The first generation is currently growing up, whose everyday life is already interwoven with digital worlds from an early age. It is not uncommon for young children to use tablets and know how to call up their favourite series, or for pupils to communicate with their neighbours during breaks via messenger services. This makes the question of how digital education processes and dealing with digitalisation can succeed, especially in youth work, all the more important. There are many similarities here, but also differences between urban and rural areas. In rural areas, there is a lack of digital innovation in the cultural sector, which is mainly due to a lack of structures, according to the initial thesis of the BiDiPeri research project of the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg. The project, led by Professor Benjamin Jörissen, is part of the funding guideline for cultural arts education in rural areas and explores the question of how cultural and educational offerings can compensate for this lack of digital innovation.
The fact that rural areas are not usually the epicentres of digital innovation is also suggested by the recently awarded Kulturlichter Prize: With this prize, the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media and the Cultural Foundation of the Federal States support projects and ideas that use digital formats innovatively to communicate art and culture. Among the nominees for a total of three prizes were exclusively projects from cities. The prize money ultimately went to Bremerhaven, Bremen and Berlin.
Based on interviews with educational experts and group discussions with young people in rural areas, the researchers of the BiDiPeri project draw two preliminary conclusions about the problem: First, the network connection. "The young people here go so far as to speak of "running internet" in analogy to "running water", the non-existence of which characterises their everyday life - in this metaphor a clear indication that access to the net is not perceived as a minor matter, but as a basic need of daily life," writes Viktoria Flasche of BiDiPeri in a guest article for the Federal Agency for Civic Education. For those young people who grow up in places without a stable network connection, there would be a risk that existing inequalities vis-à-vis urban areas would be reinforced if, for example, cultural offerings were shifted to the net. According to the report on the Broadband Atlas commissioned by the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure 2021, not only 99.5 percent of urban areas but also 94.1 percent of rural areas have broadband availability of more than 16 megabits (Mbit) per second. But the discrepancy is far greater when it comes to transmitting data at higher speeds. Besides 78.4 percent of urban areas, only 22.9 percent of rural areas have broadband availability of more than 1,000 Mbit per second.
Secondly, the BiDiPeri discussions revealed "that youth work in rural areas is generally experienced as precarious and threatened," writes Viktoria Flasche. The funding of services has to be secured again and again through project and funding applications. In this respect, the experts interviewed saw themselves as advocates for young people and tried to look after and market youth services in such a way that they would also think about the so-called "citizen public". The smaller a municipality is, the more youth work services tend to be multi-generationally networked in order to create visibility and recognition in the structures. For example, the organisation of regular festivals or summer camps takes up a lot of space, whereas new offers first have to assert themselves as culturally valuable. Youth activities that are different from traditional customs also remain implicitly embedded in the respective culture. According to the first results, innovative cultural offers by and for young people are prevented or slowed down in individual cases.
In theory, digitalisation could offer opportunities: Young people and children in rural areas could theoretically access, debate and participate in the same content via the internet as in urban areas. In principle, the radius in which information can be disseminated is no longer so closely tied to the parents' petrol tank or Deutsche Post. But in addition to digital infrastructure, dealing with digital formats requires media education. Otherwise, there is a risk that the young generation will suffer from unfiltered mass consumption of beauty ideals, marketing content and misinformation and sink into social isolation. "If education describes the changes in how individuals see their environment (and themselves) and media essentially determine the structures of this seeing, then media education circumscribes the world and self-relations of people in cultural worlds shaped by media," writes Viktoria Flasche in her guest contribution. Media education involves more than the classic PC or internet. Rather, it is about enabling playful, explorative attitudes that also take up the handling of indeterminacies. She defines these indeterminacies as, for example, the algorithmic decision-making processes of many popular applications, which remain intransparent for almost all users.
Today, a media education-oriented pedagogy is linked to post-digital lifeworlds. The prefix "post" is not meant to imply that the phase of digitalisation has already ended. But rather to show that we are beyond the phase in which something has to be explicitly described as digital.
"New - more network-like - and less hierarchical processes in rural youth work can take up post-digital dynamics more strongly," concludes Viktoria Flasche. The BiDiPeri project refers to approaches of so-called "design thinking", with the help of which offers can be developed with and for young people. Jointly and with the help of repetition, offers are to be developed step by step and in correspondence to devices, digital techniques or programmes without becoming dependent. The self-image of the participants is relevant here: they should not see themselves as individual acting subjects or groups, but "...more in the sense of a network node that draws its skills from the networking with other things and people", concludes Viktoria Flasche. This happens, for example, when the local handicrafts club networks with young cosplayers. In this case, thinking in networks is not necessarily and directly linked to digital infrastructure.
In this respect, post-digital educational concepts should not only decode media techniques and impart competences. Above all, it is necessary to fundamentally deal with self and value relationships in cultures that have always been medial. This could also create more scope for youth work in rural areas. Building on these results, the BiDiPeri project is entering a second research phase. They will explore the success factors of urban libraries that offer digital services. Their goal: to make the innovative potentials usable for rural areas as well. In November 2022, there will probably be further findings and research results.
You can find more about this research project here.
Lara Janssen was a research assistant in the MetaKLuB project until June 2022 and worked in the area of public relations.