Facebook had taken over as the social media platform of choice, people of all ages had embraced online media for both work and play, and billion-dollar enterprises were going public as a result of these trends. The spread of new media into mainstream life and institutions meant that the online world was no longer just a haven for young people, as we saw in the early years of youth new media adoption, and that online networks and communities were splintering and differentiating in new and unexpected ways. This large-scale adoption of new media created an imperative to investigate the potential connections between young people’s online activities and meaningful opportunities in education, civic institutions, and careers. The rapid incorporation of online networks into civic institutions and commercial enterprises lent urgency to the need for a positive agenda for engaging with youth new media practices.
The aim of the Leveling Up study was to provide in-depth empirical case studies of youth new media practices that could inform policy and design. This goal was fundamentally different from that of the earlier Digital Youth Project research, which sought to decode the underlying patterns of youth new media engagement, what we called “genres of participation.” The new focus on targeted investigation of practices that enhance learning and equity is motivated by the urgency of informing the design and deployment of learning technologies and related programs. As we describe in more detail below, we selected exemplary and exceptional cases that demonstrate how connected learning can support diverse youth interests and learning.
This book combines empirical social scientific inquiry with a social change agenda that advocates for a specific orientation to learning and design. It is an effort at engaged scholarship grounded in evidence and social scientific inquiry, but undertaken in the service of improving the lives of young people from all walks of life. The study does not seek to be representative of youth online affinity networks, nor is it designed to critique gaps and pitfalls of these online networks, though we see value in and allies in both of these forms of inquiry. Critique of existing practices is necessary but not sufficient; we believe that those of us practicing ethnography and social science also have a role to play in presenting alternatives. At times this means we adopt a voice that is more oriented to design and advocacy than traditional scholarly social scientific discourse, but throughout the book we situate our claims and the nature of our analysis. The study is also situated within our broader interdisciplinary network, which includes a range of approaches and scholarly voices, including critical ethnography, survey research, and design research.
Nodes in a Collaborative Network
The Leveling Up project is part of the broader research agenda of the CLRN, which investigates both the pitfalls and promises of the connected learning agenda. Some CLRN studies conduct research on educator-guided and DML-supported programs explicitly designed to support connected learning (Arum et al., forthcoming; Ching et al. 2015; Larson et al. 2013; Penuel et al. 2015). Other studies investigate a wider range of educational programs in terms of principles of connected learning (Ben-Eliyahu, Rhodes, and Scales 2014; Van Horne et al. 2016). Yet another set of studies looks at settings that are quite distant from the aspirational model of connected learning to identify blind spots and the limits of the model (Livingstone and Sefton-Green 2016; Watkins et al. forthcoming). By focusing on youth-centered online environments with connected learning features, the Leveling Up cases sit between studies centered on environments explicitly designed to support connected learning and studies of more typical environments for youth learning and media engagement.
This book draws from fieldwork and case studies developed by CLRN researchers and researchers from the Youth and Participatory Politics Research Network (YPP). Unlike a more typical edited collection of ethnographic cases, our chapters are written based on cross-case analysis, analyzing themes and topics that have emerged across projects led by different researchers. Findings from individual cases have been published elsewhere (Korobkova 2014; Kow, Young, and Salen Tekinbaş 2014; Martin 2014; Pfister 2014; Rafalow and Salen Tekinbaş 2014), as have analyses of our data in relation to specific disciplinary debates (Martin 2016; Pfister 2016; Rafalow 2015; Ito et al. 2018). Readers of this book are introduced to each online affinity network and an exemplary learner in case summaries interspersed throughout, written by the researchers who led on the individual cases. The core chapters pull findings and patterns together to synthesize the empirical findings, theoretical contributions, and implications for practice across the cases. This format is an effort to provide context for each case while also surfacing cross-cutting patterns.
Researchers from the Leveling Up project have collaborated to take the role of lead author for the chapters, drawing material from varied case studies and researchers. This is a co-authored volume rather than an edited collection of work by individual contributors. This orientation to co-authorship and joint analysis aligns with a commitment to collaborative and interdisciplinary analysis that the MacArthur Foundation’s DML Initiative has embraced for more than a decade. By funding two research networks, other major research projects, and infrastructures for collaboration, the DML Initiative has nurtured research that draws from a varied qualitative corpus and collaboration with quantitative researchers. This book is one among many efforts in the initiative to synthesize findings across varied research projects, with a specific focus on cross-case analysis of in-depth qualitative research in networked settings.
When examining networked forms of culture and social behavior, researchers have struggled to define research settings that involve networks of both local and more far-flung relationships. Ethnographic researchers have tended to reproduce many of the characteristics of traditional ethnography within online spaces by focusing on communities that enable “deep hanging out” and on the development of strong social ties and shared practices (Geertz 1998). These have included studies of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) (Nardi 2010; Taylor 2009), virtual worlds (Boellstorff 2008; Kendall 2002), and specialized online forums (Baym 2000; Hine 2000) that are conducted primarily or exclusively online. Other researchers have pursued a hybrid approach that includes online observations and interviews, as well as participation in physical gatherings and sampling through local communities. For example, in her study of social media use, danah boyd traveled to different parts of the country to interview youth about their social media use rather than recruiting through online means (boyd 2014). In Ito’s study of anime fans, she recruited through both specialized online communities and local fan events (Ito 2012a, 2012b). All of these approaches dip into the stream of highly fluid and networked forms of youth activity that span physical and networked spaces, relationships, and practices.
The collaborative research context of the DML research projects and networks offered an opportunity to take a different approach, to develop a linked set of ethnographic case studies that strategically sample from different populations and forms of social organization. We combine the strengths of in-depth, observational, and contextually attuned case research with a comparative analysis that surfaces patterns and relationships between and within cases. We developed a set of shared protocols so that all the case studies had a common bank of interview and survey questions and shared codes, using both a priori and emergent coding.1 This cultural and practice-based analysis is still interpretive and qualitative in nature, and it does not rest on the kinds of sampling approaches and claims for representativeness characteristic of quantitative research. But it does offer a way of analyzing patterns of social organization and cultural forms that synthesizes across conventional case-based research. It is a form of qualitative “meta-analysis” that draws findings from across varied case research that has asked similar questions.
Case Studies
The Leveling Up project began in fall 2011, with the majority of the fieldwork taking place in 2012 and 2013. The cases include a variety of affinity networks that make use of online spaces, and they employed research methods varying from questionnaires, surveys, semistructured interviews, observation, and content analyses of media, profiles, videos, and other online artifacts.2 When we present ethnographic research in this book, we indicate which of the case studies the example is drawn from. To acknowledge young people as agents, we use the pseudonyms and ethnic and racial categories
