Chapter 3: Phones Aren’t Smart Until you tell them what to do

The title of this chapter is a quote from a colleague of mine—an Oakland high school student. He was co-facilitating a workshop with a group of peers not long ago and told them, “Phones aren’t smart until you tell them what to do.” I asked him if I could use that phrase here, because I thought it so trenchantly captured the key themes I’ll address in the pages that follow.

The workshop took place at Youth Radio, a Peabody Award-winning youth-driven production company where I work. It’s headquartered in Oakland, California, with bureaus in Los Angeles, Washington DC, and Atlanta, and partners across the United States. Youth Radio is best known for its youth-generated public media content: features, investigative series, and commentaries on National Public Radio and its affiliates, American Public Media, as well as commercial radio stations and digital outlets including National Geographic and The Huffington Post. Young people are recruited into Youth Radio primarily from the local public schools. They go through six months of tuition-free introductory and advanced multimedia classes, including audio, video, studio engineering, music production, social media, and web publishing, paced around a weekly online radio show. High school students working as peer teachers run the classes, with support from an adult faculty made up of media professionals and educators. After those six months of classes, young people can apply for paid internships in all of the organization’s various departments: the production company, health, tech, development and non-profit administration. At any given time, between 50 and 80 young people are on the payroll.