Again, my daughter comes in handy here. I was always amazed and often dismayed, angered or disgusted at the amount of time my daughter would spend staring into her computer screen. These feelings were predicated on my understanding of what “staring into a screen” meant for me: passive television viewing. It wasn’t until later that I realized that the net generation is, of course, doing its share of goofing off mindlessly surfing Youtube, but that they are also actively engaged in a creative process that was largely unavailable to the boob-tube generation.
“Not only are youth motivated by the diverse opportunities for communication, collaboration, and creativity, their participation is supported by the multimodal and interactive design of the particular online spaces” (Fields, 2014).
As she got older, I was kept at a safe distance from her creations online, but she revealed enough for me to know that often (certainly not always) my daughter was creating an identity on cites such as Tumblr and Youtube. She participated in pursuits like fan fiction writing and meme creation, activities that are much more productive, “multimodal and interactive” (Fields, 2014) than the consumption oriented media usage I had grown up with.
“Not only are youth motivated by the diverse opportunities for communication, collaboration, and creativity, their participation is supported by the multimodal and interactive design of the particular online spaces” (Fields, 2014).
As she got older, I was kept at a safe distance from her creations online, but she revealed enough for me to know that often (certainly not always) my daughter was creating an identity on cites such as Tumblr and Youtube. She participated in pursuits like fan fiction writing and meme creation, activities that are much more productive, “multimodal and interactive” (Fields, 2014) than the consumption oriented media usage I had grown up with.