Steven gets digitally screwed over

First, I apologize for the lateness of the contribution. No excuses; my bad. Getting right to the meat of the article: Steven’s creation of a digital story. The authors make it sound like this was simultaneously a disastrous and rewarding experience for Steven.

First the rewards. Children, especially in situations of less than ideal external support, can never receive enough positive feedback for any sort of undertaking that requires them to put themselves out there in a very personal way. Being that Steven seemed to be in a less than ideal socioeconomic setting, the kernel of the idea behind the project was excellent: give a student a forum to talk about something that really mattered to them. Stir in positive reinforcement for the results and ice with the uniqueness of doing it all in a forward-looking digital setting and the results absolutely should have followed Steven through the rest of school like they did.

The disaster: The results that followed only continually reminded Steven of a very negative experience. He received unsolicited judgment at exactly the wrong time. Steven was putting himself out there (as he was asked to) about how he really felt about his family, his mother, and his environment. He was willing to talk about these things that were so tied to his identity, and he was essentially told he had something negative to be ashamed of. The whitewashing of Steven’s background to appear less stereotypical and more artificially sweetened turned him in on himself and an opportunity for expression. I have to wonder if this video is more than a little responsible for his later decline in school achievement, too. If being encouraged to have shame over one part of his past undercut his self-worth, why should Steven have tried for better grades like he had been. The very stereotyping they had been so concerned about revealed to Steven a whole identity; he didn’t understand that his achievements existed despite this negative background and so he assumed the entire role of the stereotype.

What it means to digital communication. Aside from the similarities we can observe between Steven’s larger story and the risks we face when we put ourselves out there digitally (in the average user’s scenario, the larger outside societal standards we’re all aware of take the place of the judgmental undergraduate advisors Steven was partnered with), there is a crucial difference. When I decide to expose my thoughts, digitally or otherwise, it is generally on my terms and in my own words. Whatever the response to my efforts, their genesis happened apart from outside scrutiny. When I hit submit, I’ve intellectually and emotionally committed to what I’ve produced. Steven wasn’t really given that opportunity because he never got to this point un”assisted.” Naturally, he disengaged from ownership of his words because they were compromised. The take away I get out of this is applicable to all mentoring experiences, and perhaps especially those as exhibitionist as digital autobiographies: If you tell a kid to do whatever suits him/her or his/her interests, shut the hell up when it comes to their content choices – this is not the time for vanity.

Finally, as an admitted pet-peeve and a total tangent, I really have to take a shot at the authors of the article for just one thing. As interesting as the topic is, this really could have been a few pages shorter. There was so much transitional blather at the beginning, especially in the pages devoted to the thoughts on multimodal theory that wasn't applicable to this paper. I get it, context is good, but jeez! Brevity, people, brevity.