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6 Introductiondynamics with collaborative analysis of how these different groups definethemselves in relation to or in opposition to one another. We describethese studies and the specifics on data collection and joint analysis inchapter 1, “Media Ecologies.” Our material covers both “mainstream”practices of new media use that are widely distributed among U.S. teensas well as more subcultural and exceptional practices that are not ascommon but represent emerging and experimental modes of technical andmedia literacy. In this, our work resembles other ethnographic studies thatlook at the relationships between different kinds of childhood and youthsubcultures and identity categories (Eckert 1989; Milner 2004; Thorne1993), but we focus on the role of new media in these negotiations. To theextent possible, we have also situated our ethnographic cases and findingsin relation to the quantitative work in the field. Through this approach,we have worked to mediate the gap between the textured, qualitativedescriptions of new media practices and analysis of broader patterns insocial, technical, and cultural change.YouthFoundational to our descriptive approach is a particular point of viewand methodological approach in relation to youth as a social and culturalcategory. In our research and writing we take a sociology-of-youth-andchildhoodapproach, which means that we take youth seriously as actorsin their own social worlds and look at childhood as a socially constructed,historically variable, and contested category (Corsaro 1997; Fine 2004;James and Prout 1997; Wyness 2006). Adults often view children in aforward-looking way, in terms of developmental “ages and stages” of whatthey will become rather than as complete beings “with ongoing lives,needs and desires” (Corsaro 1997, 8). By contrast, the “new paradigm” inthe sociology of childhood (James and Prout 1997) sees that children areactive, creative social agents who produce their own unique children’scultures while simultaneously contributing to the production of adultsocieties and that “childhood—that socially constructed period in whichchildren live their lives—is a structural form” (Corsaro 1997, 4). This structuralform has varied historically and is interrelated with other structuralcategories such as social class, gender, and race (Corsaro 1997; James andProut 1997). In keeping with this sociology-of-youth-and-childrenapproach, we move beyond a simple socialization model in which children