By Sarita Yardi, PhD Candidate, Georgia Tech University. Sarita was a researcher with the Digital Youth Project while completing her Master’s degree in Information Management and Systems at the University of California, Berkeley in 2005 and 2006.
As has been well-established throughout the research on digital media and technology, kids move between online and offline worlds with ease. Even kids who have limited access to the Internet, thus lying on the fringe of youth participatory culture, perceive their online environments to have real consequences and meaning for their everyday lives, Throughout my research on the digital youth project, I wanted to understand how we could harness kids understanding and enthusiasm for digital media. As a computer programmer myself, I hoped that encouraging kids to open the black box and explore the environments they participated in might help them become more sophisticated producers and consumers of their everyday media engagements. In 2005- 2006 I carried out a semester-long study of an after-school media literacy program with Sarai Mitnick [1]. We partnered with the YWCA in Berkeley, California, a program designed to empower middle-school aged girls by teaching them to program, design websites and discuss the role of technology in their lives. The program catered primarily to young African-American girls who lived in an economically disenfranchised area of Oakland, California [2].
