Youth, Technology, Governance, Experience

Adults Understanding Young People

Liam Grealy, Catherine Driscoll, Anna Hickey-Moody, Liam Grealy, Catherine Driscoll, Anna Hickey-Moody

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351112659
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

How do adults understand youth? How do their conceptions inform interventions into young lives or involve young people's experiences?

This volume tackles these questions by exploring adults' ideas about youth. Specifically, Youth, Technology, Governance, Experience examines the four titular concepts and their implications for a range of relationships between youth and adults. Utilising interdisciplinary methods, the contributing authors deliver a broad range of analyses of young people differentiated by gender, class, race, and geography across an array of contexts, including within the home, in media representations, through government bureaucracies, and in everyday life.

Youth, Technology, Governance, Experience also interrogates the meaning of technology and governance for youth studies, considering a range of ways they interact, including through social media, technologies of regulation, and educational tools. It will appeal to students and academic researchers interested in fields such as youth studies, cultural studies, sociology, and education.

1 Youth, technology, governance, experience: keywords for youth studies

Liam Grealy, Anna Hickey-Moody and Catherine Driscoll

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the collection’s keywords and the ways these concepts inform the essays drawn together in this book. Our approach is inspired by Raymond Williams’s Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society (1983) – a landmark text for cultural studies – and by the subsequent New Keywords: A revised vocabulary of culture and society (Bennett et al. 2005). In Keywords, Williams offers short essays on the ‘general usage’ of his collected keywords (1983, p. 12), attuned not only to historical changes in meaning, but to how such changes articulate with political and social circumstances. Keywords is Williams’s ‘record of an inquiry into a vocabulary: a shared body of words and meanings in our most general discussion, in English, of the practices and institutions which we group as culture and society’ (1983, p. 13). His inquiry aimed ‘to provide a useful, intellectually and historically grounded guide to public questions’ (Bennett et al. 2005, p. xviii), where conflicts over terms indicate ‘historical and contemporary substance’ (Williams 1983, p. 21) rather than semantic disagreements of definition.

This introduction is written in the spirit of Keywords, framing our collection’s aim to be broadly useful to students and scholars working on youth, youth culture, and young people. The enormous field of research that can be collected as ‘youth studies’ contains myriad investigations of relations between youth, technology, governance, and experience. All the chapters collected here are centrally interested in youth, although they bring to this subject different disciplinary approaches and field orientations, including cultural studies, media studies, the sociology of education, and criminology. The collection’s keywords are used variously across the book, signalling differences in authorial preference and disciplinary location, but also the wide social and cultural uses of these terms, from which youth studies scholars directly draw. This introduction provides historical background and examines the use of the keywords youth, technology, governance, and experience, as the broad parameters organising the chapters that follow. We begin, in greatest detail, with the contemporary critical conception of youth as simultaneously a life stage and a category of disciplinary knowledge.

Youth

Possibility. The future. Investment. Care. Youth is a concept widely associated with positive aspects of life in that it represents all that might come to be. Youth is also understood as a time of vulnerability. Being young consolidates the related needs for care, protection, and education. Beyond individual experiences, youth simultaneously symbolises potential and futurity, but also vulnerability and immaturity. However recognisable this apparent ambivalence, it raises questions about how youth continues to be constituted as such.

In discussing ‘youth’ and ‘young people’ we need to move beyond such general categories, and not just because we must acknowledge the historical and cultural contexts in which these terms hold different meanings. A typical ontology of youth begins with age and associated developmental categorisations of age. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS 2016), for example, circumscribes the ‘youth unemployment’ rate to include unemployed individuals between the ages of 15 and 24. The same age range underpins the UN’s definition of youth, which overlaps with the definition of the child under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (individuals below 18 years of age). Such crossover is inevitable for a category that is simultaneously cultural, social, and biological.

The mutability of meanings associated with age is exemplified in adaptations of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. In the 1597 play, Juliet is explicitly 13 years old and, past menarche, is considered to be of marriageable age. Though Romeo’s age is not specified, he too is called a youth, and both his actions (his identity drama) and how others treat him are compatible with the period’s ideas about youth, with his judgement and temperament deemed immature and rash. By the time the play began to be adapted for the cinema, Juliet’s age was no longer considered appropriately marriageable and the practice of using adult actors to play these youths on stage was exported to film until Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 adaptation (Brauborn et al. 1968), which courted controversy by casting lead actors who were respectively 17 and 15 years old. Concern over the representation of diegetic sex between minors in Zeffirelli’s film was fuelled by contemporaneous concerns over new forms of youth culture and of discourse on sexual freedom. By 1996, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet indicated further care to cast actors over the age of sexual consent, now 22 and 17 years old (Brook et al. 1998). The shifting meaning of age in these adaptations reflects changing adult anxieties around youth sexuality as well as historical changes in conceptions of minority and gendered ages of sexual consent (Grealy 2013). The adaptations exemplify the mobility of youth as a concept opposed to childhood and adulthood and framed as an orientation to culture, or judgement, rather than straightforwardly reflecting an individual’s years since birth.

For both scholarly and popular approaches to youth, there are characteristics and tendencies associated with youth that can overlap with and even override definitions of adulthood. Lawrence Grossberg (1994, p. 34), for example, argues that youth is defined by an ‘affective extremism’ and by ‘lines of flight that attempt to escape the dominant organization of everyday life’. Such lines of flight centrally include the pursuit of pleasure over productivity, and investment in ephemeral activities rather than future-oriented thinking as well as, contradictorily, an orientation towards remaking the future as different from the present. The characterisation of an older person as having a ‘young spirit’ and the condescending imperative to ‘grow up!’ each signal the mobility of ‘youthful’ actions and beliefs across age-based demographics. Such conceptions of youth as an orientation, often tightly associated with identity-making and with resistance to social convention, are not necessarily circumscribed by age.

The ambiguous relationship between youth and age is often exemplified by the figure of ‘the teenager’: nominally an individual aged between 13 and 20 years but in practice an assemblage of orientations, associations, and practices. The meaning of the teenager has also changed over time and points to the importance of historically contextualising any discussion of youth. In Teenage: the prehistory of youth culture 1875–1945, Jon Savage (2007) locates the emergence of the teenager at the end of the Second World War and especially links it to the effects of the military draft in the United States, which had removed young adult men from public life. The ‘Teen Canteen’ movement, for example, burgeoned from 1944 in response to the new visibility of youth during wartime and related concerns about young people frequenting saloons and drinking alcohol. Coca-Cola distributed pamphlets detailing how to start neighbourhood centres like the Teen Canteens, which frequently included a vending machine alongside a jukebox, dance floor, and ping-pong table (Savage 2007, p. 447).

In addition to new social spaces, Savage conveys this relationship between youth and post-war consumer culture as a generational identity informed by magazines like Seventeen. Featuring celebrity biographies, fashion articles, photomontage, Hollywood gossip columns, popular culture reviews, and dating and etiquette columns, Seventeen openly connected the formation of girls’ identities to consumer culture (Savage 2007, p. 448). Such conflation of girlhood and consumption-as-identity-formation was not new, as we can see in Eliza Lyn Linton’s notorious 1868 diatribe against ‘the modern girl’, in the girl’s recurring presence across cultural theory as the exemplary passive dupe of popular culture, and in earlier girls’ magazines (Driscoll 2008, p. 18). However, the interpellative modes of address characterising girls’ magazines, as well as the audiences these might attract, clearly expanded across the early- to mid-twentieth century as part of a burgeoning consumer culture through which the teenager might construct a set of preferences, affiliations, and personal style.

At least by the 1920s, in contexts as diverse as Japan, Germany, Australia, and the US, youth had come to be equated with processes of identity formation tied to broadly gendered forms of consumption (Weinbaum et al. 2008; Driscoll 2010). But the teenager as a demographic category produced by market researchers and the popular cultural industries is only one of many concepts whose intersecting meanings and histories come to bear on any common-sense notion of youth. The seemingly new centrality of youth across the twentieth century is not only a product of the expansion of youth-oriented commodity culture. Rather, the increasing weight placed on youth in modern theories of identity formation meant that associating youthful identity formation with cultural commodities helped undermine the centrality of productive and domestic relations to social identity in general.

The concept of youth has always attempted to capture the process and experience of development. Puberty is one aspect of this, as a metamorphosis of physiological events that historically emphasised growing a beard or breasts, but now more commonly denotes a person developing the capacity for sexual reproduction. The relationship between puberty and age has varied, across time and between cultures. Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, the discursive significance of puberty was subsumed by adolescence, a broader concept denoting changes in behaviour and social status. The contemporary sociological meaning for adolescence continues to suggest liminality, as ‘the transition period from dependent childhood to self-sufficient adulthood’ (Muuss 1974, p. 4), and as examined by anthropology in seminal studies of rites of passage (Turner 1967). But contemporary conceptions of adolescence far more explicitly emphasise the management of expected difficulties and also conscious adjustments to one’s behaviour shaped by an increasing awareness of and training for a future unfolding towards adult civic, sexual, and work freedoms and responsibilities.

This expanded definition of adolescence derives its popular use from psychologist and educator G. Stanley Hall who in 1904 published the two-volume Adolescence: its psychology and its relations to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religion and education. From Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, Hall developed his ‘law of recapitulation’ under which he argued the human organism must mature through stages from savagery to citizenly civility. As a vitalistic period of ‘storm and stress’, Hall’s adolescence is the definitive stage in this trajectory, ‘before the decline of the highest powers of the soul in maturity and age’ (Hall, in Lesko 2001, p. 55). In accounting for Hall’s historical significance, however, it seems as important to notice the way his theory modelled the contemporary focus on youth as the site for resolving the broadest possible social problems, and detecting signs of future problems. For Hall (1904 II, p. 448):

Youth, when properly understood, will seem to be not only the revealer of the past but of the future, for it is dimly prophetic of the best part of history which is not yet written because it has not yet transpired, of the best literature the only criterion of which is that it helps to an ever more complete maturity, and of better social organisations, which, like everything else, are those that best serve youth.

Hall’s work also draws attention to the fact that adolescence is both a set of cultural norms and a biosocial fact organising an array of institutional approaches to young people (Lesko 2001). Hall drew heavily on current debates in the still emerging field of developmental psychology, notably sponsoring Sigmund Freud’s lecture tour of the United States. In an open letter to a Dr M. Fürst on the sexual enlightenment of children, Freud (1986, p. 138) described adults’ investment in the idea of childhood innocence and its protection, and argued that a young person’s sexual education should take account of ‘each stage of [their] learning’. The famous model of sexual stages in childhood development that Freud developed from this principle may have long been contested in the discipline of psychology itself, but the core concepts of his broader developmental model continue to be important, often more directly through the work of those he influenced, including ego psychologist Erik Erikson.

Erikson’s own model of life stages gave special weight to adolescence as the temporal site of subject formation. For Erikson, each age involves the development of a specific vital strength or basic virtue, and youth is understood as a period in which the prepubescent development of ‘competence’ is displaced during adolescence proper by the centrality of ‘fidelity’, devotion, or strong attachment. During this ‘psychosocial moratorium’ (Erikson 1968, p. 242), the individual becomes focused solely on the activity of identity formation. For Erikson, the adolescent desire for attachment drives a potentially bewildering search as ‘the sense of identity becomes necessary (and increasingly problematic) wherever a wide range of possible identities is envisaged’ (p. 245). The necessity of identity development, and the adolescent’s growing freedom to encounter a range of identity possibilities gives rise to a basic conflict between identity and diversity, and Erikson’s (p. 244) contention that ‘In no other stage of the life cycle … are the promise of finding oneself and the threat of losing oneself so closely allied’ has continued to influence ideas about the blend of risk and possibility in the experience of youth. In Grossberg’s (1994, pp. 32–33) terms, youth for Erikson ‘does not so much involve an ideological search for identity as an affective search for appropriate maps of daily life, for appropriate sites of involvement, investment and absorption’. And consumer culture, Grossberg notes, is one important terrain on which this search takes place.

Published in the same year that Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet was released – 1968 – Erikson’s writing also reflects the emergence of 1960s counterculture and the spirit of the May ’68 riots in Europe, both of which tended to resist the commitments of previous generations (Williams 1970). We should not miss the echo of Hall in Erikson’s (1968, p. 258) claim that

no longer is it merely for the old to teach the young the meaning of life. It is the young who, by their responses and actions, tell the old whether life as represented to them has some vital promise, and it is the young who carry in them the power to confirm those who confirm them, to renew and regenerate, to disavow what is rotten, to reform and rebel.

Nevertheless, since the 1960s it has become increasingly common to frame youth as a time and place of potential social critique and to discuss young people as political agents (Grossberg 1994, p. 28) who may resist sexual and domestic but also social and governmental norms (Frith 2005). Those particularly influenced by Erikson’s model of youth often frame this potential for resistance in generational terms. They stress that those experiencing Erikson’s adolescent life stage simultaneously inhabit some shared historical experience (Mannheim 1952). However, generation is also a troublesomely homogenising concept, effacing difference within an age-stratified population. It also underpins the dismissive assumption that the concerns of ‘youth today’ are passing and thus trivial. Any such generational claim thus requires some care in its application.

The Chicago School of Sociology had paid particular attention to urban American youth in the 1920s and 1930s, taking young people as exemplary sites on which to see the formation of social identities and groups in relation to a social environment (or ‘ecology’) (Shaw and McKay 1942). But as the new cultural visibility of youth in the 1950s and 1960s demanded new attention from psychology it also fuelled new directions in studies of youth. For Pierre Bourdieu (1993) at this time, generation seemed a useful concept for characterising broadly changing cultural aspirations – for example, the normalised expectation that a family would own a car – as well as broad social shifts in relation to an education system – such as the universalisation of high-schooling or the expansion of access to bachelor-degree programmes. However, Bourdieu’s (1984) interest was primarily with class difference, including within generations, and socioeconomic inequality continues to be widely explored in contemporary sociological literature on youth in transition. From a sociological point of view, the end of adolescence might be observed through phenomena such as financial independence, full-time employment, or marriage. But such achievements do not necessarily indicate psychological independence and maturity, and their significance and likelihood are highly variable across time, place, and population demographics.

The conception of youth mapped across these ideas underpins the emergence of a visible field of ‘youth studies’, which took different forms under various disciplinary and institutional influences across the twentieth century. For cultural studies, the work emerging around the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham in the 1960s and 1970s has remained influential because of its interdisciplinary approach, its use of both structuralist and post-structuralist theory, and its framing commitment to political analysis of contemporary culture and society, which is now often described as ‘conjunctural’ (after Stuart Hall), but was then often characterised as ‘Marxist’. This work consistently focused on instances of (usually male and working-class) youth subcultures that appropriated popular cultural meanings to signify their double articulation with and against mainstream and parent cultures alongside attempts to win social space (Clarke et al. 1993; Hebdige 1979; Thornton 1997). These ideas remain central to the ‘post-subcultural’ work that has more recently prioritised the fluidity of young people’s cultural identifications through lifestyle consumption and temporary experiences of togetherness (Bennett 1999; Malbon 1999; Huq 2006). CCCS scholars galvanised a sense that specific cultural objects and practices are particularly fundamental to defining youth and to the experience of youth, despite recent accounts of subcultural participation by adults that problematise any presumed relationships between subcultures and age-stratified populations (Hodkinson 2012; Brabazon 2013). Youth culture, like (the mobility of) youth ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Youth, technology, governance, experience: keywords for youth studies
• PART I: Governing minority: surveillance and media classification
• PART II: Young people and technologies: ethical research and sexting
• PART III: Ethnographies of young people’s education
• Index