Digital Anatomies: Analysis as Production in Media Education

use of new technologies within media education and how it relates to the understanding, interpretation, and analysis of media texts. Our examples and interviews come from the first specialist Media Arts college in the UK, Parkside Community College in Cambridge, a small comprehensive school in which one of us worked formerly and one of us is still working. This school has been working with digital video since 1997, and we have published a number of accounts of work in this field (Burn, 2000; Burn & Durran, 1998; Burn & Reed, 1999; Burn et al., 2001). For us, the phrase digital generations suggests that the difference of digital is an absolute distinction—it implies a rupture between the technologies and cultures of the digital and analogue ages, a generation gap between the groups of people caught up in these ages, a linear past and a nonlinear future, a former swamp of dinosaur technologies, and a future utopia of dazzling digital manipulations (and a present caught uncomfortably between the two). Needless to say, we want to resist and question these rhetorics of rupture. Our main focus in this chapter is on digital video in school-based media education, and it challenges the generational rhetoric of rupture in a specific way. Digital Video editing software, although it has been bundled with imacs for some time now and with Windows XP for 3 years, is not as much used by teenagers as the cyberkid rhetoric would suggest. Although there are clearly some digital technologies that young people make their own— Chapter 15