“We had different programming for the house plants, from psychics to poets to musicians. And that tagline was ‘House Plant Vacation.’”

—Mark Allen, Director and founder of educational arts non-profit organization Machine Project

—Arts collective Finishing School

Mimi Ito at her Los Angeles home

Mimi Ito is a Los Angeles-based cultural anthropologist and MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” recipient whose research is focused on new media use by children and youth.

You’ve done a lot of research on how young people use technology and social media. How could that research help achieve the goals of education and journalism, in particular arts journalism?
Ito: That’s really the million-dollar question right now. New technologies are giving kids an unprecedented opportunity to exercise agency and voice and engagement with media, knowledge and culture, but how do you take that engagement and channel it in ways that are going to be helpful and productive for kids in their adult lives? A lot what happens in their new media engagement centers around popular culture and social peer relations, which isn’t necessarily setting them up into pathways that are going to be productive for them as adults. The three areas we worry about are civic and political engagement, academic outcomes and career-relevant outcomes. So the question is what kinds of programs—adult interventions, mentorship, ways of engaging—are going to meet kids where they are in terms of their interests, and help channel that in ways that are going to help them in their adult lives.

So what are some of the mechanisms that can allow that to happen?
First we should talk about what historically doesn’t work, and what people have done in the past, which was to take the genres of popular and youth culture and sort of slap them onto educational content. We saw that in edutainment software, wherein, for example, you do math problems and then you get to shoot monsters. Or, “Oh, kids like blogging, so let’s do blogging in the classroom”—simple transpositions of what people see as a genre of culture that kids like and try and use that as a wrapper for content that they might not otherwise be interested in. My colleague Jim Gee calls this the “chocolate-covered broccoli” phenomenon.

What’s the alternative?
It’s more about how do you change the social relationships that are meaningful for kids in ways that help reframe their personal interests, proclivities and peer supports as a means of fostering the sort of relationships that are going to bring them into these directions we’re interested in. One example of that is YOUmedia, a new program at the Chicago Public Library. It’s about taking young people who have a creative, intellectual or specialized interest and putting them into a context where they can be with peers who share and support those interests, and also be connected with adults, experts and mentors who represent that interest domain. At YOUmedia, the focus is on media production. The kids might get one class on that subject in school, but what YOUmedia provides is both a peer and mentor context, where they can immerse themselves not just in formal instruction but in a peer culture, which creates an intergenerational set of relationships that supports the development of that interest.

Sharing interest at YOUmedia at the Chicago Public Library

It’s interesting that at first, YOUmedia debated whether to incorporate their teen and young-adult book collection into their physical space. They decided to do so, and discovered that the use of those books increased tenfold.
That’s right, and it shows that when kids have a passionate and specialized interest in a topic, it’s not about the new vs. traditional media. If it’s something they’re passionate about, kids will consume all kinds of information, regardless of platform. What new media provides is the ability to specialize and drill down and really be able to go into depth into an area of interest. When that happens, they’ll be reading in print, they’ll be going to YouTube, they’ll be on social networking sites and specialized interest communities of all kinds. That’s where you see that virtual cycle where they’re creating their own content and at the same time consuming a lot of professional content. They have a deep appreciation for specialists and high-quality curatorial work in their domain. That’s where we’re trying to figure out more opportunities for kids to experience what it means to have that rich knowledge community around a particular passion—as opposed to other forms of online engagement, which, frankly, is mostly just social, hanging out with the peer group that you happen to be with in school. Places like YOUmedia are really designed to immerse kids in contexts where knowledge and expertise and specialization are really rewarded. Now YOUmedia is scaling to a bunch of other centers around the country, with 10 more opening each year in Chicago, New York and elsewhere.

What’s another mechanism for enabling that kind of immersion?
The Quest to Learn program, which is a network of middle schools in Chicago and New York based on game-based pedagogy. The focus is not so much on the idiom of gaming per se, but on gaming as a mode of inquiry, as a form of problem solving and working collaboratively as a means of figuring out how to get things done. Kids learn fractions or language arts, for example, in the process of moving forward on a shared problem, the way they’re used to doing in gaming.

Children engaged in learning by the quest-model.

How is that not chocolate-covered broccoli?
A lot of what we’re calling the chocolate-covered broccoli model is the behaviorist model, in which you do something you don’t like and then get a reward. The quest model is more of an inquiry-based, progressive educational model in which you’re trying to give kids a shared purpose and a set of problems that they’re authentically engaged in. It isn’t framed as entertainment; in fact, often it doesn’t even resemble the idiom of entertainment at all. It’s really modeling that form of learning that you see in really complex and strategic kinds of gaming, where you’re trying to succeed in a complex task and mobilizing knowledge and resources as a way of getting there.

What can news organizations learn from your research?
It’s a real question, because as we know, young people today don’t tolerate advertising in the ways that earlier generations did, which is a big challenge to the business models of news organizations. The role of professionals in youth culture, whether it’s in journalism or the academy or any other knowledge or cultural domain, is as important as ever. But that role needs to be reframed, to some extent, to reach young people in terms of the patterns of knowledge and cultural consumption they’re engaging in. When I watch how young people circulate information—especially the kind of information that has currency among youth peer networks—there’s really an absence of adult and authoritative intervention within that flow. I think we have to be a little more creative in how we think about that. It isn’t about just broadcasting and publishing along the traditional channels, but really intervening in the flow of communication that’s happening on the peer-to-peer level, and understanding how to create focus and attention within those communities. How do we start inserting adult authority and expertise within that framework of young online communication? Well, you can’t just say, this is important because it’s from the New York Times or Yale University Press or whatever; that’s not going to function as a magnet for them as it once did. At the same time, kids are very aware of how reputation and status and circulation function in a much more peer-based and networked environment. We need to find models that can be more effective at getting educational or academic or journalistic content inserted into those environments.

What might those models be?
First we have to understand the genres of engagement that youth have online. There’s the kind of friendship, peer, status, popularity dating stuff, and adults are not particularly welcome there. Most of that happens on Facebook, text messaging and instant messaging. But there’s this whole other domain of interest-driven activity, and that’s where we’re focusing our educational interventions. It’s also where kids absolutely want adults represented. If you look historically at how online youth platforms have stratified, there’s always been the lowest common denominator, which five years ago was MySpace and now is Facebook. It’ll probably stay Facebook awhile, but kids are migrating to Twitter and text messaging. That’s the lowest common denominator, and most of what circulates there is food, sex, popularity and status. But then there’s a whole plethora of sites that cater to particular interests, whether it’s sports or entertainment or creative pursuits. There are also aggregated sites. Five years ago it was Live Journal; right now it’s Tumblr. Every interest community has its own little silo, which is very challenging for people dealing with professional content. It’s not like you can just go to one single place. But in those places it’s very intergenerational, and expertise is highly valued. In fact, kids really want to connect to the professionals, the curators, the content makers, the athletes or whatever. They’re desperate for connection to those people.

So if you were an arts journalist and wanted to communicate with a youth audience, what would you do? Where would you go?
The first thing I would do is try to find those online sites and communities that young people who have that interest are connecting to. Then I’d try to define some channels so that that content becomes relevant and embedded within those existing social communities. For every interest, there’s going to be an existing social community that is supporting young people’s interests and pathways into those interests. My most recent project is on Japanese popular culture, and within that domain, you see hugely mobilized youth fandoms around video, art, anime and so on. But for the most part, I don’t see professional content creators—the anime companies, the musicians—or the journalists covering those areas engaging with those spaces. There are fan sites like the Anime News Network that are constantly pulling all the professional news and then introducing it to the fan community, and there’s a ton of fan engagement around that content. But the professional creators and journalists tend to be at arm’s length from that communication. So there’s sort of an amateur news layer that has stepped up to fill the void. But I’ve always wondered what it would look like if the professional creators actually met them halfway. You see that a little bit at fan conventions, like the Anime Expo here in L.A. every year, which include a mix of industry and professional news people and fans. It’s sort of the one time that fans can connect directly with the professional content creators. But for the most part, those links are almost always initiated by the fans, not by the professionals. There’s still a real divide there. The professional content creators seem to feel they have existing distribution channels: Look for it in the newspaper, on television, in the movie theater, on the CD or DVD that’s coming out. And they see their job as stopping there.

Maybe there’s a lack of knowledge about how to take that next step toward meeting the audience halfway.
And there’s not a business incentive to do it.

Or so they think.
Or so they think.

The ironic thing about Issa Rae, the writer, director, producer and star of the Web-based comedy series “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl,” is that she isn’t awkward at all. In fact she’s a self-possessed veteran of indie video now on her third comedy project for the Web. (The others were “Dorm Diaries,” based on her college years at Stanford, and “Fly Guys Present the F Word,” a largely improvised mockumentary about a young L.A. rap group trying to make it in the music industry, now in its sixth season.) And after a low-budget launch early this year, “Awkward Black Girl”—about a socially challenged young woman struggling to navigate around the pitfalls of friendship, dating, racial stereotyping and office politics—is now fielding inquiries from Google and YouTube that could make the second season considerably more lucrative and, potentially, a coveted spot on a major cable network.

“My main goal is to be a producer who creates projects of a type that isn’t represented in mainstream media,” Rae says. “A lot of people have asked, ‘What does the contemporary black woman want on television?’ I think ‘Awkward Black Girl’ is the answer to that question.”

From the beginning, Rae distributed “Awkward Black Girl” on YouTube and has promoted it primarily through social media, in particular Facebook and Twitter. Along the way she’s developed a strong sense of her audience—which is about 80 percent female, predominantly African-American and largely twentysomething—which she engages almost constantly, responding to a flood of comments on her own website, awkwardblackgirl.com, and on her Facebook fan site. (By halfway through the season, each episode was drawing about 60,000 viewers, and the numbers have continued to creep upward.) Funding for the series, after initially coming out of Rae’s own pocket, is now provided largely by its fan base, which contributed $60,000 (via Kickstarter, a funding platform for startup artists) to pay for the second half of the season.

Issa Rae self-published on multiple, non-traditional platforms and found her own audience. She also found her own funding. Rae is both an artist and a venture capitalist.

Rae is aware of, and mostly comfortable with, the fact that the show’s frequent and largely uncritical use of sexually explicit and often wildly un-PC language—including the N-word, “bitch” and “ho”—would make it impossible for network TV and a tough sell, in its current form, even for basic cable networks like Comedy Central. “What I appreciate about the series being online is that there’s no censorship on the Web,” she says. “There’s no gatekeeper, no one telling me I can’t say or do something, so yes, I do feel free to say and write whatever I please. This show allows me to do that, and the audience does, too.”

Still, her ongoing dialogue with the audience has its own pitfalls—responding to negative comments is particularly challenging—and can at times be, well, awkward. The most recently released episode, which featured a Halloween theme, was packed with horror-movie references from the 1980s and 90s that, it turned out, many viewers failed to recognize. Even riskier for a show with a core audience of college-age black women, the episode featured a scathing satire of African-American sorority rituals; many viewers were not amused. The show’s “dislike” ratings on YouTube skyrocketed, leaving Rae with a dilemma: Should she give her audience what it wants, or should she follow her own instincts, even if it means alienating substantial sectors of the audience?

“I do feel pressure to meet the audience’s expectations,” she admits. “Ultimately, I want to do what I want to do, because I have a vision for the series. But if I’m going to lose all my viewers that way . . . I don’t know. If it stops being fun for me, and I feel like I’m doing what I’m doing just to please the audience, then it’s over. So I’ll continue doing what I’m doing, as long as the audience is with me.”

—Chon Noriega directs UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center. He also co-curated five shows for Pacific Standard Time. Listen to him make his main points here:

“There are no centers anymore. There are multiple centers, multiple histories that are occurring side by side. And many of them have different logics at work that have to be in some ways tapped into or understood that give a sense of what is valuable there, what is worth translating into that broad common realm that the newspaper can represent.”

“There’s a kind of endpoint, a teleology about where the history of art goes. And it’s kind of astounding to me to see the extent it is still held to when in fact what is happening in the cultural field is so diverse.”

“When you make mistakes, you do push-ups. We call it ‘celebrating’… because, if you can recognize your mistake, then you can fix it. So we do five push-ups, because we recognize that mistake. And then, if you do twenty one day, the next day you try to do fifteen. You’re trying to get some type of internal push, because if I’m away from you, you need to, baby, survive on your own. It just works better, because everyone has their own accountability. And then we make it: if you think you made a mistake, celebrate. It’s not this brutal thing where we just have people doing push-ups all the time… we’re gonna go over this three or four times; now, you should know it. And then, the weird part is, I have kids that I have designated as leaders. They have to do twice the amount. If everyone’s doing five, they’re doing ten. If this is their group of students–when they come back, everyone has to be able to play–then you all have to celebrate together. And then when I make a mistake, if he’s doing ten, I have to do twenty! And I do it gladly. It’s not going to kill me, it’s going to make me stronger. What are twenty push-ups going to do to me?… Anything that I ask somebody to do, I have to be able to do it.” –musician and arts educator Fernando Pullum, of the Fernando Pullum Community Arts Center

Listen to the complete interview:
Fernando Pullum interview by engine29

“I think the greatest service journalism can offer is try to get behind the curtain and try to understand what’s motivating these media companies because it’s a closed loop system. And so it protects itself. And it would be great if more journalists could really understand the inner working of the media business. It’s sort of a mystery on purpose.”

An interview with Pat Wyatt, former president of 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment:

Pat Wyatt today, working with Navajo and Apache kids as the founding president of Media-Art-Xchanges, a not-for-profit that gives children the tools to tell their own stories.

“The communication revolution has brought people, young and old, closer together to share in a universal conversation. It is morally unacceptable to have YouTube and undocumented injustice in the world at the same point in human history.”

- Andrew McGregor, President & Founder of The Tiziano Project

We spoke with Victoria Fine, the director of programming for The Tiziano Project, about how she trains people in these areas to tell their stories in compelling ways. Victoria and her colleagues don’t just arrive in other countries, hand cameras to people and then show them how to upload to YouTube. They teach them basic storytelling, and help them make their message as engaging as possible.

“I pull things from many sources in my work, creating a kind of visual collage,” Gronk says. “I’m always mixing different time periods, different references, different media. There could be a line from a film, such “Awake, Martha, awake.” To me, that’s beautiful. That came from a scene in ‘Attack of the Crab Monsters’ [a Roger Corman sci-fi movie from 1957], which I pulled from YouTube.”

“It just shows how easily accessible everything is now,” he says, “and how you can use such a range of things to communicate your ideas.”

In 2010, What Books Press published Gronk’s “A Giant Claw,” a collection of images inspired by “The Claw,” another low-budget sci-fi classic from the same year.

Artist Scott Grieger discusses how art critics used to be a lot more fun, and the overwhelming need for an Elke Sommer wing in a major art museum.