Millennials and Media Ecology

Culture, Pedagogy, and Politics

Anthony Cristiano, Ahmet Atay, Anthony Cristiano, Ahmet Atay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781032177816
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429534928
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Millennials and Media Ecology explores issues pertaining to millennials and digital media ecology and studies the cultural, pedagogical, and political environments such heterogeneous generation populates. The book questions whether millennials are properly understood as a heterogeneous group, particularly by the institutions and agencies that target them, and whether they are demonstrating the ability to set out a path for themselves and take charge of their own life and future.

A diverse team of expert authors review past and current studies with critical assessment of arguments and propositions, and document actual experiences of members of the millennial generation through detailed studies. Engaging with topical subject matter and current research on millennials, the chapters:

• Question the misunderstanding that digital tools and Internet technologies are making the younger generation 'dumber' and 'disengaging' them from the real world
• Underscore the legal and economic insights into the commodification of the younger generation as consumers rather than learners
• Examine the historical trajectory of media technology, and whether new practices are having an empowering effect or one of enslavement to an increasingly irreversible technological and socio-political regime
• Shed light on issues of critical pedagogy emerging from digital environments in relation to one's mental abilities and degrees of wisdom
• Discuss the cultural and political implications of millennials' new media trends, the changing relationship between millennials and legacy media, which rely on the younger generation for survival;Offer new insights into the significance of current media trends in relation to issue of credibility and identity.

This is an essential book for scholars in the fields of Media and Communications and Popular Culture, and will be vital reading for postgraduate students and specialists in related fields.

Part 1
Socio-cultural environments

1
Millennial generation, new media, and convergence culture

Ahmet Atay

Introduction

This chapter focuses on the impact of the convergence culture on the members of the millennial generation. To understand the culture of millennials and their media presence and consumption, the larger cultural structure that surrounds them must be understood. In this chapter, I use personal narrative as an educator to theorize the relationship between millennials and the convergence culture. I have spent my teaching career educating millennials and trying to understand how they consume media, what they do on digital platforms, and how they utilize these technologies to communicate, access and share information, and represent others as well as themselves. These personal narratives are meant to articulate and interrogate these relationships.

I entered the classroom after a hectic day. I was carrying a stack of papers and a bottle of water in my right hand, and I was holding my Apple laptop close to my chest with my other hand. As I walked toward the front of the class, I quickly observed that half of my students were not there yet. The ones who were present barely noticed my arrival as their heads were buried in their devices. They were either looking at their computer or phone screen. In some cases, they were looking at both. They sat next to each other without exchanging any words – like total strangers on a crowded underground train, sitting in silence. I placed my belongings on the podium and started to connect my computer to the Apple TV available in the classroom. While I was in the middle of the process, my iPhone gently vibrated, notifying me that I had an incoming email. I purposely delayed my engagement with my phone and completed my task of connecting the two Apple screens. As soon as I was able to sync my computer screen with the screen in the classroom, I was relieved. I often adopt new technologies into my teaching, and I have developed a fear of failing devices in my classroom.

Although I am not really a millennial, I often find myself engaging in media consumption practices that define the members of the millennial generation. I often experience life in front of the media screens, frequently looking at my computer screen half of the day and spending the remaining time either using my cellphone or some kind of screen to teach my classes or follow the numerous faculty meetings I attend. When I am not fully engaged in the ‘cyber culture’ and media technologies that surround us, I spend my time educating, mentoring, and communicating with millennials who mindlessly use social media, quick media applications, and the latest communication technologies. Thus, I join the general view of formative scholarships such as McLuhan’s¹ and Postman’s² that new technologies are significantly changing the cultural environments we live in and are also shaping our relationships with others in different contexts. Yet, while we are indeed situated in a new media ecology, previous scholarship has tended to overlook the ‘human agency’ question – particularly McLuhan’s. In the new mediated environment, or ‘ecologies of media’, we human agents increasingly depend on media technologies to make sense of our surroundings, express ideas, communicate with others, and represent ourselves on a variety of converging platforms.

In his influential work, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Henry Jenkins (2006)³ theorizes the different dimensions of ‘convergence culture’ and explains the ways in which the convergence of media has shifted our understanding of media texts and products, production processes, consumption, and audiences. Furthermore, this newly emerged convergence culture is influencing how we communicate, consume mediated texts, engage in online communities, and construct and perform different cultural identities. Hence, understanding the various aspects of convergence culture is crucial, particularly for the millennial generation. As millennials have been born into the convergence culture, their media practices are widely influenced by this very idea of convergence. Most millennials, at least in the US, own a laptop, smartphone, or tablet and, therefore, spend a significant portion of their lives looking at screens. They text messages, use their smartphones for quick media applications such as Snapchat or Twitter, and use their computers to engage in online social communities, write school papers or blog entries, shop online, and play video games. They also use the same technologies to watch films and television shows, listen to music, or simply ‘hang out’ in cyberspace. In this chapter, I will 1) deal with the definition of convergence – the primary meaning of technological convergence and industrial/cultural convergence – and how it informs millennials’ practices; 2) discuss the new possibilities such convergences offer and how these come to fruition in matters of media consumption, presentation of cultural identities, and participation in social and civic discourses within online domains; and 3) examine the potential challenges the above scenarios present to millennials of diverse ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual-orientation backgrounds.

As a concept, media convergence explains the state of being of our culture, society, and the everyday practices in which we engage. We live in a very media-saturated world where our experiences and realities are often altered, widely impacted, or purely shaped by media and cyber technologies. We are media and technology dependent; as a result, our lives and our identities are mediated. We spend most of our waking hours looking at a screen, listening to an electronic or digital sound, or carrying on conversations about media texts, products, and technologies. While I am not suggesting that a media deterministic worldview is the absolute reality for most of us, particularly for millennials, I am suggesting that because of our technological dependencies when carrying out our everyday encounters, we are partly ‘mediated, digital, and converged’. Since we mostly live and present different facets of who we are on online domains, our identities are an amalgam: partly offline, partly mediated, and partly digital.

In a typical day, we wake up to an alarm clock, and in the case of millennials, we most likely use our phone’s alarm clock capabilities instead of owning a traditional alarm clock. First thing in the morning, we might switch on the kettle or coffee machine then turn on the TV or computer. Most likely, we will check our email or messages on our phone before we even have a proper breakfast with our family members. If we live alone, it is likely that we will consume our breakfast in front of a screen. We will send and receive more than a dozen text messages before we hit the shower. Once we are ready to leave our houses, we are probably on the phone talking to a friend or a family member. While driving to work or school or taking public transportation, we constantly check our phones and send and receive messages. Throughout the day, instead of talking to our friends, we continue to write emails, send and receive text messages, play music on our gadgets, and ask questions of Siri or other equally smart cyber friends or informants. We read the news, check the scores of our favourite sports, flirt with strangers on dating or hook-up sites, buy things online, and swipe our credit cards with chips at the stores, all while avoiding any kind of interaction with human beings. We take, send, and receive photos; keep track of our movements and our step counts; watch videos, TV shows, or other online materials on our computers or tablets; send tweets; construct Snapchat messages; post messages on Facebook; and most likely fall asleep either in front of the TV or computer screen or holding our smartphone. We spend most of our time on our computers, laptops, tablets, Kindles, or smartphones. Thus, due to such behaviour and routines, in some practical sense we live online in our cyber, mediated, fragmented, and converged digital lives.

Convergence culture

In order to make sense of millennials’ media consumption and the ways in which they use new media and cyber technologies to communicate, construct, and culturally perform, I must first explain the concepts of convergence culture. Since millennials are described as ‘digital natives’ and are surrounded by a media- and technology-driven culture, they are often highly fluent in the language and structures of the convergence culture. According to Henry Jenkins,⁴ convergence culture refers to a “flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experience they want.” Similarly, Erin Meyers⁵ writes that “The concept of ‘convergence’ encompasses a wide range of technological, social, and industrial changes to everyday media culture” (336). Hence, the idea of convergence culture describes the landscape of our current media culture and the ways in which audiences, mostly millennials, use different media outlets and platforms to access media content.

There are two important elements in the structure of convergence culture: 1) the media content that freely flows across different media platforms and technologies within and among different cultures and 2) the technologies that allow media producers and audiences alike to produce and display media content, as well as the technologies that provide unlimited and easy access to this content. It is crucial to further elaborate on these elements since they widely influence millennials and their media consumption.

First, I will focus on convergence of media content across platforms. To address the importance of media content in this particular media landscape, Croteau, Hoynes, and Milan⁶ argue that:

While in the past, media organizations tended to rely on the power of a good story (say, a novel or a single movie) or the power of a celebrity (say, a hit novelist or blockbuster star), they now work to create entire fictional universes that can be extended and sold across a range of media platforms.

(123)

For example, as audience members, we can read stories of action heroes in comic books and watch their adventures as blockbuster films in movie theatres, on DVDs, or on online platforms, such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Hulu. We can also purchase one of the latest versions of the video game featuring the same character. By placing the stories of popular characters across different media outlets, media makers not only expose audiences to their products in different venues but also produce an entertainment-based consumer culture that continuously highlights their products. Because of the globalizing nature of the media industries as well as new media technologies, media texts and content often circulate among different nations despite national borders and linguistic differences. Because of this global circulation of media products, new media technologies create a global convergence culture. In his chapter ‘Convergence and Disjuncture in Global Digital Culture: An Introduction’, Marwan M. Kraidy⁷ alerts us about two potential dangers or negative outcomes of the global convergence culture. Kraidy argues that because of the global circulation of American and Western media products and texts through digital platforms and new media technologies, we are now experiencing high levels of global homogenization and hybridization. One of the direct outcomes of this homogenization that he refers to in his chapter often materializes in the millennial generation’s culture; millennials, despite their national and language differences, often participate in similar digital or new media culture because of similar media texts, that is, the new media technologies available to them regardless of their cultural and national locations, and the cultural practices that are engineered and promoted by these technologies.

New media technologies, social network sites, digital platforms, and quick media applications are the main forces behind the creation of the convergence culture. In order to sell their consumer products, media and technology companies aim to generate a large global consumer reach. To achieve their goals, these companies prioritize the notion of accessibility. Even though the digital divide exists, and those individuals in the ‘global south’ or ‘economically and technologically developing countries’ often do not enjoy equal opportunities and technological access despite advancements in digitalization, the gap between the digital divide is narrowing. Financial and technological accessibility largely contributes to the creation and expansion of the convergence culture. Technological devices, such as laptops, tablets, smartphones, and other gadgetry are becoming cheaper and more readily available. Furthermore, as these devices become more accessible, media makers and technology companies are increasingly providing new platforms to give limitless access to text and content. For example, network channels are now putting television programming online, where audiences can watch the content for a small fee. Similarly, audiences can download their favourite shows to their computers, laptops, or smart-phones through Hulu, Netflix, iTunes, and other platforms, and they have limitless access to media content. Now, audiences can watch their shows while typing an email on their laptops or talking on their smartphones.

It is important to realize that most millennials are born into the convergence culture. They have been referred to as ‘digital native...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• PART 1 Socio-cultural environments
• PART 2 Pedagogical environments
• PART 3 Political environments
• Index