I School doctoral student Christo Sims has been awarded the 2010 Peter Lyman Graduate Fellowship in New Media. The fellowship, established in the memory of the late I School professor, provides a summer stipend to a UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate to support the writing of his or her Ph.D. dissertation. The fellowship is administered by the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM).
Christo Sims' research looks at the relations between young people and new media. He is advised by Jenna Burrell and Paul Duguid, and also works with Mimi Ito and the Distributed Learning Research Network at the UC Humanities Research Institute. He previously worked on the Digital Youth Project and co-authored the report Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. Sims received his master's degree from the School of Information in 2007; the award is particularly meaningful to Sims, since Professor Lyman advised him on the Digital Youth Project and encouraged him to pursue the Ph.D. degree.
The fellowship will support Sims' work on his dissertation, "Youth Practices with New Media and the Production of Social Difference."
Youth Practices with New Media and the Production of Social Difference
In the 1990s, scholars, policy makers, and journalists figured the relationship between new media and social inequality in terms of an emerging digital divide, a binary distinction between those with and without access to various information and media technologies, typically computing and the Internet. While the focus on access drew attention to important material differences, most of this work overlooked at least two crucial factors. First, the research gave insufficient attention to how persons made use of the technologies and media to which they had access. Second, research didn't typically explain how new media benefited a person's life chances; the positive relationship between more access and better life chances was often just assumed. With my research I hope to contribute to a growing body of work that attempts to address these earlier limitations. I focus on young people because I am interested in understanding the processes that reproduce and alter differences in opportunity across generations. For my dissertation, I'm documenting the lives of students who attend a media- and technology-rich public middle school in New York City. While I am focusing on the students attending a particular school, my research also looks at practices that center on family life and peer relations. I hope this ethnographic study will contribute to our understanding of how various social and technical configurations contribute to the perpetuation of differentiated opportunities, and that this understanding will aid policymakers, community organizations, and citizens who endeavor to ameliorate them.
Professor Peter Lyman
Peter Lyman came to Berkeley in 1994 as the university librarian and joined the faculty of the School of Information in the same year. Lyman received his B.A. from Stanford University in philosophy, M.A. from Berkeley in political science, and Ph.D. in political science from Stanford. He died in 2007 after a long battle with brain cancer. Lyman's legacy includes research on online information, ethnographic analyses of online social relationships and communities, and helping to bring university libraries into the digital era.
