Media and technology skills

![CDATA[When equipped with responsibility to self-manage their media engagements, young people often do so in ways that demonstrate complex, inadvertent and strategic relationships between self and technology. In doing so some Australian teens display critical engagement between differing publics and the affordances these alternate personas can facilitate within social media services and videogaming respectively, as well as support rather than drive the development of social relationships and interest-based activities. But as Patricia Lange (2013) and many others have pointed out, not all young people experience equality in their mediated lives. Age and gender continue to persist as key determinants to navigating media use and engagement. At the same time the way in which youth participate in and perceive their media culture does not reflect key theoretical arguments. The value of making culture and the continuums that authors such as Jenkins and Bruns articulate in relation to culture do not correspond to the ways in which youth perceive and describe their media use. The ease at which young people such as Hailey point to when they create, send and share photos and videos via a SNS platform such as Snapchat is reflective of use that is “very normal” within their everyday media practices. This reflects the ongoing discrepancy that exists between the traditional institutions of home and school and that of academia that attributes increased value to the way in which young people participate within a convergent media landscape.]]