[Staff] Preliminary Questions on a Participatory Culture and the Sociology of Virtual Worlds
Amira Fouad
October 2007
This month’s reflection has me rolling around the many ideas in my head that somehow seem so intricately connected. I’d like to take a few minutes to share how the many different ways of knowing, and thinking that I’ve been engaged in for the last five years seem to be culminating in this new field of study that I have entered since joining Global Kids.
My graduate work in human rights essentially aimed to question the particularities of individual capacity within society.
What were the identity formations that contributed to an individual’s agency, ability, or inability to contribute to society?
What were the factors that served to politicize entire identities or groups as a result of their identities?
What did the politics of representation mean for an individual’s sense of capacity? And how did those particular politics of representation and socially defined associations impact such things as coalition building, dialogue, politics, and conflict resolution for those groups? As such, my graduate studies in human rights became more about an individual (or group’s) right to impact society, one’s ability or inability to participate within a society’s processes and politics. It was there that I began questioning, How is a right to impact different than the ability to impact? Human rights, then, in my own study, were important because, they were the only measurable way to qualitatively measure such things as agency, privilege, capacity, and entitlement. Therefore, in my exploration of what we refer to as “human rights”, I was more concerned with the closing and opening of political spaces, the phenomenon’s that contributed to the politicization of identities, and the particularly local dynamics that in some form had influenced or been influenced by exogenous forces.
What my graduate research provided me with was an opportunity to unknowingly explore the broad parameters of what Professor Henry Jenkins of MIT refers to as a participatory culture.
In trying to define the interconnectedness of the broad issues and questions that my studies were defined by, I found that it was the qualitative study of human capacity and agency that most interested me. At what point in society did identity and association affect capacity?
When did constructions of race, gender, sexuality, religion, or socio-economics define perspective, association, and in what spaces were such social constructions absent? Does something like race matter online? Or does digital interaction provide a truly open and equal participatory space? Does it matter in terms of access, privilege? In what ways are virtual worlds socially constructed? In what ways do virtual worlds provide an escape from the ways individuals associate or define one another based on their physical characteristics, or language? How is a conversation about politics different between two people in a digital space, where their communication is not influenced by the physical roles of gender, race, or class, that might otherwise influence their interactions? Is a digital space a safer space? What contributes to the inequality of this space? Is human interaction, and human agency, more equal, or any less socially constructed, in a virtual world? And do social constructions define equality or inequality, agency or capacity, for any given society?
Since joining Global Kids, these are the questions that I find myself presented with. I find myself thankful to be able to do the kind of meaningful work that both contributes to youth development and allows me to ask the bigger questions of “Why?”
This is what it means to be a part of a very innovative field and a very innovative culture.
A culture that is very aware that it is on the cusp of a transforming society and aware that is necessary to this time, examine the world in all ways that are un-disciplined. A culture that is ready to consider the different lenses necessary to think critically about the connections and adapt accordingly.
That the very nature of our work is arguing about why new skills like collective intelligence and networking are imperative to societal progress; that a learning community is dependent on such skills and as a result we are at the forefront of utilizing these skills ourselves. Because of this there is this sense of cross-disciplinary collaboration, and of harnessing the ground breaking aspects of this work in a way that is collective. And so when I meet other educators who are similarly exploring the ways digital literacy skills are apparent to our societies, I realize that if any field can successfully steer clear from the types of knowledge production that essentially reinvents the wheel, digital literacy may very well be it.
And finally, that I find that what draws me ore than anything to be a part of this work is that it is evolving in what J.P. Gee would call “affinity spaces.”
This is a learning culture that rightfully applauds every contribution, whether from a novice or from an “expert”; that we are all very aware that there is significant value in our differences in perspectives, our different strengths and assumptions that we bring to our research, our practice, our questions, and that this is what’s necessary if we are going to move forward.
Progress is this.
I look forward to whatever might lie ahead as we continue to seek out new ways of knowing and developing, our youth, and ourselves.
