GoodWork Paper 63: Multiple Worlds: Adolescents, New Digital Media, and Shifts in Habits of Mind

Author(s): Margaret Weigel (corresponding author) and Celka Straughn, with Howard Gardner and Carrie James

Editor(s): Howard Gardner, Series Editor

Media: Paper

Description: Today‘s youth are the first generation to have lived their entire lives in a world rich with new digital media (NDM). NDM are ripe with the potential to transform young people‘s experiences, for better and/or for worse. Have these tools prompted changes in the ways young people think and act? This question has informed the research of the Developing Minds and Digital Media project. Our data, collected from forty excellent and experienced educators practicing at secondary schools in the Boston area, paint both an in-depth picture of the typical upper middle class high school student and contextualize this information with respect to earlier generations of students. Our research controlled for socioeconomic factors, with a focus on the children of more privileged households. We made a number of key observations regarding identity, cognition, and social cognition that point to novel developments related directly to NDM use. These observations share a sense of multiplicity. Practices that had been previously firmly situated in the construction of an isolated individual are now, via NDM, distributed, divided or fractured. The once unitary individual can now slip personae on and off with ease, as well as assume a new distanced perspective from the self. The student increasingly swims, and sometimes drowns, in a powerful current of fast-moving information. And the roles of son or daughter, student, worker, and friend that the typical adolescent assumes now overlap as NDM allow the user to inhabit multiple roles, and worlds, simultaneously.