Constructing young selves in a digital media ecology: youth cultures, practices and identity

With childhood blurring into youth in most contemporary Western societies, public perceptions and concern about ‘the young’ seem to proliferate as a result of the urge to police the boundary between childhood and youth – whether regarding sexual health (as a corollary of sexual experience or sexual knowledge), children’s and youth’s media uses and cultural practices, or consumption of popular culture. Though the ‘new sociology of childhood’ paradigm (Alanen, 1992; King, 1999) has extensively addressed how often media and popular culture is portrayed as the culprit for the disappearance of childhood innocence (Buckingham, 2011), young people’s growing participation in consumer culture in the twenty-first century has fueled parental, academic and social concern and has brought a renewed media attention to the changing dynamics of childhood and youth.

As new media technologies and marketing strategies offer new affordances to young people in terms of their repertoires of cultural practices and uses, they inevitably give rise to numerous anxieties. Scholarly work and research upon the way in which we talk about children and youth gradually abounds, especially in a cross-cultural context (see for example Clapton, 2015; Hier, 2011; Krinsky, 2008; Petley et al., 2013; Tsaliki & Chronaki, 2020a), signaling how ‘risk’ has insidiously crept into our understandings of children and youth and the social policy directed at them, and how it is tied to a notion of ‘responsibilization’ within neoliberalism. Furthermore, once we take into account how the disciplinary power of neoliberalism has become a common conceptual currency across national and cultural borders, discussing how neoliberal self-governance permeates the cultures of childhood and youth becomes even more pertinent. It is due to such ‘risk talk’ – driving policy-making at national, cross-national and global level for some time now – that the ‘discursive formations’ (Foucault 1976/1980 in Thompson, 1998, pp. 23–24) of children and teens in (pre- and) post-millennial times construct under 18s as always ‘at risk’ of being harmed (from almost everything – too much food, too much fun, too much sex, too much popular culture, too much technology) (Tsaliki & Chronaki, 2020b, p. 8).

As these discursive formations of anxiety unfold recurrently across cultures, they constitute a regime of truth and show that power is not a mere top-down imposition, but circulates productively at all levels, and creates ‘transmediated continuity’ (Jones & Weber, 2015). For example, the effort to monitor youth sexuality, alcohol consumption, food consumption, bodily size or social media use, produces numerous related discourses on television and radio, in magazines and newspaper articles and pictures, in legislation, in medical and counselling advice, or in research programmes, and across diverse media platforms, such as the internet, tabloids, cultural critics, fans, anonymous commentators, social media, commentary in the popular media and by expert opinion; in this process, they perpetuate constant visibility of the risk discourse. Having said that, it is not merely that representations of childhood and youth are shaped by morality, nor that conceptualisations of morality imbue perceptions of childhood; such a closely knit nexus also impacts heavily upon policy and practice related to children and youth, as well as the rhetoric of children’s rights (Frankel, 2012). Once we make sense of children and teenagers as a threat, being innately programmed for wrongdoing, the rhetoric of control and constraint follows, with morality becoming a tool for maintaining order. On the other hand, the social construct of the child as innately innocent, creates social anxieties around certain cultural practices and uses which may result in loss of innocence – hence the need to shield the young from any force or agent that may strip them from it. This notion of the ‘child at risk’ within a ‘risk averse’ culture, leads to the rampant ‘child protectionism’ and ‘moral parenting’ we experience today (reserving a lower social standing for those adults who fail to raise ‘proper’, ‘moral’ young citizens) (Tsaliki & Chronaki, 2020b).

In that respect, we need to pitch policy-making differently, so that we stop thinking microscopically and start planning macroscopically. To illustrate, rather than targeting the individual (girl, more often, than boy) in order to alleviate the kind of emotional problems and harm that may follow certain media uses and practices through which young people express themselves and construct a sexual self, as for example experiences with sexting (see Barbovschi et al., 2021, p. 22 on this), or revenge porn, and in the process render individuals responsible for their own resilience and privacy (see Banet-Weiser, 2018; Gill & Orgard, 2018; McRobbie, 2020, for an excellent take on resilience culture within neoliberalism), we need to think of how to eradicate a systemic culture of gender asymmetries wherein sexism, misogyny (or misandry), misogynoir, homophobia, racism, hate speech and an all-around ‘bitch culture’ find breeding ground. Here, too, we need to steer with the media in order to enhance and solidify young people’s cultural and sexual citizenship – consider for example how corporate videos with a feminist take like Procter and Gamble’s 2014 Always campaign #LikeAGirl <https://www.pgcareers.com/likeagirl-video>, can be used in the school context to unpack established gender stereotyping and framing.

This goes to show that policy-making needs to move beyond pedagogy framed by risk and instead engage with the affordances of media and digital media as identified by young people themselves. To return to my previous example of sexual communication, education that is not informed by a nuanced and interconnected understanding of young people’s everyday experiences of sexual well-being, mental health, and social media, is likely to be ineffective and inadequate as it will not resonate with young people’s own lives (Hendry, 2017, p. 510; McKee et al., 2014). It also needs to realize the links between young people’s online media cultures and practices and the emergence of digital publics enacting new forms of participatory cultural citizenship (Hermes, 2006) and benefit from academic literature in fandom, cultural, gaming and childhood studies where the notion of participatory culture is prevalent, and where young people are not constructed as innately passive, impressionable, unable to distinguish fiction/representation from reality, or right from wrong, and unquestionably mimicking what they see across various media. If we are to do away with the ‘discourses of anxiety’ (Tsaliki & Chronaki, 2020a) and all kinds of moral panics surrounding children and teenagers and their online cultures and practices, now is the time to start challenging dominant Western constructions of childhood and childhood innocence.

To this goal, John Hartley’s latest work offers a nuanced look. We live in a world where the emergence of global digital media is seen to be conducive to the reproduction and reinvention of what Hartley (2020) calls ‘demes’ – i.e., culture-made or knowledge-making groups – by children. Like many other cultural studies critics (see for example, Bragg & Buckingham, 2014; Buckingham, 2011; Clapton, 2015; Hier, 2011; Krinsky, 2008; Petley et al., 2013), who urge us to move ‘beyond media panics’ (Buckingham & Jensen, 2012), Hartley calls for a move away from a spent paradigm of child correction and protection, as well as from essentializing children as a group. Instead, he continues, we must take into account the way in which children explore and constitute their physical, social and virtual identities and networks, on an unprecedented global scale, and from ever-younger ages. By means of the digital affordances of online media, children become the first population-wide generation to form a new, global deme, wherein some of them – predominantly girls, says Hartley – work towards consciousness-raising, organizing and activism. This way, children are seen to create an emergent ‘world class’ via social media where a postmodern, posthuman, globally mediated species-consciousness is being upheld (Hartley, 2020, p. 12). As a result, within emergent digital social and screen media, children can now express and make sense of themselves in a care-free and ‘playful’ way and grab demic attention, thus practicing what movies and videogames call ‘worldbuilding’ (Hartley, 2020, p. 14).

Premised upon a notion of youth as a social construction, as well as upon its permeability, and taking into account how young people - whether as young children, tweens, teenagers, or late twentysomething, whether in the West or outside of it – are growing up with significant access to globalized media and transmedia platforms and narratives, the articles in this special issue critically investigate the issues presented by the construction of young selves within the contemporary digital media ecology.

With most research, policy and advocacy regarding children’s play focusing on the physical environment, little attention is being paid to the growing importance of digital media, and the role of free play, in children’s lives – usually as a result of a long-established antipathy towards digital technologies which are being perceived as the enemy of healthy bodies and minds. Now that the right to play has become integrated in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and children become increasingly immersed in digitally-mediated contents, forms, connections and cultures, ‘Imaginative play in digital environments: Designing social and creative opportunities for identity formation’ discusses the ways in which opportunities for play become manifest in digital environments as well as how a value-sensitive design approach can improve their design. Taking into account contemporary academic discussions regarding the range of content, contact, conduct and contract risks, together with risks to children’s privacy, health and wellbeing that digital technologies are being associated with, as well as the limitations children’s outside play is faced with, Kruakae Pothong and Sonia Livingstone problematize popular assertions of an offline/online dichotomy and its reading as real/virtual or good/bad and suggest that children’s pleasure and sense of agency must be recognized in digital as well as in nondigital contexts. Drawing on two narrative literature reviews – the multidisciplinary history of free play (Cowan, 2020) and children’s play in digital contexts (Colvert, 2021) – the authors ask descriptively how does free play manifest in children’s own accounts of digital play. From a normative point of view, one that balances risks and opportunities, together with children’s agency and adult responsibility, within a child rights framework, Pothong and Livingstone are looking for the configurations of people, products and places that will allow free play to thrive online so that they can advise providers and designers of digital services and products, as well as policymakers, on how to improve children’s free play online. Premised upon a UK-based online public consultation and a nationwide online survey, such a combination of a design-led approach and deliberation has the potential to engage the public, as well as enhance the democratic value of participation in decision-making. Acknowledging how the Covid-19 pandemic is likely to have intensified the importance of digital technologies in children’s lives, the authors point out, on the basis of the public consultation, that children suggested a safe environment for play is a prerequisite for them to enjoy the qualities of free play; that the commercial and compulsive features of digital play are intrusive and problematic; that they prefer digital features that promote their social, imaginative, risk-taking and stimulating play much more than those undermining their agency and identity formation. Overall, children require increased opportunities for creative and imaginative play; opportunities for more open-ended and flexible play; features enabling hybrid, transmedia and embodied play; and features that make room for communication, and a fairer digital environment run by alternative business models.

Drawing from the way in which confusion around sexual education and dismay about teenage access to sexual content online can be a source of concern and distress to young people themselves, their families, as well as caregivers, educators, and policy makers, in ‘Own your narrative’: teenagers as producers and consumers of porn in Netflix’s Sex Education’, Debra Dudek, Giselle Woodley and Lelia Green are interested in how young teenagers are positioned as producers and consumers of pornographic/erotic narratives within it. This way, the authors challenge the hegemonic perception of sexually explicit content as inherently harmful to young people and posit instead that, contrary to such perceptions, erotic content can be beneficial for them, especially when young people’s views are taken into account. Highlighting how the implicit moral panic regarding young people’s access to sexually explicit material quite often obscures how other online uses and practices – such as cyberbullying and user-generated content supporting ‘thinspiration’ and pro-suicide ideation – may impact severely upon young teenage life, Dudek et al point out the Catch-22 surrounding young people’s access to adult material: a regulatory context which dictates that young people should not have encountered sexually explicit content, inevitably leads to the lack of teenage accounts regarding their own experiences of accessing adult content online. Indeed, given both young people’s disappointment in school-based sex-ed programmes, which fail to communicate information about qualitative elements of sexual activity – including pleasure, desire and fantasies – in an open and aware way, and the heavy policing and censoring of young people’s fantasies, sexual behavior and engagement with sexual information and knowledge, this article discusses the series Sex Education as offering young peopel fit-for-purpose, appropriate, and life-relevant skills around teenage sexuality and sexual practice.

Ana Jorge and Lidia Marôpo build upon existing research upon the common activity among celebrity parents known as ‘sharenting’. They focus on the celebrity sharenting activities of football megastar Cristiano Ronaldo and, in fact, suggest that the discussion should move on to include children’s representation by a clan – not merely the famous parent. This way they wish to account for the ways in which celebrity sharenting may contribute to the construction of children’s digital identities, and also the ways in which these identities spread within the current media ecosystem. ‘When you realize your dad is Cristiano Ronaldo: Celebrity sharenting and children’s digital identities’ draws attention to how the academic discussion of widespread sharenting stresses the tension between the rights of parents to share parenting experiences online and their offspring’s right to privacy and participation, as well as how such parental disclosure may compromise children’s ability to freely construct their digital footprints and online identities. The article argues that celebrity sharenting cannot be seen in isolation from the wider reputation context in which celebrities live, as the portrayal of children legitimates the identity of a good (celebrity) parent for Ronaldo. In fact, sharenting has the ability to reinstate Ronaldo’s reputation following a number of scandals, by positioning children as the extended self of celebrities and thus acting as emotional capital for them. Such emotional appeal is then monetized by celebrities as it draws sponsored and commercial content to celebrity accounts in ways that influencer sharenting or sharenting by ordinary people isn’t. The article also draws attention to the pressure exerted upon the offspring’s identity development.

‘Everyday negotiations in managing presence: young people and social media in India’ is premised upon the principle that young people need to be understood within the complexities of their socio-cultural and even political contexts. The article offers an insight into the media discourse about young people in India, where the discussion oscillates between technopanics and opportunity and wishes to address the gap in research in children’s digital lives within an Indian context by looking into the self-making and relational practices of young people while on social media. Starting from a framework of rationality and agency through which they see young people developing their cultural, civic, and political lives, Devina Sarwatay and Usha Raman unpack how young people in India access, use, and experience social media. Through in-depth interviews and social media interactions with participants based on a qualitative/ethnographic approach, the authors focus on four key aspects of young people’s digital lives while the latter negotiate their identities and relationships on social media: negotiation of access for smartphones and social media; usage in terms of social media profiles; navigation across different risks and opportunities; and problem-solving strategies. Though this article presents a small, case-based study of privileged youth within an urban setting (and in that respect cannot be seen to talk about all young people in the city or the country), it is important in how it contributes to the slowly growing literature from the Global South regarding the many different ways in which young people experience, make sense of and use social media for meaning-making, identity creation, self-curation, self-presentation and for developing political and civic consciousness.

Tanja Oblak Črnič and Barbara Neža Brečko make a point of how the COVID-19 pandemic shifted the public discourse related to young children’s and teenagers’ lives and their online uses and practices, from one replete with anxiety and suspicion to one accommodating young people’s needs for schooling, socialization and leisure during nationwide lockdowns. In ‘Enhancing sociality, self-presentation, and play: a case study of digital scenarios among schoolchildren in an epidemic context’, they address the way everyday domesticated life for Slovenian schoolchildren became gravely mediatized as a result of the 2020 pandemic and the new realities this brought into children’s lives. In the attempt to explore the extent to and the ways in which children embraced online media in their everyday contexts, the authors are interested in the digital scenarios Slovenian children constructed in response to the new schooling practices and necessities. Seen from a perspective of ‘radical contextualism’ (Radway, 1988), whereby the kaleidoscope of children’s everyday life is discussed, the authors analyze children’s and teenagers’ daily activities. In this, they are able to identify children’s experiences of isolation in the midst of lockdown and reveal typical collective groupings among them. Drawing from an understanding of young people’s activities as ‘collapsed context’ (boyd, 2002, 2014; Davis & Jurgenson, 2014), their study is geared towards the role such context collapse has played during COVID-19 for young people through a pilot online study conducted with children from a primary school in the capital city of Ljubljana. With this study, the authors wish to explore the social media platforms and the digital tools that formed children’s media ecology during the lockdown; to make sense of the practices carried out by schoolchildren; and to identify their main ‘communities of practice’.

Despite growing recent research in the role different media – including conventional media as well as smartphones and cellphones – play in everyday life as well as in the planning and organizing of the pre-migration, migration and post-migration phases (Emmer et al., 2020; Gillespie et al., 2018; Leurs & Patterson, 2020; Mancini et al., 2019), there is paucity of research on the role of digital media during settlement, acculturation and integration of refugees in the host society, which Nadia Kutscher, Jana Hüttmann Michi Sebastian Fujii, Niko Pepe Engfer, and Henrike Friedrichs-Liesenkötter seek to address. At a time that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has characterized as the ‘decade of displacement’ (UNHCR, 2019, p. 4, 7), the authors work within the conjunction of digital media and migration studies in order to offer a neo-praxeological approach to the study of refugees and digital media. More specifically, ‘Educational participation of young refugees in the context of digitalized settings’ is premised upon a multidimensional notion of education (‘Bildung’) as having a potential for social inclusion of young refugees by means of opening up their perspectives for social and structural participation and integration. The authors are sensitive to the lack of adequate research as to how young refugees participate in out-of-school educational settings due to specific needs and requirements – even more so during the COVID-19 pandemic, where the digital exclusion of young refugees from educational settings was exacerbated. To this goal, the authors offer an insight into the interplay of formal, non-formal and informal places, aims and modalities of education and the way digital media are embedded within them, in order to make better sense of the educational participation of young refugees in host societies. They apply neo-praxeology (i.e., practice theory inspired) in their study of how young refugees, education and digital media intersect, and in this way they discuss within the context of educational science how the presence of different media unfolds in learning, educational and socialization processes. They conclude suggesting that neo-praxeology could play a significant role in identifying not only educational participation-related inequalities, such as structural aspects concerning language acquisition, connectedness with institutions and support structures and the availability of technical and personal resources, but also the implications these have for the reproduction of inequalities amongst young refugees.

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Notes on contributors

Liza Tsaliki

Liza Tsaliki is Professor in ‘Politics, Information Society and Popular Culture' at the Department of Communication and Media Studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Her research record spans across the following fields: political engagement and participation (including young peoples’); celebrity culture and activism; gender and technology; porn studies; children/youth and media; children/youth and sexualization; popular culture; post-feminism, body aesthetics, and motherhood; fitness culture; the erotic body; Black identity in Greece.