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Creative Production 247about the conditions under which media are created and revealing theideological dimensions of popular media. In his review of media-educationefforts, David Buckingham has described how media education has beenturning more and more to programs that emphasize media productionrather than relying exclusively on the “inoculation” approach to mediaeducation (Buckingham 2003). In the older inoculation approach, mediaeducation focused mostly on teaching kids to deconstruct texts so thatthey would not be adversely affected by violence or manipulated by deceptivecommercial content (Bazalgette 1997; Hobbs 1998). In contrast, emergingyouth media programs have been motivated by the belief that engagingin media production should be the cornerstone of media education andlead to youth empowerment through the development of self-expression(e.g., Chávez and Soep 2005; Goodman 2003; Hobbs 1998; Morrell andDuncan-Andrade 2004). These educators believe that shifting youth identityfrom that of a media consumer to a media producer is an importantvehicle for developing youth voice, creativity, agency, and new forms ofliteracy in a media-saturated era. Compared to programs that focus oncritical engagement, production-oriented programs are still relativelysparse in media education. In at least some contexts, however, there seemsto be a growing recognition of their importance (Buckingham, Fraser, andSefton-Green 2000).Today, these long-standing debates about media, kids, and creativity arebeing reframed by the proliferation of new forms of digital media productionand social media. What is unique about the current media ecology isthat photos, videos, and music are closer at hand and more amenable tomodification, remix, and circulation through online networks. In the pastfew years, it has become common for personal computers to ship with abasic kit of digital production tools that enable youth to manipulate music,photos, and video. In addition to the new genres of creative productionthat are being afforded by digital media-creation tools, we see networkedpublics as affording a fundamental shift in the context of how new mediaare created and shared; media works are now embedded in a public socialecology of ongoing communication (Russell et al. 2008). As is commonwhen new media capabilities are introduced, it takes some time for literacycapacity to build and for people to come together around new genres ofmedia and media participation that make use of these capabilities. Giventhat multimedia production tools have become mainstream as consumer