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“On Behalf of a Shared World”: Arendtian Politics in a Culture of YouthMedia ParticipationStuart R. Poyntz

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‘‘On Behalf of a Shared World’’:Arendtian Politics in a Culture

of Youth Media ParticipationStuart R. Poyntz

More than thirty years since Hannah Arendt’s death in 1975 at the

age of sixty-nine, her novel theory of the public realm continues toattract attention and debate. In this article, I contribute to this dis-cussion by drawing on Arendt’s theory of public life to investigatethe space of youth media production in relation to questions of democratic habituation. Arendt is not typically thought of in rela-tion to youth or media, but her concern for the nature of public acts,and for the way such acts expand our lives by producing worldli-ness, offers a powerful framework for thinking about teenagers’media production work.

In what follows, I introduce Arendt’s thinking on the publicrealm and then use her framework to examine the complex experi-ences of youth video production mentors involved in a summerdigital media program located in Vancouver, Canada. I situatemy review of the youths’ experiences in Summer Stories1 in relationto the development of what Henry Jenkins (2006a, 2006b) calls aculture of participation in contemporary Western societies. I notethat while such a culture would appear to offer youth more oppor-tunities than ever to produce their own cultural expressions, this

does not mean such expressions are free of disciplinary practicesthat regulate and limit youth conduct. In fact, in a culture of parti-cipation we are seeing the development of new regimes of visibilitythat shape youth experience and agency to fit with the demands of

The Review of Education, Pedagogy,

and Cultural Studies, 31:365–386, 2009

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a global consumer economy. I provide examples to support this

argument and then turn to the experiences of youth mentors inSummer Stories. Through these experiences I indicate how andwhen production work nurtures democratic habits by fosteringwhat Arendt contends is central to public life, that is, a form of thinking that is responsive to others, to the fact that we are all partof a shared world.

HANNAH ARENDT— PHILOSOPHER OF WORLDLINESS

Writing her most significant work in the shadow of the Holocaustand Europe’s fascist nightmare, Arendt’s concern for thepublic-political realm arose against a backdrop of fear. More thananything else, what concerned Arendt is the threat posed by mod-ern life to our capacity to act in concert with each other, to contestthe impersonal and alien quality of contemporary experience.

At the most general level, Arendt linked this threat to the factthat private, internal life is privileged in Western culture. She recog-

nized this tendency in liberalism, which privileges individualizedrights and private persons as the ‘‘proper site of humanity’’(Warner 2002, 39; see also Arendt 1958). She drew on Nietzsche’scritique of subjectivity to show that this focus on the individual isthe result of still larger historical ruptures: in particular, ‘‘the riseof the social’’ (Arendt 1958, esp. 38–50). This refers to the develop-ment of those practices and institutions in modern society— includ-ing schooling in its industrialized, mass forms (Levinson 1997,2002)— that discipline human relations in terms of behavior and

regulation, rather than mutual understanding (Villa 1997; Curtis1999, 75–85).In the twentieth century, Arendt traced the profound danger

posed by a denuded public world to the figure of Adolph Eich-mann, the Nazi architect of the Holocaust, whose trial for crimesagainst humanity she famously covered in Israel in 1963. WhatArendt (1963a) observed in Eichmann was an acute ‘‘remotenessfrom reality’’ (288), an unwillingness to see others. He wasprotected by ‘‘cliches, stock phrases, adherence to conventional,

standardized codes of expression and conduct. . .

against [the real],that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all eventsand facts make by virtue of their existence’’ (Arendt 1978, 4). Inthe face of this kind of thoughtlessness, Arendt tells us public action

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is a form of engagement that forces us to experience the undeniable

presence of others. Public acts speak of ‘‘involvement and commit-ment, . . . the hope, not of solving any problems, but of making itpossible to live with them without becoming, as Sartre once putit, a salaud, a hypocrite’’ (Arendt 1968, 8).

Unlike liberal traditions within democratic theory, Arendt (1958,1963b, 1968) does not frame public action in relation to a set of inherent rights one possesses or in regard to institutions thoughtto be at the center of representational democracies (Isaac 1994).Belonging to a political community is important in her framework

but in a manner that prefigures Bruno Latour’s (2005) recent think-ing about democracy, Arendt contends it is not institutions that sus-tain public life. It is speech and action in the presence of others thatenables ‘‘freedom [to] appear’’ (Arendt 1968, 4). Democracy is not athing, like a parliament that can be parachuted into communities tobe ‘‘unfold[ed] and . . . inflated just like your rescue dingy is sup-posed to do when you fall in the water’’ (Latour 2005, 17–18). Publicaction is ‘‘an intertwined form of cohabitation’’ (Latour 2005, 40); away of living that is fostered by thoughtful and vigilant resistance

to the power of ideology, bureaucracy, and artificiality; acts, inother words, that contest ‘‘the impersonality and routine characterof mass society’’ (Isaac 1994, 159). In this sense, Arendt alerts us to amore primordial description of democratic practice, one that I thinkcan be especially helpful for thinking about youth media work andhow it fosters habits that deepen public culture.

For Arendt, at root, democratic acts are about a struggle overmeaning that works to support plurality. Arendt means by this thatdemocracy is a form of associational political action where we initi-

ate meaning through agonistic encounters with others. Democraticpractice is about action undertaken with others that disrupts dis-courses of force and violence or processes of control that limitour sense of reality. Such acts counteract thoughtlessness by produ-cing a space of communicative plurality that reveals the contingen-cies that affect our ability to act with others. Democratic habituationis not about a specific form of social activism, then, nor is it limitedto a specific political project. Rather, democratic habits of mind area form of thinking and doing, the practice of being attentive to the

ways all meaning has a social and historical context, a form of con-tingency that itself is susceptible to change.For Arendt, plurality is at the center of public life because

plurality is ‘‘the basic condition of both speech and action’’

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(Arendt 1958, 176). She means to signal by this ‘‘the importance of

others in both making our lives and understanding ourselves’’(Coulter and Wiens 2002, 17). Whatever forms of specificity eachone of us represents, Arendt contends we depend on the presenceof others for this difference to manifest itself. Charles Taylor (1991)makes a similar point when he says: ‘‘My discovering my ownidentity doesn’t mean that I work it out in isolation but that Inegotiate it through dialogue . . . . My own identity cruciallydepends on my dialogical relations with others’’ (47–48). In a veryreal sense, others pull us out of a state of being into a state of

becoming. New people and new situations bring different partsof our selves into view and so public action operates as ‘‘the sceneof world-making and self disclosure, . . . a political scene . . . [where]the self and the shared world . . . emerge in interaction withothers’’ (Warner 2002, 59). In this sense, ‘‘plurality is a blessing inthat the perspective of . . . others not only defines and stabilizesone’s own perspective, . . . [it] also puts it in relation with theworld’’ (Gambetti 2005, 433). Plurality thus acts as a bulwarkagainst thoughtlessness because it counters a kind of oblivion that

can blind us to the reality of others. As such, it is essential fordeveloping a common world, a public culture in which we are allinvolved.

Given Arendt’s concern for the precariousness of public life, sheis aware that no one momentous public expression can produceautonomy or sovereignty. In fact, Arendt (1968) argues: ‘‘If men[sic] wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce’’(163). She means by this that freedom cannot be equated withautonomy because in a very significant way freedom is relational.

It is a function of the way we learn to see ourselves and our becom-ing in the world through our interaction with others. Democratichabituation is thus about learning what Emanuel Levinas (1985)has called responsiveness or ‘‘responsibility’’ to the world. It isabout becoming aware of the social nature of meaning, its contin-gency and its susceptibility to change. Democratic practice is aboutlearning to see oneself as a plural self, one always operatingthrough the sedimented meanings, the social, cultural and politicalresources that organize our lives; and yet at the same time, it is a

self working to produce relationships that enable a fuller and richerworld, a ‘‘thickness to human ethical life’’ (Nealon 1998, 34). Aplural self is thus a self that is involved in the world, a self con-ceived relationally, ‘‘in a space in-between, with others and among

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others’’ (Gambetti 2005, 435). In short, a self habituated to Arendt’s

(1968) injunction that we act ‘‘on behalf of a shared world.’’Arendt of course is well aware that many forces, institutions, and

practices can prevent public acts and the fullness of reality fromcoming into view. This concern is noteworthy in relation to youthmedia production because while there is now increasing opportu-nity for young people in advanced industrialized countries—

although certainly not only here— to cut, mix, and distribute theirown media texts, young people’s participation in contemporaryconsumer-media culture is also filtered through practices that act

to discipline and limit their expressions.

GLOBAL MEDIA AND PARTICIPATORY CULTURES

Beginning in infancy, young people now grow up learning the lan-guage of mass media through a constant diet of screen images,audio messages, and text-based communication that compete withschools and families as primary storytellers and teachers in youths’

lives (Goodman 2003). Many lament this situation (Postman 1994)and yet Appadurai (1996) reminds us that the impact of a globa-lized consumer culture is complex. Contemporary mediascapesoffer ‘‘a series of elements (such as characters, plots and textualforms)’’ out of which young people (and others) produce scriptsof ‘‘imagined lives’’ (Appadurai 1996, 35–36). The development of these scripts, however, is not about a passive audience that repli-cates dominant ideologies from consumer culture. Rather, whatwe’re learning is that audiences’ use of consumer-mediated

resources is always linked to local concerns and forms of culturalexpression, patterns and protocols of technological use and integra-tion among different groups, as well as national concerns andregulatory frameworks (Appadurai 1996).

In various national settings, including Canada, the contingenciesof media use are being shaped by the fact that young people aregrowing up in semiotic environments marked by a new kind of cul-ture of participation (Buckingham 2000; Buckingham andSefton-Green 2003; Benkler 2006; Ito 2006; Jenkins 2006a, 2006b;

Jenkins et al. 2006). Such a culture is one where there are moreopportunities for youth (and others) to express themselves throughdigital media, ‘‘to transform personal reaction[s]’’ to the images,sounds, and narratives of consumer-media culture into forms of


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‘‘social interaction’’ (Jenkins 2006a, 41). This situation is the result of

what Henry Jenkins (2006b) has called a culture of convergence thatis developing as part of the way ever more young people are usingmedia texts. What Jenkins is getting at here is that while the processof media concentration has advanced significantly in various coun-tries over the past two decades, a cultural shift made possible by thedevelopment of new media technologies and the transformation of global communication networks has also been underway.

Convergence is often assumed to refer to the development of glo-bal media giants like Disney, Viacom, or Rupert Murdoch’s Fox

empire, and so forth. But as regulatory policies and technologicalaffordances have changed, allowing older medium-specific compa-nies to integrate their brands and corporate properties into new,highly concentrated global media forces, another shift has beenunderway. In the 1990s this shift was most often associated withrhetorical expressions about new digital kids, an ‘‘N-generation’’(Tapscott 1998) who were thought capable of causing the downfallof older media companies and conglomerates (also see Negroponte1995). Although this did not happen, the convergence of media

companies through and alongside the development of new digitalmedia did coincide with a change in the use of media resources.At the center of this transformation is the fact that young people(and others) now expect to utilize, manipulate, discuss, and becomemore involved with media resources than in the past.

In many ways this change extends older, active relationshipsaudiences have always had with movies, TV, or music, and so forth.And yet, convergence also marks something new. What seems clearis that there is much more interactivity between people, media texts

and environments today, more ways for interventionist fans, acti-vists, local noncommercial producers, and others to use screenresources to produce meaning in their lives. Convergence is notonly an economic and technological change, then, it also ‘‘repre-sents a cultural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek outnew information and make connections among dispersed mediacontent’’ (Jenkins 2006b, 3).

REGIMES OF VISIBILITY

Given these changes, there are surely reasons for cautious optimismabout the increasing ‘‘capacity individuals and noncommercial

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actors have to use and manipulate cultural artifacts’’ (Benkler 2006,

276). Yet Arendt’s concerns that we never lose sight of those institu-tions and practices that foster impersonality and routinizaton incontemporary life is a sobering reminder that bears on the develop-ment of participatory media cultures. This is so because such cul-tures produce their own regimes of visibility that act to disciplineand limit youthful experiences, thereby preventing the fullness of reality from coming into view. By regimes of visibility I mean todraw attention to those practices and protocols that serve to pro-duce youth as subjects whose sense of worldliness is truncated or

managed. Arendt might say these are practices that prevent onefrom seeing the social and political nature of our lives, the diffuseways our selves are dependent on and inevitably intertwined withthe lives of others. Regimes of visibility bring young people oryoung people’s expressions into view, in other words, but theydo so in ways that limit or constrain youths’ sense of reality. Assuch, regimes of visibility are related to Foucault’s (1991) idea of governmentality.

For Foucault, as Sara Bragg (2007) has noted, ‘‘government’’

draws attention to those strategies, programs, and techniques that‘‘regulate the conduct of conduct, including the relation of the self to the self’’ in order to produce subjects ideally suited to life inadvanced liberal western democracies (345; but also see Rose1999). Regimes of visibility thus refer to the practices and protocolswithin a culture of participation that discipline and organize youth-ful expressions. One consequence is that youth experiences andagency are managed such that they better fit the demands of a glo-bal consumer economy. In the following I note one such practice

that seems to be having this effect on youth today.This example comes from the remarkable expansion of onlineresources that allow children and youth to mix and remix theirown visual and audio representations. In this regard, I am espe-cially interested in the development of video mash-up sites, whichhave developed as part of the commercial Web sites of both publicand private children’s and youth’s broadcasters. As I am using theterm here, mash-ups are short videos produced by editing togethervideo and audio resources that were made for another purpose.

Mash-ups are remixes or digital collages. They are made from shortclips and audio tracks extracted from TV shows or cartoons that aremade available to online users who are then given the opportunityto reimagine or remix a sequence of scenes or even a whole episode


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of a program. Users do not require their own editing software

because mash-up technologies are made possible through Webapplications that let young people work with and recut commercialtexts. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada’s nationalpublic broadcaster, offers a number of mash-up opportunities foryoung audiences, including The Outlet (www.cbc.ca/theoutlet),which is targeted at children on the CBC Kids Web site, and HockeyNight Mash-Up (http://www.cbc.ca/sports/hockey, which istargeted at youth on CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada Web site. A morediverse range of mash-up opportunities are to be found on

Viacom’s Nickelodeon Jr. Web site (www.nickjr.com), as well ason many other sites targeted at young people.Mash-ups are only one example of the many techniques com-

mercial broadcasters use today to attract and hold adolescents’attention. Others include free video and audio downloads, onlinegames designed around branded characters, contests, productextensions, behind-the-scenes access to celebrities and writers,and opportunities for fans to directly influence programming deci-sions (see also Zwick, Bonsu, and Darmody 2008). What makes

mash-ups especially interesting, however, is that they are enactinga particular regime of visibility fit to the new opportunities madeavailable within a culture of participation.

Mash-ups can be understood in relation to a strategy of ‘‘affective economics’’ that is increasingly central to marketingdiscourses about young people (Jenkins 2006b). At the center of affective economics is the idea that in today’s fragmented and over-saturated media culture it is increasingly difficult to hold the atten-tion of young audiences. This makes it difficult for broadcasters or

media content providers to sell audiences to advertisers becauseadvertisers are skeptical about how attentive youth are to commer-cials on TV shows or Web sites. As a result, entertainment provi-ders and advertisers are working together to find new ways todevelop viewer loyalty and brand identity. In particular, they arelearning what ad content customers will seek out and spend timewith on their own (Jenkins 2006b). Mash-ups are part of this strat-egy. They are a form of immersive advertising, a way of allowingyoung people to express themselves through commercial media

environments that simultaneously build brand investment. In thissense, participation is linked to a strategy for organizing and mana-ging youth identity. Like all advertising, mash-ups are meant tofoster a subjective identity intertwined with brand content.

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Participation is not so much about developing youth agency then; it

is about constructing a regime of visibility, a form of youth expres-sion intricately connected to the development of commerciallyoriented subjectivities.

There are other ways youth media participation is linked toregimes of visibility that truncate or limit the worldliness of youthexperience (e.g., see Grimes and Shade 2005; Wasko 2008). Themore immediate and pressing questions, however, are where andwhen do young people’s democratic habits of mind developthrough participation in contemporary media culture? In Arendtian

terms, we might ask: Where and when do young people develop aresponsiveness to the world, a sense of the social nature of mean-ing, its contingency, and its susceptibility to change?

MENTORING AND DEMOCRATIC LIFE

Any answer to these questions is complex. Here, however, I high-light one example of youth experiences with media production that

does appear to contribute to young people’s democratic habitua-tion. Specifically, I analyze the results of an ethnographic study of a peer-to-peer youth mentoring program where young peopleassist fellow youth in developing and producing their own media.Peer-to-peer mentoring has been a feature of informal, community-based youth media production programs since the 1970s (Goldfarb2002). Surprisingly, there has been little written about how peermentorship in production settings impacts mentors themselves(Goldfarb 2002; Charmaraman 2006; Poyntz 2008). What we do

know tends to focus on the psychological or vocational changes thatresult from mentoring experiences.2 But peer mentoring of lessexperienced media makers can also have a profoundly democraticinfluence on how youth see themselves and their social futures.

This was evident in a yearlong critical ethnographic study Icarried out during 2006–2007, which examined youths’ experiencesin a Canadian summer digital media program. The study focusedon Summer Stories, a program that, like many such projects(Charmaraman 2006), is intended to expand young people’s oppor-

tunities to become more fully involved in contemporary digitalmedia ecologies. Developing creative voices while simultaneouslyfostering young people’s sense of competency, belonging, andpower are crucial parts of this process. So too is promoting media


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literacy, which is done in Summer Stories by nurturing youths’

critical viewing and production habits. Alongside these broaderobjectives, the role of youth mentors in the program is to support,challenge and guide novice participants over the course of atwo-week production cycle. Mentors are typically former studentsof the program, ranging from sixteen to twenty years of age.Symptomatic of the global influences shaping all major Canadiancities today, the mentors also represent a cross-section of educa-tional levels, socioeconomic backgrounds, and cultural and ethnicdiversity.

In studying Summer Stories, I examined how the program nur-tures an Arendtian sense of democratic practice by helping youngpeople to think with an enlarged mentalite , ‘‘to care about mattersof common concern and to act on this concern with others’’ (Isaac1994, 158). I worked collaboratively3 with more than twenty youthparticipants, educators, and community members involved in theprogram and employed various methods, including a question-naire, semistructured interviews, short informal conversations,and e-mail communication to gather research data. I also took

extensive field notes throughout the study and reviewed my find-ings with participating youth and program instructors as my ideasevolved. In addition, I looked at the Summer Stories Web site andprogram brochures and evaluated all videos and related materi-als— including scripts, treatments, editing notes, and so forth—

produced or used (as part of mentor training) during the 2006program. It should be noted that I was also involved in the earlydevelopment of Summer Stories between 2000 and 2002.

In Summer Stories, small groups of two to five youth, aged four-

teen to nineteen, produce a short digital video over two weeks.Each summer, there are three distinct two-week productionsessions. As noted by one of the program’s directors, the role of mentors is to be involved in the production cycle throughout eachsession. Mentors are

The first line of instructional staff . . . [T]hey have the most involvementwith student producers, ensuring there’s never a point at which a produc-tion group is without support (interview).

Zac, a senior mentor with Summer Stories added

The mentors . . . act as advisors=producers for their groups, imparting theirknowledge about all aspects of video production (interview).

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In preparing for their roles, youth mentors participated in train-

ing workshops designed to introduce the social nature of imagery,including how visual and audio conventions operate as productiveaffordances in media production. They also learned how these con-ventions are open to change. To highlight this, mentors watchedyouth-made videos that do something that seems different, evenchallenging, to the aesthetic, social, and cultural practices commonin mainstream media. They took part in sessions looking at therepresentation of gender and considered how dominant storylinesabout youth in popular culture can shape youth expressions.

Finally, mentors took part in workshops that explained how theymight open themselves up to the diverse experiences and voicesof others throughout the summer.

As with all such educational endeavors, there were gaps and pro-blems in Summer Stories’ training (see Poyntz 2008, for details).However, of particular interest for the purposes of this article arethe ways that working in the program shaped youths’ lives andself-conceptions, how the program built young people’s productionskills while fostering an investment in and responsibility to plurality

and the social construction of meaning. As evidenced in thefollowing, this outcome was more apparent for some youth thanothers. The lessons learned from Summer Stories are still important,however, if only because they suggest how youth mentoring cannurture a form of thinking that is responsive to others, to the fact thatwe are all part of a shared world. Let me illustrate this by discussingthe experiences of two of the eight mentors involved in the study.4

MACIE— DISCOVERING THE SOCIAL LIFE OF IDEAS ANDEXPERIENCE

The first mentor was an eighteen-year-old Italian-Canadian womannamed Macie who was involved with Summer Stories as a studentand mentor over four years. Reflecting on her own developmentduring this time, Macie noted that as a young high school student,prior to her work as a mentor, she had no idea that

what we’re constantly being bombarded with . . . [through commercial]

media could become part of my own work and ideas (interview).

While helping more than forty novice video makers to create newwork at Summer Stories, however, she found her views changing.


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She felt that this was largely because she saw first-hand how stu-

dents’ ideas

often reflect . . . what they’ve seen in the media . . . While trying to comefrom a really honest, natural place, [students’] first stories often just endup [being] reflections about what they’ve seen in the media (interview).

Drawing from this, Macie began to develop a kind of social or pluralconception of her self and others. She remarked Programs like Sum-mer Stories teach you to stop for a second. [They teach you to] just beaware of what you’re being influenced by and maybe, hopefully,

you’re able to separate yourself from that and remember,

‘‘Wait a second. My name’s Macie . . .’’ This media world isn’t real. Myworld in East Vancouver as a student is real and what am I actually feeling,not what do I think I’m feeling because I’m told that this is how I shouldfeel and what I should buy (interview).

In Arendtian terms, mentoring appears to have contributed toMacie thinking of herself relationally, as a self whose real andimaginary scripts are formed in relation to the larger media culture

in which we live.At the same time, supporting student video-makers to creativelyreconstruct and respond to media messages taught Macie that ourinherited scripts are not final. Rather, like our selves, they arecontingent and susceptible to change. Macie said she came to thisconclusion as she learned the language and conventions of mediaproduction, including the fact that media representations have ahistory. She said

By being more aware of how images work, it’s made it easier to see how meand other youth can respond to the influx of media messages and imagerytoday . . . I think it’s very important that youth know [they can] expresstheir side, their reaction to the environment they live in (interview).

Through mentoring, Macie seems to have learned to operate inwhat Arendtian scholar Rolando Vazquez calls the ‘‘realm forthinking,’’ a place that is ‘‘dynamic and open to question[ing]’’the nature of the world and our role in it (Vazquez 2006, 44).Although fostering change remains difficult, mentoring helped

Macie to develop what Arendt would call an enlarged mentalite , anawareness of how our lives are enabled and enriched when spacesof communicative plurality are created. As a concrete example of what this might look like, Macie and other peer educators from

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Summer Stories developed a pirate youth television station that for

a time became a space for youth to produce, distribute, and circu-late their work to local teen audiences. East Vancouver TV (EVTV)eventually hosted seven broadcasts. More important than this num-ber, it represented an instance where a new youthscape took form,one meant to facilitate a new realm of expression and togethernessfor young people.

Of course, tensions were still evident in the way Macie’s experi-ence in Summer Stories fostered democratic sensibilities. EVTV isimportant, but Macie’s thinking about her work with less experi-

enced youth producers was also filtered through a sense of culturalexclusiveness, a sense that she and other mentors were part of a van-guard, a group that had managed to escape a kind of false conscious-ness seen to afflict other young people’s relationships with mediaculture. This was evidenced when Macie talked about students’early video work. Some of Macie’s comments about other youths’work reflected a sense of how our media culture operates as a formof public pedagogy. Other remarks, however, indicated disdaintoward the perceived naivete of other youth. This became evident

when Macie commented that so many new video-makers produce

copy-cat spew [based on what] . . . we’re taught . . . we’re supposed to beand feel by the media . . . I feel like a lot of students . . . end up spewing thatout without being fully aware of what they’re doing (interview).

When they do this, Macie says, she was frustrated largely becauseshe’s not altogether interested in

people talking about things they have no authority or knowledge to talk

about. That bothers me (interview).

In addition to these remarks, a sense of cultural exceptionalismvis-a-vis other youth was also evident in Macie’s understandingof the future of Summer Stories. Julia, a project director, noted thisin recounting a conversation she had with Macie about the pro-gram. According to Julia, Macie said she was worried about theprogram because

some of the older mentors, including herself, were thinking of leaving the

following year (interview).

Other, younger mentors were developing through the ranks, but asthe conversation continued, Julia said it became evident that from


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Macie’s perspective, Summer Stories’ future was cast in doubt

because some senior mentors were leaving the program. Optimisti-cally, of course, I think these concerns are a sign of Macie’s attach-ment to Summer Stories. On the other hand, however, they indicateher difficulty in imagining how other young people could engage inthe same kind of critical practices she has learned over her fouryears in the program. This disconnect suggested a tension in theway Macie’s mentoring experience impacted her openness toothers. While apparently more capable and even willing to engagethe plurality of others, Macie also appeared suspicious and even

disdainful of other youths’ abilities to operate in the ‘‘realm of thinking’’ that she identified with herself.In this sense, mentoring shaped Macie’s democratic habituation

in complicated ways. From an Arendtian perspective, she became akind of public actor, aware of the contingent and contestable natureof meaning across a variety of contexts and practices. She began toconceive of herself and others relationally and to engage in ques-tioning the nature of the world and her place in it. Macie seemedto imagine that she and her colleagues were exceptional and

uniquely positioned to understand the plural and belated condi-tions that shape hers and others’ experiences, but her observationsalso revealed an awareness of how our lives are enabled andenriched through our dependence on others. Macie’s sense of exceptionalism contains the potential to undermine her commit-ment to foster difference and entertain the plurality of others. Atthe same time, her work with the EVTV project was symptomaticof her willingness to initiate new programs and new possibilitiesintended to empower youth. This is indicative of the way demo-

cratic habits were fostered through Macie’s experience as a youthmedia production mentor. To be sure, this outcome was not thesame for all mentors. In fact, if Macie’s story exemplified certaindemocratic possibilities that can arise through mentoring, anothermentor’s experience highlighted some of the challenges that canundermine how young people become oriented to democratic lifethrough media production work.

DOMINIC—

STRUGGLING TO KEEP UP

Dominic was a seventeen-year-old African-Canadian youth whowas involved with Summer Stories as a peer mentor for the first

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time during this study. He came to the program with some back-

ground in video-making, but with no prior experience in the pro-gram. The challenge this posed was acute. Not only did Dominicface skill deficits he also faced difficulties becoming a part of thecommunity of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991) among SummerStories’ mentors.

Dominic arrived at Summer Stories with only a modest back-ground as a video-maker. He noted as much when he talked abouthis experience with his first student group. In particular he had avery difficult time challenging his group in ways that would help

them produce better work. As a result, he said

I was really stumbling all over the place . . . [Especially with the first film,] Iwas trying to figure out my whole mentor role . . . I didn’t really know whata mentor does, what a mentor doesn’t do, so . . . [the first] film didn’t comeout so great . . . I was like, ‘‘yeah we should do this’’ and [the students]were all like ‘‘no, we should do this,’’ and so I was conflicting with themwhen I should have been flowing with their ideas. [In the end,] we justended up kind of going back and forth and I think that sort of [hurt] thefilm (interview).

During a critical review, following the first two-week session, a pro-gram director met with Dominic and gave him specific objectives towork on for the next session. These included developing a produc-tion plan for his group, helping his students develop a shot list, andusing his critical viewing skills to help challenge students’ decisionsthroughout the production cycle (field notes). If useful, taking upthese directives was difficult because, while learning to mentor,Dominic was also trying to improve his technical production skillsand his own abilities as a storyteller.

In response, in the second two-week session, he says

I just tried to watch everybody else, I just sort of tried [to do] what the othermentors were doing (interview).

Macie used a similar strategy in her first two summers as a mentor.In Dominic’s case, this helped, but with the second production hesaid he really struggled around knowing how much to intervenewith the students’ script and how much of the story to leave open

for them to develop and clarify while shooting the video. He alsohad difficulty keeping the group on task. All of this had a noticeableimpact on the final project. In fact, Dominic felt the video wasn’t assuccessful as the first project he mentored. In the second video,


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there ended up being plot holes in the story and ultimately the stu-

dents had to return for two extra days of shooting and editing tocomplete the project (field notes).

Skill deficits were a problem, then, but more importantlyDominic faced a challenge that was central to how the programnurtured his democratic habituation. Arendt reminds us that beingrecognized for one’s own uniqueness by one’s community is centralto public life. Recognition by others is in fact a basic condition fordemocratic experience, that which saves us from an oblivionmarked by thoughtlessness and a sense of ‘‘impotence’’ (Arendt

1958, 201). Recognition by others enables a space of appearance todevelop, a space which comes into being ‘‘wherever men [sic] aretogether in the manner of speech and action’’ (Arendt 1958, 199).The problem for Dominic was that precisely this element of publiclife eluded him in his experience with Summer Stories.

Not unlike other youth media programs, the community of prac-tice or local culture among Summer Stories’ mentors was somewhathermetic. Senior mentors and program directors admitted as much,noting that it can be difficult to absorb new people into the program.

The short production time frame during each production sessionexacerbated this problem, as did the short training schedule. ButKira, a senior mentor, noted another issue related to Dominic’s case

I don’t know exactly how to explain it. There were the core original men-tors who are ‘‘eastside,’’ not hippies, but [with] hippy-type parents in somecases. The kids aren’t hipsters but hipster-types. And Dominic is kind of hip-hop, a more mainstream guy. [Because of this,] he was just one stepbehind everybody else . . . [H]e had to learn more . . . I guess more trainingwould have helped . . . (interview).

Because Dominic did not arrive in the mentoring program with thesame kind of youthful cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984) as some of the older mentors, in other words, he faced challenges fitting inwith his peers. In the end, this made his job much more difficult.

In a very real way, in fact, the hermetic culture within SummerStories left Dominic on the outside, unrecognized as a colleagueby more senior mentors. Dominic did not possess any of theobvious cultural competencies that would stand him apart from

the mainstream of youth culture. In fact, Dominic was only inter-ested in hip hop music because it ‘‘sounds cool’’ and the videos‘‘look awesome’’ (field notes). He also demonstrated little concernfor other media that might be considered alternative to mainstream

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fare. In this sense, within a sociology of taste cultures (see Bourdieu

1984), Dominic did not carry nor express the kinds of cultural capi-tal that would imply ‘‘‘‘subcultural’ experiences and identifica-tions’’ (Buckingham, Niesyto, and Fisherkeller 2003, 468). Instead,at least as evidenced in this study, his tastes and interests weremore conventional.

This stood him apart from older mentors where a sociology of taste framed around alternative or subcultural experiences andknowledge seemed to be privileged. The upshot of this was thatthe evolving mentor culture within Summer Stories left Dominic

little room to negotiate his own role in the program. Instead hewas positioned as an outsider, in Arendt’s (1958) words, made tofeel ‘‘impotent’’ (201).

In the face of this, it is perhaps surprising that Dominic gained par-ticular perspectives as a peer educator that contributed to his sense of being a democratic actor. Beyond developing better ‘‘people skills,’’mentoring affected Dominic’s conception of the contingency and con-testability of meaning, fostering what Arendt might understand as asense of the social and ethical conditions underlying our selves and

our experiences. This was evident in his remarks about the signifi-cance of creative production work in the lives of young people.Although Dominic took three video classes prior to his work as amentor, he noted he had never really considered the relationshipbetween youth media work and more commercial, mainstreammedia experiences before Summer Stories. He said

I didn’t think there was much of a relationship there (interview).

Watching kids try to shape their own stories and thinking about

how and why they chose certain characters and storylines, how-ever, revealed a new dynamic for Dominic. He said he began toevolve a distinction between creative youth work and the largermedia environment in which we live. He said he began to see youthvideo making as

like your freedom to speak, your freedom to be who you want to be and totalk about whatever the hell you want to talk about (interview).

He went on

It’s kind of weird that only a certain amount of people know how to do it[i.e., make videos] . . . Because if everyone who knows how to use a camerathinks a certain way, we’re all screwed right, because we’re just going to


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see the same damn thing over and over again. And then there’s this media

that’s going to get stuck in our heads, then we’re all screwed. . .

So I guess itdoes sort of make sense then that it is democratic to teach people how tooperate a camera (interview).

These remarks are hardly conclusive, but they do suggest a bur-geoning distinction for Dominic, one which differentiates betweenand signals the inequality symptomatic of specific media practices.It is a distinction that seems to acknowledge that commercial mediacan shape how young people understand themselves and their

worlds by constituting ideas and conceptions that ‘‘get stuck inour heads.’’ In response to this, creative youth media work is posedas a resource that fosters plurality, one which allows youth to contest‘‘your freedom to be who you want to be’’ (interview). In this way, itappeared as though Dominic’s experience in Summer Stories led tothe development of an enlarged mentalite , a sense that he and otheryouth are public actors whose lives are intertwined in a set of con-testable relationships with the media environments in which we live.

If this is so, it remains true that the challenges and difficulties

Dominic encountered in his first summer as a mentor underminedthe degree to which this experience fostered democratic habits of mind. So much of his time was spent learning his role and attemptingto find a place for himself in the program that the potential impact of this experience was lessened. This is unfortunate and also indicativeof a shortfall in Summer Stories that mitigated the extent to which theprogram nurtured young people’s democratic experience.

The examples of Macie and Dominic are instructive in an age of participatory culture where, among other developments, there is a

sense of hope about the role young people can and will have inshaping the cultural practices that organize their lives. Not onlydo their stories indicate how peer mentoring can foster the demo-cratic habits of mind that deepen and enrich public life but theirexperiences also highlight the difficulties and challenges to be facedin nurturing such possibilities.

Arendt (1968) understood that public life is a ‘‘lost treasure,’’ apotential that ‘‘appears abruptly, unexpectedly, and disappearsagain, . . . as though it were a fata morgana’’ (4). ‘‘What first under-

mines and then kills [public action] is loss of power and finallyimpotence; and power cannot be stored up and kept in reservefor emergencies, like the instruments of violence, but exists onlyin its actualization’’ (Arendt 1958, 200). In complicated ways, youth

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mentoring in Summer Stories enabled such actualization, fostering

democratic habits, if not always equitable experiences.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Over the past two decades, young people’s media ecologies havechanged. Global consumer cultures continue to have a formativerole in youth mediascapes even as the kind of involvement youthhave in such mediascapes has changed. New media productionopportunities are developing both inside and outside formal and

informal learning environments. To take advantage of the agenticpotential these opportunities provide, however, requires more thanloose rhetorics about digital generations who are native to and thusknowingly aware of the possibilities afforded by new media. Whatis required is a clear understanding of when youth participationworks to expand and enrich public life and when, on the otherhand, it does not.

I believe Hannah Arendt’s public realm theory is helpful here. Themodel she provides for thinking about youths’ democratic habitua-

tion is less about aligning this habituation to specific political posi-tions and more about imagining how creative youth work feeds aform of thinking and doing that is attentive to the ways all meaninghas a social and historical context, a form of contingency that itself issusceptible to change. Of course, youth do not develop this way of thinking easily or naturally. It is the result of provocations and chal-lenges that are meant to suggest how our creative interventions andour selves take shape under specific mediated relations with theworld. Macie and Dominic learned this through the media literacy

training they received as mentors as well as through their work withnovice video makers in Summer Stories. This in turn changed howthey imagine themselves and the way they conceive of their workwith others. What matters today, then, is knowing where andhow this kind of thoughtfulness in action develops through youthmedia participation and how it might be helped to flourish.

NOTES

1. This, like the names of the mentors referred to later, is a pseudonym.2. So, for instance, it appears that mentors develop emotional self-awareness, asser-

tiveness, and self-reliance as well as new technical skills (Miller 2002). They alsotend to develop ‘‘empathy for the feelings of others, [an] ability to establish


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mutually beneficial personal relationship(s) . . . [and an] abilit[y] to maintain hopein adverse situations’’ (Miller 2002, 38–39). They typically discover latent abilities,gain self-confidence, and also a sense of self-actualization (Roberts 2000).

3. By this I mean I invited study participants to act as codesigners of semistructuredinterviews. I also took an active part in the Summer Stories program, helpingyouth to produce their videos, while also offering feedback (when asked) on storyideas, and so forth.

4. I have chosen these youth because they offer instructive examples of how mentor-ing impacted the larger group of young people involved in the project.

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on behalf of, participation culture

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