Summary
The tenth-anniversary edition of a foundational text in digital media and learning, examining new media practices that range from podcasting to online romantic breakups.
Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out, first published in 2009, has become a foundational text in the field of digital media and learning. Reporting on an ambitious three-year ethnographic investigation into how young people live and learn with new media in varied settings—at home, in after-school programs, and in online spaces—it presents a flexible and useful framework for understanding the ways that young people engage with and through online platforms: hanging out, messing around, and geeking out, otherwise known as HOMAGO.
Integrating twenty-three case studies—which include Harry Potter podcasting, video-game playing, music sharing, and online romantic breakups—in a unique collaborative authorship style, Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out combines in-depth descriptions of specific group dynamics with conceptual analysis. Since its original publication, digital learning labs in libraries and museums around the country have been designed around the HOMAGO mode and educators have created HOMAGO guidebooks and toolkits. This tenth-anniversary edition features a new introduction by Mizuko Ito and Heather Horst that discusses how digital youth culture evolved in the intervening decade, and looks at how HOMAGO has been put into practice.
This book was written as a collaborative effort by members of the Digital Youth Project, a three-year research effort funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California.
Praise
"When your kids are playing Minecraft, hanging out online with gamers or anime fans, they are learning—and learning how to learn. Ito's well-researched book is for parents as well as educators who want and need to understand the power of informal learning unlocked by the media youth devote themselves to voluntarily."
Howard Rheingold, Author of Net Smart: How to Thrive Online
"Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out is staggering in its scope and in its implications. The researchers take seriously young people, their lives online, their subcultural practices, their identity play, their nascent civic engagement, their dating and social interactions, their involvement with fan production practices, and much, much more. What emerges is a complex picture of how they are living through and around emerging technologies, how they are innovative in their use of new tools and platforms, and how they are struggling with the contradictions of their lives."
Henry Jenkins, coauthor of By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism
