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Work 335work, are creating a new media ecology that supports these more informalkinds of work and economic arrangements. Across the class spectrum, wesee kids and young adults choosing to participate in creative and technicalwork because of the pleasure of productive activity that they engage in ontheir own terms, regardless of whether or not there is economic benefit.Whether the work is economic activity or nonmarket work, many kidsare looking online for sites for exercising autonomy and efficacy andmaking their labor visible in a public way. Digital-media ventures are moreattractive than the unskilled labor usually available for kids. Many motivatedkids are not satisfied with a purely preparatory role and look forreal-life consequences and responsibilities in the here and now. Many areready for these responsibilities and launch successful careers online. Youthappreciate the opportunity to be “taken seriously” by their coworkers informs of work that have clear productive benefits to others and where thereis public validation and visibility. For others these activities are a way toexperiment in certain forms of work without highly consequential failure.While educators have long noted the importance of learning in situationsof real-life work and apprenticeships, there are relatively few examples ofthese forms of learning in the United States. Studies of Girl Scout cookiesales (Rogoff et al. 2002) give one example that does come from the UnitedStates, but many of the most celebrated examples in the literature comefrom cultural contexts where kids are engaged more directly in economicactivity (Lave and Wenger 1991; Nunes, Schliemann, and Carraher 1993).Aside from volunteerism and concerted cultivation, which are framedmore as preparatory activities, kids in the United States have few contextsfor this kind of learning. The cases we describe, by contrast, are about newmedia’s providing access to high-stakes and real environments where learninghas consequences on kids’ and others’ lives.The ways in which new media intersect with youth’s activities of workare indicative of the complicated role that youth labor has occupied inmodern society. Although youth were largely shut out from the formal,high-status labor economy, they have continued to work in a wide varietyof forms. New media are making some of these activities more visible andvalued, in part because of young people’s new media literacy, which canoften exceed that of their elders. The examples of youth practice, in turn,are part of a broader restructuring of what counts as work and productive