By Greg Toppo
CHICAGO - On the ground floor of the city's main library, an odd experiment is taking place, one that could determine what your neighborhood library looks like in 10 years.
It goes like this: Take a very large room and fill it with the latest digital media - laptop computers, music keyboards, recording equipment, video cameras and gaming consoles. Invite teenagers. Apply a little pressure, pushing them both to consume and produce media. Watch what happens.
Once a storage room at the Harold Washington Library Center, the high-ceiling, 5,500-square-foot space, dubbed "YOUmedia - a Digital Library Space for Teens," has become a magnet for young people citywide, so popular and influential that the library plans to replicate it citywide.
The original space, sitting in the shadow of the downtown Loop, sees a steady stream of visiting librarians, educators and scholars.
"When people see it they're completely gobsmacked," says Mary Dempsey, library commissioner.
Funded in part by the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the project sprang from research on how digital media affect kids' literacy. Simply put, it's changing the requirements.
"We are in one of these rare moments in time where what it means to be literate today, what it meant for us, is going to be different from what it means to be literate for our kids," says DePaul University's Nichole Pinkard, who first envisioned the space. Just as schools have always pushed teens to read critically and pick apart authors' arguments, she says, educators must now teach kids how to consume media critically and, ideally, to produce it.
"It's really a shift from thinking of a library as a repository to a community center, a place where things actually happen," says Taylor Bayless, 27, a librarian and one of the center's mentors.
YOUmedia owes much of its basic ideology to Mizuko Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California-Irvine who in 2006 studied how teens use "new media." After three years, her team concluded that most kids shift between three stages of consumption and creation, informally dubbed "hanging out," "messing around" and "geeking out."
In the first stage, teens are mostly text-messaging or instant-messaging friends and haunting sites such as Facebook - what the researchers call a "lightweight means" of maintaining friendships. "Messing around" begins when teens take an interest in media itself: composing music, editing photos or shooting video, driven more by interests than a desire to be with friends.
"Geeking out" involves using new media in an "intense, autonomous and interest-driven way" that often leaves friends in the dust as teens seek out experts for help.
YOUmedia is laid out to accommodate all three stages. Drew Davidson of Carnegie Mellon University notes that he and colleagues designed it with the "hanging out" space by the front door. But even kids who stay put there absorb what's happening in the other two.
"If you're just 'hanging out,' your awareness of the possibilities of the things you could do just gets raised," he says.
On a recent afternoon, most patrons were comfortably "hanging out." Two girls in a beanbag chair shared a MacBook they had checked out at the front desk, tweaking their Facebook statuses; a dozen boys egged each other on as two button-mashers played the video game Infamous.
Nearby, Bayless sat with a group of boys, helping them plan a taping of their weekly podcast about video games. They were somewhere on the border of stages two and three, "messing around" but approaching geek stage. One of the three was trying to get Bayless to think about how the game Bioshock owed its philosophy to the novels of Ayn Rand. Clearly geeking out.
A few feet away, another boy repeatedly played a fragment of percussive digital music, shaving off microseconds as he struggled to fit it into a larger composition.
One thing you quickly notice: It's loud. Gone are the students studying quietly among the stacks. While bookshelves occupy a large central space, the sounds of music, video games and conversation are everywhere.
Poet and lead mentor Mike Hawkins says, "It's a constructive loud."
Raymond Abercrombie, 17, stumbled upon YOUmedia two years ago while looking for "some random book" for a college-prep class.
Ten minutes into his first visit, he met Hawkins, widely known as "Brother Mike" - the name comes from his days on the city's poetry scene - who introduced him to performance poetry. Soon Abercrombie was geeking out in what he calls "the nerd space," discussing poetry.
Then he was performing his own poetry and music. He now shows up seven days a week, and you'll find him most afternoons "either making music or discussing music."
Ito, the anthropologist, considers the project "amazing on a lot of levels."
Ito says the secret of YOUmedia's success is that it's based not on what adults think students should be doing, but on "what kids actually do and how they engage" with media and one another.
