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54 Heather A. Horst, Becky Herr-Stephenson, and Laura Robinsonmaintain connections with friends, messing around as a genre of participationrepresents the beginning of a more intense engagement with newmedia. In the first section on “Looking Around,” we focus on the ways inwhich kids use search engines and other online information sources to findinformation, a practice we call “fortuitous searching.” The second sectionattends to the importance of “Experimentation and Play” in facilitatinglearning about the way a particular medium works, particularly throughthe processes of trial and error. The final section, “Finding the Time,Finding the Place,” outlines many of the conditions or environments thatare conducive to young people’s efforts to engage with new media throughillustrations of young people seeking out and taking advantage of theresources available to them at home, at friends’ homes, and at after-schoolprograms and in other institutional contexts.Looking Around One of the first points of entry for messing around withnew media is the practice of looking around for information online. AsEagleton and Dobler (2007), Hargittai (2004; 2007), Robinson (2007), andothers have noted, the growing availability of information in online spaceshas started to transform young people’s attitudes toward the availabilityand accessibility of information (Hargittai and Hinnant 2006; USC Centerfor the Digital Future 2004). Among our study participants who completedthe Digital Kids Questionnaire, 87 percent reported using a search engineat least once per week, varying from Google to Yahoo! and Wikipedia aswell as other more specialized sites for information. 8 The vast majority ofthe young people we interviewed engaged in “fortuitous searching,” a termthat distinguishes itself as more open ended as opposed to being goaldirected. Rather than finding discrete forms of information, such as theexchange rate between the United States and Great Britain, the color of aparticular flower, or the name of the twentieth U.S. president, fortuitoussearching involves moving from link to link, looking around for whatmany teenagers describe as “random” information. As seventeen-year-oldCarlos, a Latino from the San Francisco bay area described the process toDan Perkel (MySpace Profile Production), “I was just going throughGoogle . . . it just gives a lot of websites. So I just started finding these . . .I put Google . . . then it took me to a website and it had a lot of differentstuff. . . .”Despite the seemingly roundabout method of following links describedby Carlos, teens’ online research can be quite focused. Many searches