Over the weekend, while looking at various resources in digital media literacy teaching for my proposed digital media exemplar project, I began to think back at my experience teaching documentary production at WHYY. I remembered the disconnect that often happened between the documentary project that the students were expected to carry out and the media that our students were interested in and would spend their downtime watching. Although the instructors tried to give students the initiative to choose their own topics and way of making the documentary, the students still often had trouble engaging with the structured process that we laid out for them and with the sedate, objective style of news reportage. By contrast, they were engaged and adept media consumers. They followed humor vlogs, like “Asia Star”, a YouTube drag character, and video sharing sites outside of YouTube and Vimeo, like “World Star Hip Hop”. (http://www.worldstarhiphop.com/videos/)
I would like to shift my final project proposal to a project on civic media in hip-hop culture. Although the Internet videos that my students enjoyed watching did not necessarily have an explicitly civic component to them and at times were downright harmful and age-inappropriate, I generally saw something valuable in my students getting to browse and find videos that resonated with their sense of aesthetics and culture and that were entertaining and silly and fun to watch. I would like to write a paper tying the concepts discussed in our seminars and in our readings to my observations and research on the manifestations of hip hop culture in today’s digital media landscape that serve a civic purpose and that inspire youth civic engagement.
One particular group that I recently found out that I believe I can use as a model for the intersection between hip-hop aesthetics and youth empowerment was a group called “Dollar Boyz”. (http://dollarboyz.com/), described as a “youth-led movement” which aims to engage Philadelphia youth of all ages, though mostly male, through a variety of events and a partnership with the Pennsylvania Academy Leadership Charter School. They organize block parties and have been tied to recent trends of flash mobs in Philadelphia. (http://articles.philly.com/2012-09-07/news/33651283_1_flash-mobs-social-…) They also appear to wed elements of the music and PR business to their enterprise, producing music videos and music tracks. “Young and Paid” is a motto that many of their members use.
In my research paper, I aim to compare the media output of the “Dollar Boyz” to the community and civic media organizations that are more removed from entertainment and from turning a profit, like the program at WHYY that I worked at. Through several visits that I plan to make to Philly in the next two months, I hope to interview my former colleagues and students and come to a conclusion about how subaltern media spheres can be brought into the same mission statement of more traditional media literacy programs.