Project Partner:

TakingITGlobal.org

ART Mobile Lab

Project Description:

When looking at new media communication, it is clear that the digital divide is still apparent across class, race, and gender. My Major Paper seeks to examine how youth are working to bridge these gaps by seizing the means of communication, creating alternative networks, and brainstorming new functions that CEOs had never dreamt possible. As innovations in Citizen Media continue to rise, many gaps still exist blocking people from self-expression and access to the digital commons.

Mobile communications have started to bridge the digital divide.  Globally 1.5 billion people have access to televisions, and 1 billion to the Internet; yet overall the most actively used electronic gadget is the mobile phone, with over 3 billion users worldwide (Open Handset Alliance, 2009). Reaching the 4 billion mark at the end of 2008, equaling approximately one cell phone for every two human beings (ITU, 2008). Not only do mobile phones enable citizens to receive media, they have the dual function of creating and broadcasting media as well. Economists around the world are hailing cell phones as the solution for ICT development and a ray of hope in bridging the digital divide. At the London Business School it was found, “for every additional 10 mobile phones per 100 people, a country’s gross domestic product (GDP) rises 0.5 percent” (Waverman et al., 2005). Soon there will be more cell phone users than literate people on the planet (Chipchase 2005). This signifies a shift into a new age of digital literacy, where avatars, emoticons, pictures, sounds and videos often hold more power than names and numbers.

Through an online global youth mobile survey, both quantitative and qualitative data will be collected to explore how youth across the world are using their mobile phones regionally as tools for activism. An in depth literature review will be conducted examining the variety of ways that youth are using new media technology to fuel transnational movements for social change. My final MRP will be exhibited online at MobileRevolutions.org, accompanied by a series of blog posts, videos, websites and other digital media projects.  Through a solid exploration of mobile communications and global youth activism, I will use ePAR methodology to engage youth activists online in community knowledge production.

Research Problem:

The key issue that I would like to explore is how youth are using mobile communications to create social change within their local communities. I will explore this through conducting a global youth mobile survey in collaboration with research partners TakingITGlobal.org, and the Advanced Research Technology (ART) Mobile Lab. TakingITGlobal is a youth run NGO which hosts an online social network for youth leaders and activists from around the globe. With over 200,000 youth members from more than 200 countries, TakingITGlobal.org is the most popular online community for youth working to make a difference in the world. This makes it the ideal platform for conducting research about the use of wireless technologies by youth community leaders. For TakingITGlobal to engage with a diverse range of activist youth leaders from different socio-economic levels, it must adapt to the new trends of youth in developing countries who are increasingly using mobile phones to access the internet.

The goal of the study is to measure ways in which youth use mobile media as a tool for social change around the world. A global youth mobile survey will be conducted over the TakingITGlobal platform to determine how youth use their phones to share knowledge and create social change, as well as to create recommendations as to how TakingITGlobal can evolve to reach out across mobile platforms. This research project aims to crowdsource grassroots innovation from youth around the world on how to synchronize our existing services with what is already happening in the field. The survey will be designed and initially conducted online among members of the TakingITGlobal.org online community.  The results of the survey will be used to create a mobile platform, allowing TakingITGlobal to broaden and diversify their reach, offering relevant information, inspiration and community development tools through a medium young people are comfortable with. It will further enhance their relevance as the world’s largest online community for young people interested in creating positive social change. The research will lead to increased understanding of how youth are using mobile communications for social change which will in turn act as a blueprint for TakingITGlobal’s mobile engagement strategy creating:

• Improved access to resources for youth leaders who do not have computer access

• Mobile integration of TakingITGlobal’s existing website and services

• A resource for other youth leaders and organizations who are looking to integrate mobile technology into their work for social change.

Research Questions:

My objectives are to find out the ways that youth use Citizen Media to build critical discourse and communities for grassroots organizing. I hope to achieve my objectives and answer the following questions which guide my research inquiry:

• How are youth leaders across the world using mobile phones as a tool for social change in their community organizing?

I will answer this question through a survey conducted through TakingITGlobal.org.  With a projected sample size of around 3,000 youth (between 1-2% of 248,877 members), I will to gather valuable data from online youth leaders between the ages of 16-30. From my own work as a youth activist and community researcher I will explore through the media I produce how I have leveraged mobile communications to organize for social change, and try to apply these same tools as a means of harvesting knowledge from the field and engaging community stakeholders.

Research Methodology:

Increasingly the arts are accepted as valid methods of inquiry in both Popular Education and Participatory Action Research (Sinner, A., Leggo, C., Irwin, R. L., Gouzouasis, P., & Grauer, K. 2006). ePAR is one technique of Participatory Action Research that merges the media engagement elements of Community Art, with the critical pedagogy of Popular Education. Community Art is the practice of threading together individual and community knowledge through collective arts production.  Community members share and create knowledge through art-making, while at the same time activating new sets of media literacies. Community art is often collaborative in nature, pairing “professional” artists with local communities of “non-professional” participants in order to create art that speaks to local issues and identities (Barndt, 2004).  Many community artists are committed to working alongside and within marginalized populations, such as youth, low-income people, people of colour, people with different abilities, women, and queer communities; populations whose voices are often left out of mainstream cultural discourse.  In engaging marginalized communities in collective place-based media production, community arts projects bring traditionally silenced voices to the forefront (Honor Ford-Smith, 2001). Community artists not only operate in traditional locales like community centres, but also in schools, often challenging both classroom hierarchies of media literacy, as well as the banking model of education  (Freire, 1970). Often drawing on Freirian notions of Popular Education, artists challenge traditional notions of literacy, introducing concepts of agency and empowerment alongside the traditional canon of education.  At the same time, there lies a simultaneous challenge to the colonial dominance of the written word (Taylor, 2003), as artists introduce new fields of literacy, while at the same time inviting participants to bring their personal and community knowledge (Shimshon-Santo in press). While Popular Education’s primary goal is to create critical literacy, it uses a number of multi-media techniques; from Nicaraguan HIV/AIDS educators working with communities to create telenovelas, to creating mind maps on the dirt floors of rural communities. Popular education blends with Participatory Action Research, as education and knowledge creation are turned into participatory processes.  Participatory Action Research (PAR) also at times uses media as a research tool, getting participants to use media tools like cameras to tell photostories, or create zines based on common experience (Barndt, 2004).  Their definitions crisscross; Participatory Action Research projects often use Community Art techniques, and often the difference between a Community Art and Popular Education project is only geographical, as Community Art is an Anglo North American term and Popular Education is a Latino South American phenomenon. ePAR is a term coined from the innovative award winning Teen Net Research Program to describe the combination of Participatory Action Research techniques with the use of new media tools like the internet and mobile phones (Flicker et. al, 2008).  ePAR melds principles of both Community Arts, Popular Education, and Participatory Action Research as it merges media art, community animation, and participatory knowledge production. The resulting knowledge produced by participants can be easily disseminated through the internet through the social networks of the peers involved in creating the media.  The results of these projects have a high potential of creating social change and attracting a wide audience.  For social service agencies that deal with marginalized youth, ePAR can be an effective method of engaging youth as peer researchers and training youth to be community agents for social change.

Utilizing ePAR methodology, the TakingITMobile survey will involve two project partners, TakingITGlobal and the ART Mobile Lab.  Project partners will provide feedback in the generation of the survey questions, recruitment, data interpretation, and will aid with dissemination over their networks.  In order to include the voices and expertise of the wider community I have created a TakingITMobile Working Group through the TakingITGlobal network to invite interested members to participate.  As well, TakingITGlobal has worked to encourage idea generation through creating a monthly theme on Mobile Communications, featuring articles by users from across the world and encouraging users to get involved with the working group.  Currently at 25 members, this working group includes TakingITGlobal users of all ages from 15 countries around the world.  TakingITMobile group members will participate in group brainstorms, review and give feedback on the survey questions, and help with recruiting and disseminating survey data. Once reviewed by the project partners and working group, the survey will combine both qualitative and quantitative data collection.  Survey respondents aged 16-30 will be recruited through the project partners’ and working group’s networks, and will be featured on the TakingITGlobal website. The final results will be analyzed through SPSS conducting a regional comparison of mobile usage across the globe.  Other independent variables measured include gender, urban/rural, and level of access.  The information gathered from the survey will provide valuable data on how youth are using their phones for social change and will feed TakingITGlobal’s strategic planning to provide better access to information for youth leaders around the world.