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Understanding the virtual and actual 

Since well before Elvis shook his hips and changed rock and roll, parents have been worried about how their kids are coping with cultural change.

But, "no previous generation has grown up in a digital era, immersed in digital culture from birth until death," said Shanly Dixon, a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities whose research is on young people, privacy and digital culture.

She and Sandra Weber (education) co-edited Growing Up Online: Young People and Digital Technologies, recently published by Palgrave. The book is the result of a close collaboration between Dixon and Weber, who headed up an international research project on girls’ everyday experiences of digital technologies.

In addition to the other participating contributors from Concordia (Leslie Shade, Communications; Brandi Bell, PhD Candidate in Communications; and Kelly Boudreau, MA graduate Sociology), the book brings together authors from McGill, the U.K., the U.S. and South Africa in order to look at a wide range of young people’s experiences in cyberspace.

The book brings together several articles, often focused specifically on girls and young women. The observations counter a lot of assumptions about girls' lack of affinity for technology and their vulnerability on the world wide web.

"Because there's a tendency,” said Dixon, “to address young people’s engagement with digital technology either as a moral panic or from a utopian perspective, we chose contributions to the book that approached this issue from a more nuanced, balanced perspective." That expectation, and the desire to foreground young people’s voices, was reflected in the project. Weber co-authored one of the chapters with her adolescent niece.

"We shouldn't assume we know how technology affects children, we should look at what they actually say and do," said Weber. How young people negotiate, adapt, adopt and remake the technologies often creating their own games not as the producer intended, Weber pointed out, is the focus of the book.

"There's a tendency, for example, to say ‘this is virtual space’ and ‘that is actual space,’ but many of these categories don't really hold up as mutually exclusive under scrutiny. Young people negotiate their online and offline worlds more seamlessly than we might believe," Weber said. "Cyberspace is a place for friends to get together in, to drift in and out of, a place where they can ‘hang out’ in ways that are both similar to and different from getting together in a park, a mall, or each others’ houses without using digital technology.”

Both editors expressed delight at how well the two of them worked together, and how willing their contributors were to participate in the extensive back and forth editing process. Weber said that she couldn't imagine a better editing experience. Now that the book is out, Dixon has returned to teaching at Concordia and completing her PhD and Weber is preparing research on community-based art and media education for disadvantaged youth, including pregnant teenagers.