She was always curious about other cultures and dreamed about getting to know people from different parts of the world. Her English was limited, but that did not deter her. She especially relished the time she spent in chat rooms, first ICQ and then Yahoo. “Mona, a 22-year-old agriculture student and amateur graphic artist” who grew up in a semi-rural Egyptian town, “recalls the excitement in 2006 when her parents bought a computer … for her and her siblings. Some of his online players became friends and even visited him in Egypt during their holidays.”Ĭonnection, context & perspective-taking. The community of players formed and enforced its own codes of civility. Their reactions took him by surprise and led to exchanges about discrimination and other related issues. Other players immediately called him out for being homophobic.
Playing World of Warcraft helped Murad overcome depression connect with people in other countries, learn English and “learn culture”: “During a game taunted his opponent through the chat function with a homosexual slur.
So consider how using connected media itself – not being taught about it – sensitized, informed and otherwise educated three young Egyptians, three of many young people across the Middle East mentioned in Herrera’s paper: If we want to support the members of this very connected generation that we love as they find their identities, roles and contributions in a networked world, certainly we have to understand their media tools and environments and help them use them to their advantage as well as for the social good. For one thing, it’s much easier to find examples of what’s possible – what has been achieved, how it has and who can help – in a constantly updated global database of humanity’s collective knowledge and social action. But the ways people of all ages think about and act on it are changing as we connect across borders, cultures, jurisdictions and other traditional lines of division. It’s not that national citizenship is going away, of course. Their tendency to be more collectivist oriented has led some to call them the ‘we’ generation.” Members of this cohort, born between the late 1970s and the early years of the millennium, function in ways that are more horizontal, interactive, participatory, open, collaborative, and mutually influential. She cites more than a dozen scholars who see in this generation “patterns of sociability, cognition, and values distinct from generations who came of age in a pre-digital era. “Compared to previous generations, youth coming of age in the digital era are learning and exercising citizenship in fundamentally different ways,” writes Linda Herrera in Harvard Educational Review. We – all of us, worldwide – can’t yet be sure what citizenship, digital or otherwise, is becoming in this rapidly shrinking, networked world. I hope that – even though entire curricula have been written for digital citizenship instruction in K-12 schools – perspectives like this will help everyone exposed to them see that we are far from ready to define digital age citizenship, much less dictate to young citizens what it is. It’s the view from youth themselves, as captured by scholars in the new book Wired Citizenship: Youth Learning and Activism in the Middle East, edited by Linda Herrera at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (Routledge 2014). This being Digital Citizenship Week in the US, here’s a view of it that isn’t typically heard by parents and K-12 educators here.
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