The Digital Edge. S. Craig Watkins
media seemed unlikely as a result of social and economic barriers, students designed their own social hack to pursue their interests and creative aspirations in the digital world.
A Case Study of Creative Resilience: Miguel and Marcus
Miguel and Marcus, twins who lived in a trailer park community with their immigrant parents, are excellent examples of the tenacity many students displayed to ensure their meaningful participation in the digital world. All of our interactions and conversations with the twin brothers and their parents strongly suggest that the family were undocumented Mexican immigrants. Like many of the students from immigrant households, Miguel and Marcus began their schooling in the United States in an English language learner class. They mastered that curriculum relatively early in their academic career and transitioned seamlessly to an English-language curriculum. The twins were in the ninth grade, well adjusted, and enrolled in two pre-AP classes when we met them.
The media practices of the twins took shape in a home environment that offered a modicum of access to the social and gaming media they coveted. There was a computer and two televisions in the home. The computer was a PC that was shared among four siblings and two adults. Moreover, the PC was an aging machine with a temperamental graphics card, which made it unsuitable for the gaming adventures and social media that the twins enjoyed. The Internet connection was not broadband but it was functional. No one in the household owned a smartphone. Miguel, however, did own a Nintendo DS—a handheld gaming platform that was steadily losing market share to the Apple products during our fieldwork.
In the cramped bedroom that the twins shared was a Wii game console and television set. The Wii, according to Miguel, was hooked up to an old television. “It’s a small old TV like the one that releases all that static,” he said during one of our many interviews with him. Due to the PC’s limited performance capacity, the twins opted to use their Wii gaming console whenever they logged into Facebook at home.
Occasionally, Miguel used his DS to connect with peers. “The DS has a browser and you can connect to Facebook Mobile,” he explained. He used the social network to “personal message” friends, but it was a much slower form of communication. “Most people have phones and they text each other,” Miguel said. When asked what else he did with the DS, Miguel said, “I can put music on it. There are programs and games. There is a notebook thing that I can write down memos and meetings.” He also had a few games on the device. Miguel expressed frustration that the DS could not connect to the Wi-Fi at school. He noted that Apple products like the iPhone and iPod connected with no problems.
In addition to connecting with his peers from school on Facebook, Miguel used the social network to connect with people he had met through Perfect World, a popular multiplayer online role-playing game. Perfect World is a 3D adventure and fantasy virtual world based on Chinese mythology. As with World of Warcraft, it took the commitment of seemingly endless hours to develop both the technical proficiency and the social currency necessary to build a more compelling experience in Perfect World. He played every night for two hours when he arrived home from school. He acknowledged that he would have played much longer, but “my parents only give me two hours of computer time a night.” His commitment to playing also led to the creation of some fruitful social relationships within the game.
Jason, a fifteen-year-old from Florida, was someone that Miguel met in the virtual gaming world. “I was a noob [newbie] and had a quest that needed to be done and he decided to help,” Miguel told us. During the quest they entered a dungeon and killed the boss. Shortly after that they became in-game friends and connected with each other outside of the game through Facebook.
Another colleague in the game also came to his rescue in a time of need. “I had this other friend that invited me to his faction because my old faction was full of a-holes,” Miguel said. He needed another quest to complete a level, and the leader of the other guild helped him achieve his mission. They started chatting after that. The leader of that guild was twenty-four years old and lived in New York. Miguel was fourteen. He also befriended a couple based in Brooklyn. He chatted with them three or four times a week via Skype’s voice service.
Needless to say, the strategic play, social ties, and skills that Miguel developed through participation in Perfect World intrigued us. This was a whole different person. In school Miguel was reserved, quiet, and unassuming. Out of school he was actively involved in a virtual gaming world that required him to collaborate with strangers to problem solve and that also led to meaningful social interactions outside of the game.
The challenging computing conditions that they faced at home made after-school time especially appealing to Miguel and Marcus. Like a core group of students in our study, the twins stayed after school to access the Internet. When the school day ended, their social gaming and computing lives began. The twins were tinkerers and fond of experimenting with new online gaming platforms, forms of play, and communities.
As a result of their curiosity, the twins introduced Minecraft into their peer group’s informal gaming ecology. Somebody (it was never revealed who) took the time to secretly download Minecraft on all of the computers in Mr. Warren’s Game Lab. This act of bravado turned the classroom into a quasi-Minecraft studio for a brief period of time. In addition to playing the game, several students shared their perspectives and knowledge about the open and innovative world the Minecraft platform has sparked.
While Marcus, Miguel, and some of the other students played the game recreationally after school, Mr. Warren, the advanced game design instructor, was exposed to Minecraft and its merits as a learning engine. The following summer Marcus and Miguel were among a small cadre of students who received an invitation to work on a Minecraft-based project with geologists from a local university. The informal gameplay enriched the formal learning opportunities for the twins and some of their peers.
Critics typically decry engagement in gaming worlds, but the assorted skills—social, tactical, and communication—that some pick up can be useful beyond the game world.15 The twins were among the few students in our sample who played in this particular sandbox of digital and participatory culture. In many ways, their play was socially networked and reciprocal—that is, connected to other gamers who helped them execute various quests, level up, and attain skills and in-game assets that raised their status and capabilities within Perfect World. These are precisely the kinds of skills—leveraging networks to achieve mastery, greater competency, and social mobility—that are growing increasingly valuable in a knowledge-driven and networked world.
Even in a home environment that required four siblings to share an outdated PC, Miguel actively participated in a connected gaming community. Moreover, Miguel and Marcus’s discovery of Minecraft contributed to the making of a rich, informal learning and gaming ecology at Freeway. Their openness to new gaming platforms and experiences led to important learning opportunities for them and their peers and also embodies the creative resilience that is a vital but seldom noticed feature of life in the digital edge.
Shifting Contexts of Internet Engagement
In addition to learning about their access to Internet media, we were interested in learning more about the contexts in which black, Latino, and low-income youth use media technologies. Their widespread use of social and mobile media can be attributed to many factors, including a rapidly evolving media environment. In this section we focus on two features of this changing environment. First, we consider the widespread adoption of the Internet in schools. Second, we discuss how the diffusion of Internet-enabled handheld devices has profoundly reshaped the technology landscape and practices of black, Latino, and lower-income youth.
The Internet Goes to School
Since the mid-1990s, public schools in the United States have made steady progress in expanding Internet access. In 1994, 3 percent of U.S. schools had Internet access in instructional rooms.16 By 2005, nearly all (94 percent) public schools had Internet access in instructional rooms.17
Predictably, schools with high poverty and black and Latino student populations were less likely than their counterpart schools to provide Internet access. In 1999, about three-quarters,