Young people's creative understanding of their mediaworlds

这个研究项目将探讨当今年轻人使用和创造媒体的经验。它将使用创新的研究策略，包括视觉创意、隐喻、叙事和讲故事，以了解媒体创作、分享和消费在年轻人的日常生活和人际关系中所起的作用，以及他们如何看待自己的身份。该项目将探讨支持不同类型的媒体使用和交流的动机，以及个人如何理解他们的个性，他们的社会身份，以及他们生产，分享和消费的媒体之间的关系。它将寻求建立模型，帮助研究人员理解今天年轻人的“受众”、媒体“接受”或“参与”体验——部分是通过询问年轻人自己。媒体“观众”的传统概念已经崩溃，尤其是对年轻人来说，这已经成为司空见惯的现象，因为今天与流行文化的接触意味着创造和分享媒体，以及消费媒体。基于诸如“接收”电视广播或“阅读”大规模生产的媒体产品等概念的传统模式，现在只是部分有用。今天的媒体消费者也可以成为媒体生产者，分享他们在网上创造的图像和音乐，在网上展示自我（比如在MySpace上），在维基上协作生产知识，使用各种“Web 2.0”工具进行交流，分享信息、想法和媒体材料，并表达自己。当然，这种说法也可能被夸大了：个人可能不想花很多时间创作——他们可能只是想娱乐——尽管近年来在线工具的使用变得更简单了，但人们对新技术的熟练程度和舒适度不同，当然，不同水平的技术、文化和经济资源影响着人们的使用。很明显，传统的定量和定性研究方法只能给我们部分的了解这些经验。该项目提出，我们需要新的实证研究形式，以更全面地了解生活和参与复杂媒体世界的日常体验。这与媒体受众研究的转变有关，其中有人认为，不应该仅仅期望研究参与者产生关于他们媒体消费的讨论，而应该给他们创造机会，然后反思创造性的人工制品本身。以及了解“是什么”的年轻人与媒体,各种形式的——在某种程度上我们已经知道从学术和商业研究,我们还需要掌握动机、紧张和冲突的驱动和影响媒体使用和沟通,并在结果产生影响(如:如何自我;提出了新的信息是如何回应;趋势或问题成为流行和倡导者,或弃用,批评者)。这项研究将寻求发展创新的视觉和创造性的研究方法，这些方法将利用隐喻和叙述，以获得对社会经验的更丰富的理解。

This research project will explore young people's experience of using and creating media today. It will use innovative research strategies, involving visual creativity, metaphor, narratives and storytelling, in order to understand the role that media creation, sharing, and consumption plays in young people's everyday lives and relationships, and how they consider their own identities.The project will explore the motivations underpinning different kinds of media use and communication, and how individuals understand the relationship between their individuality, their social identity, and the media they produce, share and consume. It will seek to establish models which will help researchers to understand the experience of 'audiencehood', media 'reception' or 'participation' for young people today - in part through asking young people themselves.It has become commonplace to observe that the traditional notion of the media 'audience' has collapsed, especially for young people, as engagement with popular culture today means creating and sharing media, as well as consuming it. Traditional models, which were based around notions such as the 'reception' of television broadcasting or the 'reading' of mass-produced media products, are now only partially useful. Today's media consumers can also be media producers, sharing images and music that they have created online, making online presentations of self (such as in MySpace), collaboratively producing knowledge in wikis, and using various 'Web 2.0' tools to communicate, to share information, ideas, and media materials, and to express themselves.Of course, such claims can also be overblown: individuals may not want to be creating a lot of the time - they might simply want to be entertained - and although online tools have become simpler to use in recent years, there are different degrees of skill and comfort with new technologies, and, of course, different levels of technical, cultural and financial resources affect access.It is already clear that traditional quantitative and qualitative research methods can only give us a partial understanding of these experiences. The project proposes that we need new forms of empirical research, to more fully understand the everyday experience of living and participating in a complex mediaworld. This connects with a shift in media audience studies, in which it has been argued that research participants should not be merely expected to generate talk about their media consumption, but should be given opportunities to create, and then reflect upon, creative artefacts themselves.As well as understanding 'what' young people do with media, in all its forms - which to some extent we know already from academic and commercial studies - we also need to get to grips with the motivations, tensions and conflicts which drive and affect media use and communication, and have an impact upon the outcomes (such as: how the self is presented; how new information is responded to; which trends or issues become popular and have advocates, or are deprecated and have detractors).The study will seek to develop innovative visual and creative research methods, which will make use of metaphors and narratives, in order to acquire richer understandings of social experience.