Sunny day, sweeping the clouds away...At this week's round table, Inica, Jack, & Kenisha spoke with Michael Preston and Rafi Santo from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop about how teens are engaging with public media, and media and social media more broadly today. We all expressed nostalgia for public broadcasting, connecting it to our youth, while not fully connecting it to our present. Which didn’t surprise our guests because it mirrors findings in their By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences initiative, in which they spoke with tweens and teens across the U.S., asking them for their advice about what media producers should do if they want to engage with people their age, and how their lives have changed during the pandemic, producing the report The Missing Middle: Reimagining a Future for Tweens, Teens, and Public Media.
We’ve grown up with access to the world at our fingertips, able to access anything, anytime, with the lines between work and play blurring because so much of both happen online. Our lives have been shaped by online interactions, which is a blessing and a curse. Technology evolves as quickly as we do—and what our younger siblings experience through technology may be very different than what we have. We loved discussing what a good, credible media technology ecosystem could look like--amidst the crisis of misinformation, disinformation, and polarizing media consumption--and the values that should undergird it.
We loved speaking with our guests about the authentic learning lives of youth, and how to honor the very rich learning and problem solving that happens beyond the classroom, in large part thanks to what technology makes available to us . At root, questions about technology boil down to questions of values--what do we want to spend our time doing and learning, how do we create breathing space in our tech-dominated worlds, and what kinds of possible futures do we want for young people and for our citizenry? Most youth don’t know what public media is, where to find it, and what’s different from commercial media, but public media has an important role to play in a healthy democracy, particularly given how few purely public goods we have in the U.S. that aren’t driven by profit.
We all agreed that youth should play an active role not just in selecting what media we watch but in producing it: which is of course a core value of this for GenZ, by GenZ podcast. Thank you for joining us!
