‘Connect and create’: Young people, YouTube and Graffiti communities

Abstract

Dominant discourses around young people and social networking in the mass media are littered with negative connotations and moral panics. While some scholars challenge this negativity, their focus has predominantly been upon the formation of friendships, the construction of identity and the presentation of the self online. We argue that as well as engaging in such areas, young people are also appropriating social networking sites, such as YouTube, as spaces in which they can engage in what Jean Burgess terms, ‘Vernacular Creativity’ – a way of describing and surfacing creative practices that emerge from non-elite, specific everyday contexts. Using case study material we consider the processes of Vernacular Creativity as engaged with by young people in relation to doing graffiti with YouTube. Through this, and given that graffiti is a cultural practise traditionally associated with physical space, we also consider points of continuity and discontinuity in relation to Vernacular Creativity mediated with YouTube and the significance of such things in enabling young people to connect and create with like-minded others.

Notes

1. Of course, we recognize not everyone has or desires access to such technologies.

2. It is perhaps necessary at this early stage to point out that we are aware of the debates e.g. boyd and Ellison (2007) and Beer (2008) surrounding what constitutes a social networking site, and indeed whether it is appropriate to use this term or that of ‘social network site’. We are purposefully using social networking as we prefer the suggestion of a dynamic network rather than solely representation that this term implies.

3. A pseudonym.

4. A pseudonym.

5. We are not blackboxing young people's experiences of and with digital media. We do not see them has ‘hard wired’ as related to digital media. However, in the case of Schofield he did fit in with contemporary discourses of young people that situate them as surrounded by digital media and having the affectivities to enacts their affordances. Clearly, this has some bearing on our study and we pick this matter up in the discussion of our data.

6. Black books are: ‘the recipe books, the practice sessions, the calculations before executing a masterpiece’. http://www.graffiti.org/blackbooks

7. Here we use the term ‘immaculate creativity’ as a take on Fine's (2003) notion of immaculate perception where he argues that innate perceptions of the value of art by those in the artworld are not possible. In the same way, we argue that in this case, vernacular creativity is not innate. Indeed, YouTube makes such influences very clear as it renders explicit some of the processes of creative input by others.

8. We are aware such a demarcation is problematic and do not wish to set up a dualistic relation between graffiti done in the physical world and that which is digitally mediated. It is quite clear that the two can be implicated in each other.