Book Announcement - Worried About the Wrong Things: Youth, Risk, and Opportunity in the Digital Age
I'm excited to announce that my first book,* Worried About the Wrong Things: Youth, Risk, and Opportunity in the Digital Age, <air-l@listserv.aoir.org>* is now available (The MIT Press, 2017). It is likely of interest to digital scholars, as well as to educators and youth-serving organizations. Many in the AoIR community have offered support and feedback along the way and I thank you all for that and further look forward to hopefully thanking some of you in person in Estonia. Best, - jacqueline **Overview It’s a familiar narrative in both real life and fiction, from news reports to television storylines: a young person is bullied online, or targeted by an online predator, or exposed to sexually explicit content. The consequences are bleak; the young person is shunned, suicidal, psychologically ruined. In this book, Jacqueline Ryan Vickery argues that there are other urgent concerns about young people’s online experiences besides porn, predators, and peers. We need to turn our attention to inequitable opportunities for participation in a digital culture. Technical and material obstacles prevent low-income and other marginalized young people from the positive, community-building, and creative experiences that are possible online. Vickery explains that cautionary tales about online risk have shaped the way we think about technology and youth. She analyzes the discourses of risk in popular culture, journalism, and policy, and finds that harm-driven expectations, based on a privileged perception of risk, enact control over technology. Opportunity-driven expectations, on the other hand, based on evidence and lived experience, produce discourses that acknowledge the practices and agency of young people rather than seeing them as passive victims who need to be protected. Vickery first addresses how the discourses of risk regulate and control technology, then turns to the online practices of youth at a low-income, minority-majority Texas high school. She considers the participation gap and the need for schools to teach digital literacies, privacy, and different online learning ecologies. Finally, she shows that opportunity-driven expectations can guide young people’s online experiences in ways that balance protection and agency. ** *Dr. Jacqueline Ryan **Vickery, Ph.D.* Assistant Professor Department of Media Arts <http://mediaarts.unt.edu/> College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences University of North Texas @JacVick | http://jrvickery.com/ <http://jrvickery.com/> *"Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world." - * *Grace Paley*
participants (1)
-
Jacqueline Vickery