Watkins, "The Young and the Digital"

    The article we read this week is from a chapter of a book titled "From the Young and the Digital" by S. Craig Watkins. The book is a very interesting read on how young adults are blogging about their lives using social media and other internet networks. Watkins does a lot of comparisons within his book. He compares Facebook and MySpace and uses blind studies to clarify the type of students that use each of these types of social medias. He also compares the difference between television and social-network sites and the experiences that belong with the different media. Television is more about watching and leisure time whereas social media is more about doing and sharing. This is how he differentiates between old and new media. He establishes that it depends how people are concerned with themselves and what they want to say about them selves.

   S. Craig Watkins is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin as a professor of Radio, Television, and Film. He received his Ph.D in media studies at the University of Michigan in 1994. Watkins is also a Global Fellow for the IC², a group of individuals from around the world that work collaboratively on creative, academic, and innovative ideas. He does research on the interactions between youth and the digital age. He has written three different books exploring young people's dynamic engagement with social media and other platforms, as well as the hip hop culture in America. His other two books are Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement, and Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema. He is a prominent speaker at many college campuses discussing the topic of social media within our generation. He even gave a talk at Madison a few years ago talking about his research involving technology, media, youth, race, and society. He has appeared mutiple times as a guest on National Public Radio during a show regarding internet evolution radio. He is currently writing a new book that looks in the evolving world of digital media, education, and social inequality in the US. The book is looking to be published in 2015 and is written with the help of a team of graduate students at the university with him.