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| The Red Victorian, San Francisco, by Ben Dunning |
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Images
Amoeba Records, Haight Street, San Francisco CC BY 3.0
Homelessness, San Francisco CC BY 3.0
Project briefing session, San Francisco CC BY 3.0
My lunch from Starbucks CC BY 3.0
Wall mural, San Francisco CC BY 3.0
Homelessness, San Francisco CC BY 3.0
Today's teenagers are hooked on their cellphones. While for some, MySpace or FaceBook are essential elements of their communication tool set, the vast majority of youth around the world rely primarily on their cellphones for staying in touch. According to research from the MobilED (for “mobile education”) initiative, the average South African teen cannot imagine life without a cellphone: “They sleep with it, eat with it, live with it, the teenagers see themselves and their cellphone as one.” But although we are witnessing a “social revolution” in cellphone usage among teenagers, very little research has been done in this field. How do youth socially and communicatively interact with their phones? How can cellphones be used to document their lives? And in a world of global communications, can this mobile device be a conduit for increased cross-cultural awareness and sensitivity?
John Kuner and I, both Fellows at Stanford University (USA) are conducting research into digital storytelling for youth. We tried to answer these questions, along with South African-based Adele Botha, who is on the MobilED team. Over August and September we took a group of teenagers from San Francisco and Pretoria (a South African city near Johannesburg), from different social, economic and ethnic backgrounds, gave them a bunch of camera phones and told them to document their lives, put the material online and to engage each other around that.
The project spanned two media: the camera phones were used to capture visual content, and the web was used for presentation of, and communication about, the content. Every week John and I would meet with the San Franciscans to discuss a new task, based on a series of themed prompts, such as: tell us about the food you eat. The teens would sometimes conduct research online, shoot material at home or in their community, copy it to a PC, do some editing and then upload to the web as a post to their own blog. The group in San Francisco were interns on a summer programme at the Bay Area Video Coalition and had recently completed a course in video production, so they used Final Cut Pro for movie editing. We mostly used Nokia N90 handsets, and Vox as the blogging platform. Each teen created their own blog account, but were invited as members into a single, private group for the project. For project management and task communications we used Basecamp. The broad themes for the self-documentation were: about me (where I come from; the story of my name; my favourite books, bands, things; the food I eat; and my room); my community (what it looks like; what I like about it, etc.); and a relevant issue in my community. We asked them to think about their own culture as a context for the project, to try to frame their lives, communities and issues within their particular cultural milieu. “Mobiquette”, acceptable etiquette when using camera phones, was also discussed beforehand.
Due to budget constraints, we could not have the teens upload content directly from their phones to Vox, which is a pity because the immediacy of cellphone communication is one of its greatest features. A photo of cool graffiti, taken while walking home from school, which is uploaded immediately, is so much cooler for being “in the now”. While today's teens thrive on that instant gratification, the time difference between the USA and South Africa meant that this wasn't such a major factor after all. Because of differences in school calendars between the U.S. and South Africa, not all of the themed tasks were completed by both groups.
So, what did the teens come up with? Basically, some amazing work!
Ben grew up in the Haight Ashbury neighbourhood of San Francisco, the epicentre of the sixties hippie movement. He is a big fan of graffiti as a form of street art, which comes through in his neighbourhood video, appropriately set to a song by a busker on Haight Street, recorded with his cellphone.
Lupe lives in the Mission District of San Francisco, a traditionally Hispanic community with beautiful wall murals, which is clearly evident in her neighborhood video. She is Mexican American, named after the Virgin de Guadalupe and shows us her Rosary beads in her room tour.
Diem, who's family moved from Vietnam to the USA when she was three, spoke about her lunch from Starbucks, how the only thing it represented was convenience and that she knew nothing about the person who'd made the sandwich. The post about her that includes a video tour of her room (thanks Diem, that's brave!), tells us more – explicitly and implicitly – about her culture, both Vietnamese and as a typical U.S. teen. Her neighborhood video encapsulates the cultural diversity of San Francisco.
Christian, a San Franciscan native, talks about his planned shoot to introduce his neighbourhood, including the new property development happening there, before heading out “into the field.”
The South African postings included a video of someone bridge jumping, of a pet parrot, photos of hunting trips to game farms and a visit to Rosebank flea market in Johannesburg. Instead of writing about what he did with his free time, Shane (15) made a video. While the U.S. kids were more into hip hop and graffiti, the South Africans enjoyed heavy metal, fantasy books and braaing (barbecuing). As Brandon said: “[I love] a good piece of meat, just the right spicing and a little pink on the inside is perfect!” In general the South Africans were good about explaining local slang and the meaning of Afrikaans words. Computer gaming was also very popular. Brandon went on to say: “I am very into anything and everything electronic or computer related since I was about nine, the way everything just meshes together is just fascinating. Take the current state of computer graphics ... it's becoming so real that it's blurring the lines of reality.”
While much of the material was fairly high level, e.g. “I can't survive without my iPod,” or a photo of a pet dog, there were moments of very personal disclosure, such as the resentment felt towards the U.S. government by one girl because her father had to spend 13 years in a re-education camp in Vietnam after being abandoned by the US army after the war there. Or a boy's pain in working through his parents' divorce, even though they continued to live in the same house (“in different rooms, of course!”). All of the personal moments, including those that are not necessarily deep or painful, are endearing and alive with teenage honesty.
These moments became the essence of the project, and only began to appear when a certain degree of trust had developed between the teller and the listener. It is here that the cellphone could come into its own, for if there are stages of engagement (low trust, menial engagement moving to high trust, meaningful engagement) then using this device that is so entrenched in the lives of teens, this “trusted” device, could have a catalytic effect on “loosening up” the actors and fast tracking to a higher level of engagement.
For the “issue in your community” prompt, the San Franciscans decided to work as a group on homelessness, which is a big problem in the city. They first discussed the issue amongst themselves, conducted desktop research, compiled interview questions, and then headed out to take photos and conduct interviews. Ben's series of photos and Lupe's photos and interview with someone from the Coalition on Homelessness provided good insight into the issue. Here the theme was more about how one portrays an issue in your community to the world? How do you capture the essence of the problem? What do you show, what don't you show?
Of interest was the readiness of the teens to publicly publish their work. They could have made their blogs viewable only to the members of our Vox group, but most of them chose not to limit access in any way.
So what about Creative Commons? Only one of the teens had heard of it! Some of their videos gave cursory references to material used, such as “Music by the Grateful Dead” but that was about as detailed as it got. We also had the U.S. group find videos on YouTube as part of their topic research. Regarding homelessness, one of the teens found a video of Lisa Simpson performing a protest song. The video has since been taken off YouTube, presumably for copyright reasons. In a 2005 survey by Pew Internet, 75% of US teens that downloaded music off the web thought that this, along with file sharing, was so easy to do that it was unrealistic to expect people no to do it. Couple this attitude with the fact that now more than half (55%) of all online American youth ages 12-17 use online social networking sites, that routinely allow widgets for including music, video and photos, and the need for widespread education around licensing becomes very clear.
And what about did they think about using cellphones to document their lives? “The camera phones were cool, different,” said a participant. One teen said that she would never have considered using camera phones as a way to educate and influence others. But once they began the project, using the camera phones for this purpose became natural for all of them, although lighting and sound were noted as issues to watch with camera phones. These devices are different to digital or video cameras because of their ‘everydayness’. They are always on hand, are used many times a day and so are perfectly suited as the device to capture the moment, which is often when cultural nuances are revealed.
The teens learned much about each others’ lives, and about their own, simply by having to think about all the things they like, don't like, eat, watch, say and do. When documenting their own lives the teens realised how much they are influenced by the many cultures surrounding them, from traditional family culture, to that of the community, their peers, or simply the times – living as a teenager in 2007 in San Francisco or Pretoria. A common theme was how they were proud of their heritage. As Ben said: “I think its important to show the many sides of San Francisco to the kids in South Africa because it is a place so full of culture and life.”
While differences between the groups were noted and discussed (the South Africans hunt more than their US counterparts!), it was really the high level of similarities that surprised everyone. Diem said: “I learned how our cultures [US and South African] contrast, and also how they're similar. I think that was my favorite part.” About the South Africans, one US teen struggled for the right word and then said: “They were more 'civilised' than I expected. Their interests are European and Westernised.”
One of the goals of this project was to explore the use of new forms of communication devices and media to foster cross-cultural awareness. Both cellphones and blogging, supported by in-person group discussions, proved to be successful tools for this purpose. Further, while computer access and broadband Internet connectivity is much more prevalent in developed countries, cellular infrastructure is good, and handset pervasiveness, or at least its growth rate, is often higher in developing countries. Cellphones are a common device to bridge these two worlds in much needed cross-cultural collaborative projects.
Much more research is needed in this space. John Kuner's Project VIEW and MobilED will continue to explore the boundaries to find the cross-cultural and educational value in cellphone usage. And much awareness needs to be raised around Creative Commons and licensing in general. For now, we have shown that cellphones have a place in the creation of meaningful user-generated content, and make for a fun ride!
tags: san-francisco united states culture camera-phone cellphone teen youth blog san-francisco pretoria
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