The acquisition of media as cultural practice: Remote Indigenous youth and new digital technologies

Globally, telecommunications, information technologies and traditional broadcast media have converged into a digital realm. In remote Indigenous Australia, with improved broadband and greater access to mobile telephony and digital technologies through media organisations, arts projects and libraries, young people are appropriating new digital technologies for their own socio-cultural processes and purposes. In the remote context, the affordances of digital technology are enabling individual and collective access and participation, the acquisition of expertise, and the enhanced capacity for computer-mediated communication and multimodal production outside institutional or instructional settings. The manner in which young people are taking up digital technology reveals much about the way in which their imaginative capacities are being moulded by them and how this technology is being used as a cultural tool. In this chapter, a 'practice' perspective is taken from anthropology to highlight how the digital media practices of Indigenous youth in some communities are drawn from the established practices of the older generation, who, from the 1970s, participated in remote Indigenous media organisations and used earlier pre-digital media forms as tools for language and culture maintenance.