From USA Today:
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.

For the full story, please visit http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2011-10-09/chicago-teens-bu....