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36 Heather A. Horst, Becky Herr-Stephenson, and Laura Robinsonto learning posits that the development of knowledge and expertise isdeeply integrated with being part of social groups engaged in joint activity(Wenger 1998). In order to understand these forms of group practice andidentity, studies need to take into account an individual’s media engagementas well as the properties of social groups and cultural identity. Whilequantitative studies (see box 1.1) can help us situate an individual’s mediaengagement with specific media and technologies, we provide an ethnographicaccounting of shared practices and cultural categories that structureyouth new media participation.“Hanging out,” “messing around,” and “geeking out” describe differinglevels of investments in new media activities in a way that integrates anunderstanding of technical, social, and cultural patterns. It is clear thatdifferent youth at different times possess varying levels of technology- andmedia-related expertise, interest, and motivation. The genres of participationthat emerged from our research can be viewed as an alternative toexisting taxonomies of media engagement that generally are structured bythe type of media platform, frequency of media use, or structural categoriessuch as gender, age, or socioeconomic status. Quantitative studies customarilycategorize people according to high and low media use, which is thenanalyzed in relation to different social categories or outcomes of interest.For example, the Kaiser Foundation report on “Generation M” (Rideout,Roberts, and Foehr 2005) looks at how differing amounts of media exposuretime relate to individual measures such as age, educational status, raceand ethnicity, school grades, or personal contentedness. Our approach iscloser to those of qualitative researchers who take a more holistic approachto media engagement by focusing on how social and cultural categoriesare cut from the same cloth as media engagement, rather than looking atthem as separate variables. For example, Holloway and Valentine (2003)suggest the categories of “techno boys,” “lads,” “luddettes,” and “computercompetent girls” to understand how gender intersects with computerbasedactivity and competence. Sonia Livingstone (2002) suggests thecategories of “traditionalists,” “low media users,” “screen entertainmentfans,” and “specialists” to relate frequency of engagement with specificmedia types to certain forms of social and cultural investments. However,all these taxonomies are based on categorizing individuals in relation tocertain practices. By contrast, our genre-based approach emphasizes modesof participation with media, not categories of individuals.