting make the productive labor (as opposed to preparatory work) of childhood more visible (at least in the new media domain), and they challenge the status of educational institutions in defining the training of youth for high-tech work. This in turn is tied to structural changes in certain forms of economic exchange activities, in which the business models of creative industries are being undermined by user-generated content and peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing. In other words, domains of creative work that were considered almost exclusively the province of commercial efforts are being partially displaced by the work of creative hobbyists who are not necessarily seeking monetary rewards. While we do not see evidence that new media practices are leading to any fundamental reordering of the conditions of economic inequity, we are seeing some indicators that the interfaces between the productive and preparatory work of childhood are being renegotiated through these practices.

Training

Although our work has focused on learning in informal settings, a number of our case studies did examine media-education programs in schools and after-school centers, and we had many opportunities to speak to kids and parents about how they thought computers contributed to their schoolwork and their future careers. Computers and media-related expertise intersect in complicated and sometimes contradictory ways with how parents, educators, and kids believe young people should be prepared for schooling and jobs. In her analysis of how computer-based pedagogy relates to young people’s school performance and future careers, Ellen Seiter argues that educators and technology boosters often fail to take into account the contexts of structural inequity that usually overwhelm the benefits of technology access that educational programs might provide. She argues, “the barriers that make the dream of winning something like a ‘cool job’ in new media a very distant one for working class students” (Seiter 2007:28). At the same time, she describes how technology-based educational programs are justified by exactly this promise of social mobility. In Seiter’s view, the resources that middle-class and elite children have at home, in contexts of concerted cultivation, are what determine cultural and social capital in relation to digital media and the ability to parlay fun engagement with digital media to careers in the “new economy.” Educators who are fighting for social-equity agendas have always faced an uphill battle against the entrenched structures of social and cultural distinction that extend well beyond the classroom walls; we have no reason to believe that simply introducing technology to this equation is going to transform these structural conditions. In fact, since some of the most cutting-edge technology practices are learned outside of schools, in the private contexts of peer interaction and family life, the equity agenda is made even more challenging from a public-policy perspective.

As we described in the chapter on Media Ecologies, it is difficult to clearly map differences in socioeconomic status to new media fluency. At the same time, we see some patterns in the degree to which computer use is framed in terms of an education-oriented or vocational tool for social mobility, versus one that is an unremarkable and taken-for-granted component of everyday social, recreational, and academic pursuits. In other words, “training” as a genre of computer use tends to be associated with aspirations of upward mobility by less financially privileged families rather than by families who see computers as already deeply embedded in the fabric of the children’s everyday lives. In the earlier chapters of this book, we have described some of the informal settings of peer group, interest group, and family where much of the basic learning and literacy about new media is supported. In these contexts, parents and youth are generally not mobilizing a discourse of vocational training but rather a discourse of enrichment and creativity.

The day-to-day struggles of educators, parents, and kids to chart trajectories through educational institutions and on to jobs and careers need to be contextualized by these structural conditions and by our cultural imaginings and values around technology, achievement, and work. Even before a consideration of whether kids might get a creative-class job, parents and educators hope that computers will give kids a leg up in their educational performance. This often translates to a parental concern that computers should be used for serious educational purposes and not for socializing or play. We observed this tendency most strongly in less privileged families that saw schooling as their primary hope for upward mobility. One parent in Lisa Tripp and Becky Herr-Stephenson’s Los Angeles Middle Schools study explains how she tries to encourage certain forms of computer use in the home for her 13-year-old daughter, Nina, the third of four children. Anita immigrated from Mexico 18 years ago, and her husband is from El Salvador.

Anita: [Mi hija] se pone en la computadora y le digo que la computadora es para hacer tarea, no es para estar buscando cosas en la computadora. Y a veces [mis hijas] se me enojan por eso. Y les digo: “No, la computadora yo se las tengo para que hagan tarea.” A veces les pregunto: “¿tienen tarea?” O: “estás haciendo tarea.” Pero a veces tengo que estar lista a ver qué es lo que están haciendo. Se meten a la Internet y tantas cosas que sale ahí. Y se ponen a
mirar sus amigas y eso. . . . Entonces, es lo que no le gusta a ella que yo le diga: “¿sabes qué? La computadora no es para que andes buscando; es para lo de la escuela.”
[My daughter] sits in front of the computer and I tell her that the computer is for doing homework, not for looking around. And sometimes [my daughters] get mad at me because of that. And then I say, “I got this computer so you could do your homework.” Sometimes I ask, “Do you have homework?” Or, “Are you actually doing your homework.” I have to keep a close eye on them to see what is going on. They get on the Internet, and with so many things there. They look for their girlfriends and all. . . . They don’t like me saying, “You know what? The computer is not for you to be looking around. It is for schoolwork.”

Lisa: ¿Qué es lo que más le preocupa a usted acerca de la Internet y sus hijas?
What is your main concern with the Internet and your daughters?

Anita: Lo que me preocupa . . . ya ve . . . es que salen muchas cosas ahí que se meten con niños, y a veces platican con ellos, y a veces no saben ni qué gente es. Es lo que me preocupa, porque digo “no.” Y a ver qué es lo que están mirando ellos y uno tiene que estar siempre listo con ellos. A veces estoy que les quiero quitar la Internet, pero a veces me dice él: “por su tarea está bien. Porque después van a andar que ‘me voy a hacer tarea,’ ‘que no tengo computadora,’ ‘que no tengo esto.’” Pero es por lo que más peleo ahorita con ellos.
My main concern is . . . you see . . . you hear all the time that people try to reach kids and talk to them. Sometimes [kids] don’t even know who they are talking to. . . . That is my concern. That is why I say, “No.” I need to keep an eye on what they are looking at. I always need to be attentive. Sometimes I feel like canceling the Internet, but my husband says, “It is good to keep it because of their homework. You don’t want them saying ‘I need to go somewhere else to do my homework,’ or ‘I don’t have a computer,’ or ‘I don’t have this.” But this is mostly what I fight about with them these days (Translation by Lisa Tripp).

A father who is raising his two daughters on his own also voices a commitment to educational goals, though he does support his daughters’ use of the Internet for personal communication. Juan has been in the United States for almost 30 years, and he is raising his two younger daughters (11 and 12 years old) on his own while working in a restaurant. They have an older computer at home that they acquired used, and it is not connected to the Internet (though it once was) because of the cost.

Lisa: ¿Usted que cree que la Internet es una buena manera para los niños comunicarse entre ellos, o le preocupa esto?
Do you think that the Internet is a good way for your kids to communicate with their friends or are you worried about that?

Juan: No, es mejor que se comuniquen de esa forma porque les ayuda más a salir adelante. Y también cómo lo tomen ellos. Si lo van a tomar como un juego, esto y lo otro, no. La cosa es que vayan a la cosa seria, que vayan aprendiendo. Con ánimos de seguir adelante en sus estudios, de salir adelante. Sabes que ahorita sin estudios uno no es nada. No es nada. A trabajar, andar limpiando y haciendo acá, sufriendo más si un día no te necesitan. Salir adelante.
No, it is better for them to communicate that way because it is going to help them get ahead. And it also depends how they treat it. If they are going to treat it like a game, then no. But if they take it seriously, they will be learning from it, and it will help them with their studies, and help them get ahead. You know that now without an education you are nothing, nothing. You have to work, clean places, do odd jobs, suffering if one day they don’t need you anymore. [It’s important to try] to get ahead (Translation by Lisa Tripp).

In their work in Los Angeles, Tripp, Herr-Stephenson, and Martínez interacted with parents, teachers, and kids in both the classroom and at home, affording a rare opportunity to look across multiple contexts of media use for particular kids. In the multimedia course that the kids were engaged in, teachers occasionally spoke of the possibility of careers in media, but their goals were generally more immediate and less ambitious. They saw new media production as a way of keeping kids engaged in the classroom, which could in turn keep them from dropping out. They also thought that one side effect of this engagement was that kids would pick up basic reading and writing skills. One teacher describes his first year with the multimedia curriculum: “I think this year, in terms of behavior and classroom management, was one of my best years because I didn’t have to force the kids to be in the classroom.” While at a local classroom level, these educators are doing their best to make the most of the opportunities put forward to their students, the risk, as Renee Hobbs (1998) points out, is that media production can be constructed as a curriculum geared for low-achieving students, who “are allowed to ‘play’ with video-based and computer technologies, while high-ability students get more traditional print-based education.” In other words, while higher-achieving students are engaged with computers and media production as part of a more general media ecology they inhabit, the classroom becomes a place for a more remedial form of media education for students who do not have this cultural capital.

In contrast to the orientation of classroom teachers, educators in youth media programs had a different view of the potential of media education. Educators in the hip-hop program that Mahendran observed (Hip-Hop Music Production) and the video-production program at the Center where Dan Perkel, Christo Sims, and Judd Antin (The Social Dynamics of Media Production) observed saw their roles more in terms of vocational training than in general or remedial education. Media production is tied explicitly to the hope of employment in creative-class jobs, though educators at the Center struggle daily to instill this ethic of professionalism in the media-production process. At times, the goal of producing work in a vocational vein conflicts with the goal of empowerment and the development of youth voice. Hobbs (1998) describes this as a tension between more expressive and vocational forms of media education. Although youth were encouraged to take charge of their own projects, adults would intervene to focus them and orient them toward the goal of creating a polished work. In contrast to the hip-hop program, where youth were motivated by their existing engagements and knowledge of popular culture, youth in the Center’s program had to rely more on the adult educators to set the agenda and provide the cultural capital for their work.

Among youth engaged in youth media programs, we also found some who were deeply pessimistic about what opportunities formal education afforded them, and who saw a more vocational orientation toward digital media as an alternative to a middle-class school-to-work trajectory. One of the participants in Dilan Mahendran’s Hip-Hop Music Production study, Louis, an 18-year-old African American, describes a moment during his first day of high school, referencing a famous scene in the book and the movie The Paper Chase, in which a Harvard Law School dean warns first-year students that most of them will not make it through the program.

Louis: Yeah. When you’re a senior, 80 percent of the people you see right now are going to drop out . . . look to the left and look to the right, because they’re not going to be here.

Dilan: That’s what the teacher said to you?

Louis: Yeah. They set you up for failure. You know what I’m saying? We look to the left and we look to the right, and we laugh about it at that time. We’re like . . . ha, ha, ha. I had my best friend Jerell and my best friend Rob. Sure enough . . .

Dilan: You were 14?

Louis: We were 14, 15 at the time. Sure enough, Jerell drops out in 11th grade and Rob drops out somewhere I think in 11th grade. I dropped out somewhere in the 12th grade. And it’s kind of like they was fucking right. We all dropped out. It was kind of like [inaudible] . . . fuck, they were right. How the fuck did you know? It’s a psych trip. First day of school, of course you’re going to sit with your friends. Of course you’re going to sit with somebody that you identify with. All right, look to your left and look to your right; they ain’t going to be here. Then you go to school every day and it’s like this—fuck up, fuck up, fuck up. . . . That’s how school is.

This same teen is deeply involved in the production of hip-hop in a youth media program. His awareness of certain social structural conditions reflect what Hansen, Mortimer, and Krüger (2001:133) have described as the differential pathways between school and work that are characteristic of the United States. Rather than focusing on an academic pathway, Louis sees the apprenticeship and mentorship of the media-production program as a more compelling alternative. Hansen, Mortiner, and Krüger also note that the United States is distinctive, in comparison to many European countries, in having very few vocational and apprenticeship programs for teens, so they often turn directly toward employment to receive career training. Mahendran notes that the after-school setting is opening the horizon for explicit vocational training in the digital economy, contrasted with high school, which is the horizon of college. In this way, digital-media training and youth efforts can be compared to traditional vocational training such as auto mechanics or HVAC schooling. The programs are a kind of introduction to vocations associated with creative labor.

All of these examples that we encountered in our fieldwork illustrate the ways in which different forms of media and technology engagement are tied to different trajectories of school-to-work for youth. Youth media programs navigate a complicated balance, using media production as a form of remedial classroom work as well as at times framing the programs as vocational training. In both of these stances, it can be a challenge to develop programs that support the development of expressive capacity and voice rather than skills development. In the most promising cases of youth media programs we have observed, these programs can fill a vacuum in apprenticeship and vocational training that is largely absent in the United States. We need to keep in mind, however, that these conditions of engaging with new media differ quite markedly from the opportunities afforded to youth from more highly educated families, who grow up in contexts where high-end technology is within easy reach, and where the adults with whom they regularly interact at home provide expertise and role models for careers in the high-tech workforce. Heather Horst’s study of middle-class families in the Silicon Valley (Silicon Valley Families) describes settings where parents are intimately involved in structuring high-tech environments for informal learning in the home; they are not focused on specific vocational outcomes as we see with youth media programs.

Entrepreneurism

Contemporary childhood in the United States is characterized by a primary focus on play and education rather than on economic activity. At the same time, even after child-labor laws were in full effect in the early twentieth century, there has been a role for working children, particularly as they enter their teenage years (Zelizer 1994). In the latter half of the 1900s, it became common for youth to combine part-time work with their schooling, and studies through the 1990s indicate that approximately 70 percent of teens aged 16–18 have part-time jobs (Hansen, Mortimer, and Krüger 2001). As described earlier, the jobs available to teens are usually part of the unskilled service sector. Historically, paper routes and fast-food jobs are stereotypical forms of teen labor. The high-tech and creative jobs that young people are being prepared for in digital-production programs and through middle-class high-tech cultivation in the home are largely reserved for credentialed adults. This is in line with broader indicators that show that employment in skilled labor is generally unavailable for children and youth (Mizen, Pole, and Bolton 2001). Although our study included many youth with high degrees of technology expertise, we saw only three cases in which they were actually employed in jobs that made use of their technology skills during their teenage years. Technology was more commonly where they spent money; many teens in our study did engage in part-time work, often with the goal of funding their new media habits. The adults in our study who did have new media jobs had new media hobbies as teens but not salaried jobs in new media industries.

Our focus for this section follows from this observed reality. We do not delve into the jobs that teens have or the domestic labor that they perform in the home, since this work has at best a tangential relationship to new media practices. It is beyond the scope of this effort to do justice to the complex realities of young people’s economic lives. The issues surrounding how young people gain and spend money, particularly on media and communications, is a crucial topic that deserves an even more sustained treatment than we can give it in this book. In this section we focus on somewhat more exceptional cases that illustrate the avenues that young people are finding to mobilize new media for economic gain. While the majority of youth in our study did not engage in these innovative new forms of economic activity, the cases that we do have are compelling; they illustrate the emerging potential for activating youth entrepreneurism and real-life learning through online networks of peer-based commerce and media sharing. Unlike training-oriented genres of participation, these entrepreneurial practices involved youth from a variety of different socioeconomic backgrounds (though they were sparsely represented throughout). They also involve kids engaged in productive labor in the here and now rather than as a model of preparatory work or training.

Youth with expertise and interests surrounding media and computers often understand that they have skills that can translate to economic gain. At the same time, their avenues for earning money from these abilities and interests are limited. Until they finish with schooling they do not have the option of fully entering the competitive marketplace for high-tech and media jobs. Among youth whose primary occupation is schooling, and who are interested in capitalizing on their new media skills, we have found three different modes of economic activity: publishing and distribution of creative work, freelancing, and the pursuit of enterprises.

Publishing and Distribution

In our chapter on Creative Production, we have described the ways in which young creators are using online venues as a way of publishing and disseminating their work. While the vast majority of these efforts are not oriented toward immediate economic gain, some of the more entrepreneurial young creators are reaping economic benefits from their creative work. Even if they are not receiving actual revenue, they see online sites such as MySpace, deviantART, or YouTube as spaces where they can promote their careers as musicians, artists, or video makers.

A small number of creators we encountered were successfully making money off their work, either by selling the actual work or by acquiring ad revenue online. As described in the chapter on Creative Production, Patricia Lange’s study (YouTube and Video Bloggers) is peppered with cases in which youth were aspiring to “make it big” through YouTube and were at times successful in monetizing their participation or gaining mainstream attention for their work. Perhaps one of the most visible examples is an 19-year-old Australian woman known as Caitlin Hill,[2] who is ranked 31st among most-subscribed-to YouTubers of all time. Coming from a modest economic background, she used her grandmother’s digital camera to make videos. Her grandmother now comes to her when she has computer problems. As her channel page indicates that she is a YouTube partner, she is presumably receiving a share of ad revenue from ads placed on her YouTube videos. Another youth in Lange’s study, Max (14 years old, white) was contacted by ABC about getting his video shown on television. Although he did not ask to get paid for this, after the ABC appearance other requests started to come in. He explains that now “I’ve gotten pretty good. . . . I’d say ‘Oh. I want to get paid if you’re gonna . . . for my video.’ And they’d be like, ‘Oh. Yeah, we are expecting to pay you,’ and then, we would negotiate about price and stuff like that.” While these cases represent the much-sought-after goal for youth who aspire to media careers, most will acknowledge that it is quite difficult to achieve this level of success on one’s own as a purely garage operation.

In Dilan Mahendran’s study of young hip-hop musicians (Hip-Hop Music Production), he found a strong entrepreneurial spirit among many of the youth he spoke to. Some of the beat makers sold their creations to rappers who would use them for their own song production. Others produced “mixed tapes” of their own work or that of other artists and sold them on public transportation or in other pedestrian areas. Artists can often feel conflicting loyalties over whether they are pursuing their craft for the love of the work or for economic goals, and this is tied into widely recognized tensions between hip-hop culture and the commercial rap industry (Mahiri et al. 2008). Louis gives voice to this ambivalence:

It shouldn’t be about a meal ticket. It’s not always about money. I mean, it’s two ways to do it. It’s either you make music to make music, or you make music to make money. Me? I do both. . . . I know that the music I make, it’s not necessarily going to be accepted by all, because not everybody is going to be able to identify and agree with it. But the thing is, is that in order for that to survive I have to make music that people can identify with, that people are going to listen to.

Although hip-hop may be an example of a form of media in which practitioners have an unusual amount of self-reflexivity regarding the problems of commercialization, many young creators struggle with this boundary between a creative pastime and a more work-oriented commercial stance.

Among the case studies of anime and Harry Potter fans, we have also encountered examples of youth who have successfully capitalized on their creative talents. Although intellectual-property regimes make it difficult for fans to make money off fan-related creative production, there are some niches where economic gain is possible. Becky Herr-Stephenson’s study of Harry Potter fans (Harry Potter Fandom) focuses in part on podcasters who comment on the franchise. Although most podcasters are clearly hobbyists, a small number have become celebrities in the fandom who go on tours, perform “Wizard Rock” music, and in some cases, have gained financial rewards. Mizuko Ito, as part of her study Anime Fans, spoke to Ian Oji, an artist who draws comics as part of a comic writers’ collective. Once a year the group will self-publish a comic anthology that it sells at local anime conventions. All of the large anime conventions will have an “artist’s alley” that will feature young aspiring artists selling their artwork, stickers, T-shirts, pins, and bookmarks for a small fee. These same artists will generally also have online sites that promote their work. In other words, the peer-based spaces of the convention floor and online sites are closely linked; they are spaces for artists to both promote and sell their work in an informal economy.

These kinds of ventures are examples of ways in which youth can make money from some of their creative talents, even if for relatively small economic gains. Youth recognize that it is highly competitive to make a living off their creative talents, but digital media and distribution provide avenues into online distribution and advertising that enable new possibilities for marketing their talents. As described in the Creative Production chapter, most of these ventures stay in the domain of hobbies, but a small number, such as SnafuDave, described in the sidebar “I’m Just a Nerd,” are able to parlay these efforts into successful commercial careers. In many ways, these ventures are examples that are very much in line with the historical position of the work of youth, conducted largely “around the edges of the formal labour market” (Mizen, Pole, and Bolton 2001:38) and often involving gray zones outside of officially sanctioned forms of work (McKechnie and Hobbs 2001). At the same time, digital distribution is opening a wider range of venues for circulating and monetizing skilled forms of creative work, which have been largely limited to specific professions such as child acting (Zelizer 1994).

Freelancing

Another category of paid work that young people can gain access to through new media is different forms of freelance and contract labor. Technically sophisticated youth recognize that they have marketable skills that are in demand from their peers and adults in their vicinity. Most of these kids do not try to profit from this and engage in informal help and sharing between family and friends. This is in the vein of chores and child care, for which youth may receive small financial rewards, but the work is also often framed as household obligation. Altimit, an 18-year-old Filipino American in Katynka Martínez’s study Computer Club Kids, describes how his father asks him to help out fixing his family and friend’s computers:

Altimit: Yeah, and like my friend’s house, usually my family friend, they would say, “Oh, something’s broken.” So, rather than him coming, he sends me. So, like, “I’m trying to play World of Warcraft.” “I don’t care. Go. You’re not doing anything anyway.” I’m like, “I’m trying to level.” “I don’t care. Go.”

Mac Man: Do you get paid to do it?

Altimit: No.

Mac Man: Hey, that’s sad.

Altimit: I wish I did. Make a lot of money.

The challenge for many youth is to move their labor from a category of unpaid helping to a category of valued labor, which might be potentially monetized. Marjorie Faulstich Orellana (2001) describes how adults often resist describing the children as “workers” and prefer to describe it as “helping,” activities that are good for kids’ social development but not part of the monetized labor economy. This exchange with Mac Man and Altimit is evidence of how kids may see this dynamic differently. They understand the economic value of their technical labor even though the father may not recognize it. We have seen some cases of a few entrepreneurial kids’ overcoming these challenges and making real money off their technology skills. The case of SnafuDave in the sidebar is one example of a youth’s transitioning into a successful career as a freelance web designer and later into one that centers on his own creative work.

One 15-year-old white participant in Patricia Lange’s YouTube and Video Bloggers study describes how he has started a small design company. “I have a couple clients that I do web hosting for. And then, I’ve done some programming, but I’m not that good at it. But I’ve pretty much done some of every geeky thing that there is out there.” He built his client base from personal connections, beginning with family and then branching out to friends at school and people he met online.

I have pretty good customer services. Since I have a very small client base, I can afford to help them make websites and any problems that they have, so a lot of it is just helping them make websites, fix websites, change things, and basic things like that.

In a similar vein, in Christo Sims’s sidebar, Technological Prospecting in Rural Landscapes, 16-year-old Zelan describes how he is building up a career as a freelance technical expert.

In the gaming world, the most-skilled players can gain sponsorship or win financial awards through tournaments, and a number of titles have a professional gaming scene. The top players can make a living playing the games on the marketing value they gain as a result. Hundreds, thousands, and even millions of dollars in prize money are turned out each year for competitors in these titles. The most popular tournaments are those run by the Cyberathlete Professional League, the World Cyber Games, the World e-Sports Games, the Electronic Sports World Cup, The Championship Gaming Series, and Major League Gaming. It was rare to encounter youths in our study who were actually able to make money off their gaming. Even among those who did, none saw gaming as a primary occupation. For example, Altimit describes making small amounts of money off his Warcraft play. Scottanime (31 years old, white), one of the interviewees in Mizuko Ito’s study Anime Fans, described how when he was younger he used to be a card-game expert. He would be hired by gaming companies to demonstrate the games at conventions. He did not see this as a sustainable or secure career option, however, and he went on to take a job as a mail carrier. Similarly, MercyKillings, a white 35-year-old in Ito’s Anime Fans study, was also a professional gamer after college, but he maintained a day job working in construction. These stories parallel the kinds of involvements that youth have historically had with sports; gaming is an activity most children and youths participate in regularly, but very rarely does it translate into a career. Although we saw many instances of youth who admired pro gamers, we did not have examples of kids who actually were pursuing pro gaming as a career.

Enterprises

The examples of entrepreneurism that we have presented involve young people’s working to break into established models of publication, distribution, and freelance labor. These practices involve a kind of modeling of adult careers in what might be called creative-class labor (Florida 2003). Young people are developing skills and talents that they can market and contract out to others. The last category of entrepreneurism that we would like to discuss is one that is more closely tied to genres of practice that we associate with the street smarts of a small-business person. The classic model of this kind of small business in childhood is the lemonade stand. New media, online distribution, and auction sites such as eBay have expanded the potential for entrepreneurial activity that relies on digital media for the buying and selling of goods.

For example, Gerar, a 15-year-old from a mixed Mexican and Salvadorian background, in Katynka Martínez’s Animation around the Block study, found a unique market niche where he could establish his own small-business enterprise. He explains how many of the youth in his neighborhood own an iPod but not a computer. “They pay me to upload some songs for them and depending on how many songs I have to download or upload into their iPod that depends how much I get paid. If I have to download 100 songs I charge them four bucks or something.” He has a corner on the local market, because there is only one other person in his peer group who has a computer. The other person he has heard of who does have a computer, however, “does not have an Internet connection so there’s no way he can download music and charge the others.” Toni, a 25-year-old who immigrated from the Dominican Republic as a teen (Mizuko Ito, Anime Fans), describes how he was dependent on libraries and schools for his computer access through most of high school. This did not prevent him from becoming a technology expert, however, and he set up a small business selling Playboy pictures that he printed from library computers to his classmates. The two cases of Mac Man and of 16-year-old Zelan, presented in the sidebars, provide an illustration of this small-business spirit animating youth digital ventures. These are not privileged kids who are growing up in Silicon Valley households of start-up capitalists, but rather they are working-class kids who embody the street smarts of how to hustle for money. They are able to translate their technical knowledge and expertise into capitalist enterprises that have immediate financial outcomes.

None of these cases represents a major restructuring of the basic financial conditions that youth live under. They replace paid unskilled formalized labor with new financial arrangements in the informal economy, but they are not generating large amounts of new income. The larger impact on kids’ lives is perhaps not a financial one but is more about kids’ being able to develop financial agency that is not fully determined by existing commercial models (such as online ads) or by the more formal school-to-work transitions envisioned by parents and educators. In other words, these practices resist the existing normalized pathways for youth labor, being neither part of a future-oriented vocational or preparatory orientation, the model of youth “talent,” nor one that is framed by the stance of “helping out” that underlies most freelance youth labor. The enterprise genre described in this section does not even appear as a category of youth labor in surveys of youth work (McKechnie and Hobbs 2001). While youth have had small spaces in which to begin their own enterprises, in at least a small number of cases we have found, youth have mobilized online media to expand this genre of participation into new directions.

Nonmarket Work

Although most young people in our study were not engaged in paid work related to digital media, there were a substantial number of kids who were engaged in nonmarket work with new media. Amateur and nonmarket activities have historically been a place for middle-class and elite kids to “practice” work, develop creative talents, and gain experience in self-actualization and responsible work. While formal education can impart knowledge and skills, nonmarket work provides domains where youth can put these to practice in a context of accountability and publicity. Whether that context is a piano recital, helping out at a church, or being part of a soccer team, these activities are domains where young people can develop their identities as productive individuals engaged in serious and consequential work, in contexts where they can build reputations and gain public acknowledgments of their accomplishments. Lareau’s argument (2003) is that these activities of concerted cultivation, which are pursued vigorously in privileged families, are a site for the production of class distinction.

Children in working-class and poor families engage in fewer of these kinds of activities, but they are often expected to perform much more domestic work. The domestic work of cooking, cleaning, and child care contributes directly to the household economy but is invisible outside of the home. These forms of nonmarket domestic work, while instilling a sense of responsibility and self-efficacy, do not build the broader networks of human relations and skills for navigating various contexts of publicity as you see in activities of concerted cultivation outside of the home. While these forms of helping and domestic work can have many benefits to youth who engage with them (Orellana 2001), they are not directly tied to immediate participation in contexts of publicity with new media, with the exception of some of the categories of practice described in the previous section.

The relation between concerted cultivation and vocation is not straightforward, however. The same families who will encourage sports, arts, and music as childhood activities will also push their children toward traditional high-status careers with more stable and guaranteed financial rewards. Upper-middle-class youth who are avid fan producers, for example, are still pursuing traditional career paths through elite universities. One accomplished fan producer seemed puzzled by Mizuko Ito’s question as to whether he might consider a career related to anime. “Well, first off, [my parents] would kill me. Secondly, I could probably make more as a biomedical engineer than anything in that neighborhood” (Anime Fans). By contrast, less privileged families might see creative-class careers as one of their few chances at upward social mobility, what one of Ito’s interviewees described as a “pipe dream for a fancy job.” In the previous section, we discussed some of the ways in which new media might provide broadened access to new forms of economic networks. We saw how youth from a wide range of class backgrounds exploited these networks for economic gain. In the case of nonmarket work, household economic status is a stronger determinant of forms of participation. Here we see youth who choose to engage in unpaid labor in far-flung networks that makes no contribution to their household economy. While they are arguably gaining experience that will help them in their longer-term career aspirations, immersive participation in these activities is predicated on the fact that they do not feel pressures to engage in domestic work or paid work outside the home.

Nonmarket Peer Production

Within the field of digital-culture studies, theorists are debating how to understand the “free” nonmarket labor that supports activities such as open-source software development, citizen science, game modding, fansubbing, and Wikipedia authoring. For example, Yochai Benkler (2006) sees “nonmarket peer production” as part of a fundamental shift from the market mechanisms that characterized cultural production in high capitalism. Other theorists see these processes as exploitation of users and consumers for the commercial gain of media industries (Ross 2007; Terranova 2000). These kinds of practices differ in important ways from traditional forms of volunteerism and community service, yet they may provide some of the same social benefits for youth. When examining youth practice in this domain, we need to negotiate a complicated tension. On one hand, it is important to value these activities as spaces where youth can engage in active forms of social organization and develop a sense of efficacy and leadership. Further, these activities are part of a “free culture” sharing economy that has a unique ethic of civic participation aimed at developing public rather than proprietary goods (Lessig 2004). At the same time, widespread youth participation in unpaid digital cultural production is part of a resilient structural dynamic in which many constructive activities of youth are not “counted” as a contribution to economic productivity (Qvortrup 2001). The enthusiasm that media-savvy youth are bringing to nonmarket digital production represents a unique twist to these existing dynamics.

As part of Mizuko Ito’s case study on anime fans, she has researched the practices of amateur subtitlers, or “fansubbers,” who translate and subtitle anime and release it through Internet distribution. The chapter on Creative Production has described some of the ways in which they form tight-knit work teams, with jobs that include translators, timers, editors, typesetters, encoders, quality checkers, and distributors. Although the quality of fansubs differ, most fans think that a high-quality fansub is better than the professional counterpart. Fansub groups often work faster and more effectively than professional localization industries, and their work is viewed by millions of anime fans around the world. Fansubbing, like much of digital-media production, is hard, grinding work—translating dialogue with the highest degree of accuracy, timing how long dialogue appears on the screen down to the split second, fiddling with the minutia of video encoding to make the highest-quality video files that are small enough to be distributed over the Internet. They often work on tight deadlines, and the fastest groups will turn around an episode within 24 hours of release in Japan. For this, fansubbers receive no monetary rewards, and they say that they pursue this work for the satisfaction of making anime available to fans overseas and for the pleasure they get in working with a close-knit production team.

Similarly, fan conventions are organized entirely by volunteers, who at best might get a free hotel room for months of work in organizing an event for thousands of fans. Some of the most dedicated of convention organizers Ito interviewed described spending almost all of their vacation time and a substantial amount of their own financial resources to act as volunteer organizers. Gamers also pour tremendous amounts of time and energy into organizing online guilds and developing their own content to enhance the gaming experience for others, such as game reviews, walk-throughs, mods, and machinima. Because these activities are constructed as “fan” or “player” activities, and there are legal constraints on their monetization, participants are doubly hampered in translating these activities into personal financial gain. The nonmarket ethic of fan-based production is that this work is done “for fellow fans” and not for financial gain. This stance represents a kind of accommodation between fans and commercial media industries, in which the latter tolerates some degree of fan distribution and derivative works, provided they are not framed as commercial work.

Another version of nonmarket work is the kind of involvements that youth have with online gaming economies that exhibit many of the same features as real-life economies, but that are quite separate from them. These involvements are most evident in multiplayer online gaming worlds (Castronova 2001; Dibbell 2006), but they are also an important part of sites such as Neopets or games such as Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! that involve the buying and selling of game items. The grind of nonmarket work is familiar to any player in a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). Rachel Cody’s case study of a linkshell’s defeat of a high-level monster (see the sidebar Final Fantasy XI: Trouncing Tiamat) is a culminating moment for players who have poured months of their time into the repetitive labor of “leveling” their characters by battling monsters and engaging in menial craftwork. Laura Robinson’s Neopets sidebar illustrates some of the energies that young people bring to these online economies, even though they do not translate to real-life capital.

Fan production and gaming production are not the only examples of practices in which youth engage that involve many of the same disciplines of professional media production but that bring none of the financial rewards. Even an activity such as the creation of YouTube videos, which often seems playful and off-the-cuff, involves this kind of grinding labor to create good work. One of the youths Patricia Lange interviewed, Jack, a 17-year-old white male (YouTube and Video Bloggers), described a video shoot with a group of fellow homeschooled teens.

. . . the environment was just, you know, torturous. And tempers were flaring ’cause we were all . . . we would be shooting day in and day out for, you know, sometimes for two or three days in a row, and we would just be sitting there and we’d get really mad at one another. And then looking back, we just always laugh at it because it’s just so ridiculous that we’re all sitting here in this 100-degree weather with all this stuff around us, and we’re just absolutely dying. Reshooting the same scene over and over again, and, you know, and it never just progressed anywhere.

Youth pour their energies into producing videos, writing fan fiction, making music, or recording podcasts, and they most commonly release their work on the Internet for free. At the time of Google’s purchase in 2006, YouTube was valued at more than a billion dollars, capitalizing on the economy of freely shared amateur media production, for which creators did not earn a penny from the distribution of their work online. Although business models and terms of service for online sharing sites are changing, and there are more opportunities for amateur creators to gain revenue from online distribution, most amateurs, youth, and fan producers do not see any economic gain from their work.

These practices add a new twist to our existing understandings of volunteerism and civic engagement. Just as with more long-standing forms of youth volunteer work and internships, this nonmarket work is a space for young people to experiment with different work practices before they make commitments to jobs and careers. Workers in these nonmarket economies will often “retire” because “it wasn’t fun anymore” or it was becoming too much like a “real job.” Although the practices resemble market-based labor in many ways, they are still a form of volunteer practice that youth can drop out of with little material consequence. Still, relationships they foster with their peers in these groups provide opportunities for mentorship and for youth to take on identities as leaders and media producers. Further, these activities are often animated by a civic spirit of sharing that takes “free culture” as a rallying point in working toward a cultural commons that is not dominated by commercial interests. At the same time, it is important to keep in mind the broader political economic conditions in which these kinds of engagements occur. Most of these more sophisticated forms of nonmarket online production are the province of relatively privileged youth who are pursuing these activities during college or other times in their lives when they are not under financial and time pressures to engage in domestic or paid work.

While we should look to these youth practices as examples of highly engaged forms of youth mobilization and creativity, we must also recognize how they remain embedded in existing structural conditions of inequity and in a robust set of commercial practices that define the contours of Web 2.0 industry. In many ways, the free-culture movement and industry attention to user-generated content are part of a cultural logic that is clearly growing in salience and that defines a particular historic moment in the evolution of media and communications. We see youth innovation as central to defining these new genres of cultural participation, even as they are very much under flux, through a complicated set of struggles between different media industries and sectors as well as the everyday activity of youth and adults.

Conclusion

An exploration of different forms of work that youth engage in through and with digital media illuminates some important dimensions of youth participation in labor and economic activity. Throughout this discussion we have seen the resilience of existing forms of class distinction in structuring young people’s access to particular job trajectories and their orientations toward labor and work. Further, youth labor has tended to be ghettoized into unskilled labor or informal economies that are generally framed as “helping” rather than activity with clear financial motives. New media participate in the production of these familiar distinctions. While recognizing these conservative tendencies and existing structural divisions, in this chapter we have tried to highlight the potential of new media engagement in changing some of these conditions by highlighting somewhat exceptional and innovative cases. If these cases are any indication of broader shifts, we are beginning to see evidence that new media are helping to open new avenues for young people to exercise new forms of agency with regard to labor and work.

Although it is rare for teens to get real jobs that make use of their technical and media expertise, their knowledge of new media can support forms of economic activity and work that were not previously available to them. We have discussed this in terms of ways that kids can earn money through distributing their work, freelancing, and entrepreneurism. These forms of grassroots economic mobilization are particularly evident among youth from less privileged backgrounds. By contrast, elite youth, particularly those who spend many years in higher education financed by their parents, will often parlay their new media skills in the nonmarket sector. Much like different forms of volunteerism and internships functioned historically, networked “peer production” provides opportunities for kids to experiment with different forms of work and public participation. These activities, varying from creative production to fansubbing to virtual currency trading, are training grounds for participation in the twenty-first-century economy. The difference, however, between these and structured educational and preparatory programs is that youth who participate in these activities engage in work that is immediately consequential; these are not training exercises but activities that provide them immediate gains in the context of a network of peers or a broader audience of viewers and readers. Particularly in the context of the United States, where there are relatively comparatively few high-quality apprenticeship and vocational programs for teens not on an academic track (Hansen, Mortimer, and Krüger 2001), these opportunities fill a social vacuum.

In our discussion, we have tried to work against the assumption that digital media are opening up opportunities to tech-savvy kids in the same ways. Kids from a wide range of economic and social backgrounds are mobilized around new media work. Though we have seen a general opening up of opportunity for participation in various forms of new media work, the vast majority of these engagements do not translate to paying jobs and successful careers in the creative class. Elite kids have access to the real-world social and cultural capital where they may be able to translate these skills to jobs and paid work, and they will have a leg up on kids who do not have this social and cultural capital. Even among privileged kids, we see a tendency for them to see these forms of work as serious hobbies that are separate from their real-life trajectories, which guarantee them a stable future career through standard and well-established forms of education. By contrast, less privileged youth may look toward creative-class careers for new kinds of opportunities, but they may not have the social and cultural capital to translate their talents into careers. In either case, we see a growing space of creative-class work that is not directly tied to the “day jobs” of the people participating in them. The economies of P2P trading that are flourishing online, and the venues for amateurs to showcase their work, are creating a new media ecology that supports these more informal kinds of work and economic arrangements. Across the class spectrum, we see kids and young adults choosing to participate in creative and technical work because of the pleasure of productive activity that they engage in on their own terms, regardless of whether there is economic benefit.

Whether the work is economic activity or nonmarket work, many kids are clearly looking to it as a site for exercising autonomy and efficacy and making their labor visible in a public way. Digital-media ventures are more attractive than the unskilled labor usually available for kids. Many motivated kids are not satisfied with a purely “preparatory” role and look for real-life consequences and responsibilities in the here and now. Many are ready for these responsibilities and launch successful careers online. Youth appreciate the opportunity to be “taken seriously” by their coworkers in forms of work that have clear productive benefits to others and where there is public validation and visibility. For others these activities are a way to experiment in certain forms of work without highly consequential failure. While educators have long noted the importance of learning as it is situated in real-life work and apprenticeships, there are relatively few examples of these forms of learning in the United States. Studies of Girl Scout cookie sales (Rogoff et al. 2002) are one example that does come from the United States, but many of the most celebrated examples in the literature come from cultural contexts where kids are engaged more directly in economic activity (Lave and Wenger 1991; Nunes, Schliemann, and Carraher 1993). Aside from volunteerism and concerted cultivation, which are framed more as preparatory activities, kids in the United States have few contexts for this kind of learning. The cases we have described, by contrast, are about new media’s providing access to high-stakes and real environments where learning has consequences on kids and others’ lives.

The ways in which new media intersect with youth’s activities of work are indicative of the complicated role that youth labor has occupied in modern society. Although youth were largely shut out from the formal, high-status labor economy, they have continued to work in a wide variety of forms. New media are making some of these activities more visible and valued, in part because of young people’s new media literacy, which can often exceed that of their elders. The examples of youth practice, in turn, are part of a broader restructuring of what counts as work and productive labor, one that sees a greater role for the informal, peer-based economies that have unique affinities with the social positions and cultures of young people. While the relationships between these peer-based economies and existing commercial sectors is still very much under negotiation, we can expect that the activities of youth today will result in resilient changes to the relationships between public engagement, cultural exchange, and economic participation.

Notes

[1] “Crowdsourcing” describes the process in which work that used to be outsourced to a contractor is now performed by an undefined, large group of people in an open environment. Some examples cited as examples of crowdsourcing are collective citizen-science projects, some of the work of MoveOn.org, or Wikipedia.

[2] This is her real-life name.

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