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.
