Majoring in Change: Young People Use Social networking to reflect on High School, College and Work(8 Minding the Media)

This volume presents a long-term qualitative study that follows 20 New York City public high school students as they make the transition into college and work. The primary data are the young people’s reflections on high school, how they felt unprepared for college or career, and the subsequent work they have done in order to succeed. The text critiques the current state of secondary and university education, especially the neoliberal emphasis on private industry and competition. However, it claims that a critical media literacy intervention can provide young people with the skills to challenge their environments and realize they are part of, not apart from, larger social issues. One unique feature of the text is its datagathering method: Stories are culled from in-person interviews and, most importantly, electronic interviews conducted on Facebook. The research was conducted, and this book written, to illustrate the very real struggles and socioeconomic challenges of young people and works to create proactive, productive change on their behalf.

About the Author :
Allison Butler is Lecturer in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is a media educator and media education researcher.

Review :
"Facebook is, increasingly, where adolescents are in today's world. Allison Butler's book finds a group of young people from underprivileged backgrounds and explores the means by which they use the social networking site to connect: with her as both researcher and, in some cases, former teacher; with each other through the details of daily life as well as life's more cataclysmic moments; and - perhaps most importantly - with their developing and everchanging sense of themselves. The rich interview data shed light on the role of Facebook and other social networking sites in the lives of the young...interview subjects. Yet the data also reveal much more about the positionality of these young adults within larger social, political, cultural, and educational contexts. The result is a series of critical insights gleaned by the author - many wry and witty - on such pressing contemporary subjects as neoliberalism and its continued threats to the public school system in the United States and on the nature of the transition between adolescence and adulthood as played out in (and as shaped by) a digital media world." (Erica Scharrer, Professor, Department of Communication, University of Massachusetts, Amherst)