CONVERGING MEDIA

Case Study

Studying Digital Natives

During Michael Wesch’s graduate training in anthropology, he spent a total of eighteen months in New Guinea studying the impact of print, mapping, and census-taking on the natives of the remote Mountain Ok region. Today, he continues to study cultural changes wrought by the introduction of communication media. But, instead of studying print, he focuses on Web 2.0. And instead of studying isolated villages untouched by contemporary communication technologies, he studies globally connected virtual cultures that are the very products of the newest media. That is, Wesch studies digital natives—people who are most at home with converged media.

Wesch’s methods would be labeled qualitative in conventional media research; he conducts ethnographies of the way people use digital media in their everyday lives. This method surrenders claims of objectivity in favor of attaining insights through participant observation. Instead of studying the digital media strictly in terms of information exchange, which is the tendency in quantitative research, Wesch’s Digital Ethnography Working Group looks at the much more complicated process of producing, sharing, contesting, and negotiating meaning, as it relates to media and media users.

Wesch emerged as a leading public intellectual in the area of Web 2.0 when, after working for months on an academic paper that would explain the significance of new Web tools, he realized that he needed to exploit digital media in order to explain the digital media. On January 31, 2007, he posted the results of this epiphany, a frenetic 271-second YouTube video titled “The Machine is Us/ing Us.” Wesch used screen shots of editing source code, bookmarking sites, creating blogs, and posting images to create a compelling and concise multimedia message, framed with a highlighted composite quote from “We Are the Web” by Kevin Kelly and followed by an appeal to move beyond thinking of Web 2.0 as mere information processing, noting that “the Web is no longer just linking information . . . the Web is linking people.”

The simplicity and eloquence of Wesch’s presentation attracted immediate attention in the blogosphere, and thanks to Digg, Delicious, and Technorati, “The Machine is Using Us” quickly became the most-viewed video on the Web, even beating out all the Super Bowl ads that appeared the next weekend.¹ In its first six weeks, the video attracted 1.8 million views. Today, that number has grown to 11 million.

Wesch serves not only as a leading figure for researchers studying the convergent media, but also as a model of sorts for students who are considering careers in media research. Wesch demonstrates that research motivated by the quest for meaning provides avenues for gaining deep insights into how our identities and our values have been shaped by mediated experiences. Ultimately, his work on digital natives is designed to make us more self-conscious about the impact of converged media. This orientation on self-knowledge and how it relates to media literacy is apparent in the only question that appears on final exams in his anthropology classes: “Why are you here?”