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Media Ecologies 31We use the metaphor of ecology to emphasize the characteristics of anoverall technical, social, cultural, and place-based system, in which thecomponents are not decomposable or separable. The everyday practices ofyouth, existing structural conditions, infrastructures of place, and technologiesare all dynamically interrelated; the meanings, uses, functions,flows, and interconnections in young people’s daily lives located in particularsettings are also situated within young people’s wider media ecologies.We also take an ecological approach in understanding youth cultureand practice. As we suggest in the case of interest-driven and friendshipdrivenparticipation, these are not unique social and cultural worlds operatingwith their own internal logic, but rather these forms of participationare defined in relation and in opposition to one another. In this way, weextend the understanding of media ecologies used in communicationstudies (e.g., McLuhan 1964/1994; Meyrowitz 1986; Postman, 1993), whichhas focused primarily on “media effects,” to studies of the structure andcontext of media use. Similarly, we see adults’ and kids’ cultural worlds asdynamically co-constituted, as are different locations that youth navigatesuch as school, after-school, home, and online places. The three genres ofparticipation that we introduce in this chapter—“hanging out,” “messingaround,” and “geeking out”—are also genres that are defined relationally.The notion of “participation genre” enables us to emphasize the relationaldimensions of how subcultures and mainstream cultures are defined; it alsoallows us to use an emergent, flexible, and interpretive rubric for framingcertain forms of practice.In this chapter, we frame the media ecologies that contextualize theyouth practices we describe in later chapters. By drawing from case studiesthat are delimited by locality, institutions, networked sites, and interestgroups (see appendices), we have been able to map the contours of thevaried social, technical, and cultural contexts that structure youth mediaengagement. This chapter introduces three genres of participation withnew media that have emerged as overarching descriptive frameworks forunderstanding how youth new media practices are defined in relation andin opposition to one another. The genres of participation—hanging out,messing around, and geeking out—reflect and are intertwined with youngpeople’s practices, learning, and identity formation within these varied anddynamic media ecologies.