The Digital Is Kid Stuff by Josef Nguyen

The Digital Is Kid Stuff by Josef Nguyen

How popular debates about the so-called digital generation mediate anxieties about labor and life in twenty-first-century America   “The children are our future” goes the adage, a proclamation that simultaneously declares both anxiety as well as hope about youth as the next generation. In The Digital Is Kid Stuff, Josef Nguyen interrogates this ambivalence within discussions about today’s “digital generation” and the future of creativity, an ambivalence that toggles between the techno-pessimism that warns against the harm to children of too much screen time  and a techno-utopianism that foresees these “digital natives” leading the way to innovation, economic growth, increased democratization, and national prosperity.   Nguyen engages cultural histories of childhood, youth, and creativity through chapters that are each anchored to a particular digital media object or practice. Nguyen narrates the developmental arc of a future creative laborer: from a young kid playing the island fictions of Minecraft, to an older child learning do-it-yourself skills while reading Make magazine, to a teenager posting selfies on Instagram, to a young adult creative laborer imagining technological innovations using design fiction.  Focusing on the constructions and valorizations of creativity, entrepreneurialism, and technological savvy, Nguyen argues that contemporary culture operates to assuage profound anxieties about—and to defuse valid critiques of—both emerging digital technologies and the precarity of employment for “creative laborers” in twenty-first-century neoliberal America.

"Josef Nguyen offers a compelling, timely examination of how entangled digital media have become with childhood and creative expressionThis is an illuminating and useful read for youth and media researchers, educators, and professionals working in informal education that gets beyond binary thinking about the goods or ills of digital media and instead digs into these forms as play and creative practice."—Carly A. Kocurek, author of Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade

"The Digital Is Kid Stuff is a brilliantly argued, engagingly written, and insightful unraveling of the discursive tensions between youth, digital media, and the neoliberal logics informing how and why we value young people’s capacity for creativity. Josef Nguyen offers a rich contextualization and analysis of the ideologies that shape how contemporary society imagines young people's position within creative economies."—Jacqueline Ryan Vickery, author of Worried About the Wrong Things: Youth, Risk, and Opportunity in the Digital World

Josef Nguyen is assistant professor of critical media studies at The University of Texas at Dallas. 

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781517911140
ISBN 10	1517911141
Title	The Digital Is Kid Stuff
Author	Josef Nguyen
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	University of Minnesota Press
Year published	2021-12-28
Number of pages	304
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable