Blamed for Change: Historical Lessons on Youth, Labor, and New Media Futures

This paper analyzes anxieties around contemporary youth adoption of new media in the United States from a historical and theoretical perspective. It offers comparative analysis (through a history-of-the-book approach) of issues of agency, community, labor, and productivity in the contemporary neoliberal era and draws comparisons to anxieties over these same issues in the original era of liberalism. In late 18th-century America, new mass technologies of printing and new cultural forms were being adopted at the same time the new American nation was attempting to define its version of representative democracy. Anxieties during a moment of enormous change in American history were blamed on a new technology and its most popular cultural form, the early American novel. The popular novel was, in effect, the video game of the new republic, a site of cultural censure and reproach. This historical comparison illuminates the contours of the present-day anxiety about youth using and producing content with new media and helps to differentiate features of the overgeneralized phenomenon known as "new media." This historical contextualization also helps us understand anxieties around do-it-yourself participatory culture as a form of labor at a moment when the larger economics of neoliberalism are in the midst of drastic realignments and reconfigurations.