Digital Diversions

Youth Culture in the Age of Multimedia

Julian Sefton-Green

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9781857288568
• eBook ISBN: 9781135358976
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This work explores the diverse ways in which young people are active social agents in the production of youth culture in the digital age. It collects an international range of empirical accounts describing the ways in which young people utilize and appropriate new technology. The contributors draw on a range of theoretical perspectives including cultural studies, social anthropology and feminism.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Being Young in the Digital Age

Julian Sefton-Green

Childhood and the Future

Children are at the epicenter of the information revolution, ground zero of the digital world… Children have the chance to reinvent communications, culture and community. To address the problems of the new world in new ways.

Jon Katz’s (1996) polemical rhetoric encapsulates a sense of momentous and far reaching social change, locating the young at the heart of an on-going revolution. However, his article about the ‘rights of kids’ in what he calls the digital age, actually rests on far more mainstream assumptions about the young, best summed up in the banal lyrics of a song, recently popularized by Whitney Houston, ‘The children are our future’. Children both represent and quite literally embody our, or at least our societies’, future. Of course the platitudinous truthfulness of this statement, that children will grow up and become adults in the future, tends to obscure its ideological construction. As Chris Jenks (1996) has recently argued, it is not so much physical children who represent the future but our notion of childhood itself. Modern industrial life has constructed the special and privileged space of childhood not only as a walled garden to keep out the concerns of the adult world but—to pursue the horticultural metaphor—to nurture from seed the adult plant. In a similar vein the historian Carolyn Steedman (1995) has shown some of the literary and artistic ways in which children are conceptualized as icons of growth and development, tracing the history of this construction over the last couple of hundred years. Yet, perhaps the most salient image of a contemporary child in western society is a picture of a rapt face staring entranced at, almost into, the computer screen. This image is powerful not just because it encapsulates the hopes and fears within popular narratives of childhood but because it also tells a parallel story, the narrative of technological progress.

Indeed children (or youth) and new technology are terms which are often yoked together in discussions about the nature of contemporary socialchange, precisely because they both embody similar Ideological assumptions about growth, progression and development which underpin late modern society. However, neither of these narratives are without their contrapuntal alternatives. Western constructions of childhood have oscillated between views of the child as savage and innocent; pure and tainted; ignorant and intuitive. Similarly the new technologies—which for the purpose of this volume are primarily denned as the digital information and communications media, such as computer games or the Internet—are also described in terms of binary oppositions. Thus, they are fragmenting contemporary society, yet uniting it; they are destroying education or remaking it; they are transforming culture and communication or merely conferring privilege on a few. Both in the academic disciplines of the sociology of childhood and the newer field of technoculture or cyber theory, these disjunctions and contradictions are being discussed and analyzed (Qvortrup et al, 1994; Sardar and Ravetz, 1996), yet rarely are these shared notions of the future analyzed together.

Of course, notions of the future imply either intervention and change or pessimistic determinism; here again these twin narratives of technology and childhood tell similar stories. New technology is seen to offer the hope of transforming contemporary society into a better one, in the same way that adults speculate that their children’s lives will be somehow ‘better’ than their own—as Katz puts it above, addressing the problems of the world in ‘new ways’. On the other hand, concerns about the changing nature of childhood—or indeed about its apparent ‘disappearance’—have become inextricably bound up with wider anxieties about the impact of technological change. Successive waves of moral panic continuously link the changing nature of young people’s lives with an increase in the provision of media technology in the previously enclosed and protected domains of the family and the school. The concept of an ‘audio-visual generation’ (or what seems to be called at the moment ‘cyberkids’) seems to have become a shorthand way of labelling these hopes and fears, and it clearly illustrates how each category seems to have become a way of talking about the other.

On one level, this reflects changing realities—for example, the fact that all young people growing up today will work with digital technologies at some point in their adult lives. Yet on another level, it also raises questions about how we describe and conceptualize social change—and indeed, about how we might imagine the future. As I have implied, these debates are inevitably bound up with much broader ideological, moral and social motivations, yet they often float free from any discussion of the concrete realities of children’s lives, or of their actual uses of these new technologies.

The central aim of this book then, is to offer some empirical evidence about the multiplicity of ways in which young people are utilizing and appropriating a range of new technologies in the making of youth culture in the digital age. In this process, perhaps, it may be possible to gain a more accurate picture of what the future might actually be like.

Counting the Digital Age

One of the most common ways of defining what it means to be a child (or youth) is in terms of age. However, recent studies of childhood (for example, James, 1993) have examined the ways in which young people themselves negotiate the social meanings of different age boundaries. More significantly they suggest that being a child continuously locates one as being a person who is becoming someone else—as opposed to being an adult, where it is presumed one’s identity has coalesced into a state of permanence. Yet there is much to suggest that new technologies may be helping to redefine this process. This is not only a feature of the new digital technologies but part of the larger impact ‘older’ media technologies are still having on our society. Thus, Simon Frith (1993) has shown how ‘youth’ has been redefined by discourses of taste and by the marketing departments of record companies to cover a biological age up to forty. More pessimistically, conservative commentators such as Neil Postman (1983) or Joshua Meyrowitz (1985) have argued that the prime impact of the mass media, especially television, is to destroy the ‘natural’ boundaries around childhood and youth, blurring the onset of adult knowledge and experience.

Digital technologies, or more precisely certain uses of them, continue this process of redefinition in seemingly contradictory directions. Thus on the one hand, they seem to offer a kind of ‘adultification’, since young people can act in the digital realm with an equivalence of grown-up power. On the other hand, they seem to have continued the process of ‘juvenilization’ associated with leisure pastimes, and in particular with notions of playing games. Although historians suggest that games and play were proper adult activities in the Middle Ages, changing patterns of leisure (largely due to the impact of industrialization) ended up relegating such activities to the domain of the young. This association of play and childhood was further cemented by the ways in which child development theorists and psychologists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used the metaphor of play in their construction of normativized mental growth. This history seems to have reached a new stage when we consider that the largest area of computer use, and one of the economically most powerful, is that of the computer game and related leisure activities. Equally, much supposedly serious use of the computer, particularly for educational purposes, has become more ‘frivolous’ with the development of info- or edu- tainment genres. Indeed Haddon (1992) and Murdock et al (1992) have shown how the evolution of the domestic PC was rooted in this discourse of home entertainment during its uncertain development in the 1980s.

Playing computer games or even just playing with the computer is thus a central part of its usage: even, for example, the metaphor of ‘surfing the Net’ carries leisure connotations.¹ However, many of these forms of play are carried out by people who, in terms of age at least, would be described as adults. A further example of this ‘confusion’ in the UK might be the advertising campaign for the Sony Playstation. This ‘computer’ is a pure gamesmachine (i.e., not a PC), and was clearly targeted at the mid-twenties consumer. Even if this approach could be interpreted as an advertiser’s ploy—to attract late teens to the machine by branding it as a sophisticated twenty-something’s plaything—this move clearly signifies that it is reasonable to sell an expensive ‘toy’ (normally a child’s possession), to the upper end of the child/ youth age range. On the other hand, many feminist commentators have noted how computer games can be further defined as toys for boys (Spender, 1995:186). This perspective is implicitly critical of the ways in which adult men are socially sanctioned to behave in ‘immature’ ways, like boys, and encouraged by the content of computer games to retreat into adolescent fantasy (for example, Sardar, 1996:24).

Being an adult in the digital age then, may involve making this concession to one’s latent childishness. To echo the proverb, being a man means we can carry on playing with childish things without diminishing our adult status or (and this is just as important) in any way depriving our children of their special rights to play. By the same token, young people can use digital technologies to act in the adult realm, an arena traditionally denied them in economic and social terms. There are many apocryphal and true stories in circulation about young people being asked to design web pages or program machines or act as computer consultants. Similarly, being online is not a body-dependent activity and therefore age is not the barrier it conventionally is in face-to-face social encounters.

Of course, this has led to as much anxiety as it has optimism. Are children going to have unrestricted access to pornography or be abused online? Can they participate in adult conversations and have equal access to information compared with their ‘adult peers’? Some of the chapters in this collection develop these issues in more detail, exploring young people’s actions in public spaces, traditionally assumed to be the preserve of adults.² As they imply, the digital age is one in which conventional definitions of childhood and adulthood are being redefined through social usage rather than in terms of biological age. If childhood and adulthood are destabilized by these processes, then it almost goes without saying that youth, the theoretical category occupying a hazy liminal state between these two states of being, is further thrown into disarray.

This argument obviously relates to the ways in which digital technologies are reconfiguring the distinctions between work and leisure and—in particular the notion that the home and the workplace are exclusive sites for either. Thus a young person may be working at home while executives play on their machines at work. Indeed, in late 1996, Apple used this ‘anomaly’ in its advertising slogan: ‘And when your children stop working…you can play with it.’ These and similar scenarios leave us with a number of questions about the potential impact of these kinds of activities on traditionally significant boundaries. If work, leisure, adultness, childhood and youth do not occupy the same spaces that they have conventionally done, what will be the implications for who and what we are?

The Digital and Postmodern Theory

The notion of postmodernism has been at the centre of extensive discussion about the theoretical, political and economic determinants currently influencing contemporary social life. As has been frequently pointed out, this term (and its derivatives) actually covers a variety of different philosophies and modes of academic enquiry. In very broad terms the concept of postmodernity refers to a variety of contemporary ‘sea-changes’ in the social order at a number of levels, ranging from the organization of the global economy to the organization of individual consciousness. It is argued that changing methods of industrial production, the global homogenization of American consumer culture coupled with a ‘new’ world order emerging at the end of the Cold War have resulted in a qualitatively distinctive state of cultural, political and economic practices as we enter the new millennium (Harvey, 1989). However, the role of digital culture and technology within this complicated matrix of ideas is far from simple.

One of the key issues here is the precise relationship between modernity and postmodernity. Indeed some critics (for example, Giddens, 1990) argue that it is more accurate to say that the current state of affairs resembles a continuation of the immediate past more than a new beginning. This debate is mirrored in discussion of digital culture, which often fails to consider its relationship with other forms of contemporary media culture. If modernity is exemplified by mass media culture, in what ways does digital culture break with or extend this paradigm? For example, in discussions about the meaning of television in the lives of young people there are a number of unresolved research questions, such as those focusing on the relationships between the context of media use and the meaning of media texts; the specific impact media may be having on young people’s knowledge and experience of the world; and the cultural appropriations and resistance to dominant values that might be entailed in young people’s readings of TV (Buckingham, 1993a). All of these are ‘live’ questions that have been re-energized and perhaps refocused by the impact of digital technologies, but it is foolish to imagine that digital culture, in and of itself, invents these questions by virtue of technological specificity. The extraordinary hyperbole surrounding many aspects of digital culture should not distract us from its continuities with more traditional forms of screen-based entertainment (Hayward and Wollen, 1993). In marking out the distinctively new in digital culture it is important not to lose sight of the continuities with older media forms and the sets of theoretical and research questions that surround them.

From this point of view, it is helpful to be clear about the determining role of the technology itself. In general terms, accounts of digital culture find it very difficult to avoid any reference to this question because writing about contemporary change from a ‘digital perspective’, necessarily tends to rely on technological explanations. Much debate thus falls into a kind of binary determinism. Put crudely, this often comes down to the following kind ofquestion: is it the computers themselves which facilitate global communication and our sense of the self (for the optimists) or surveillance and dehumanization (for the pessimists)? These questions vex the cyber theory discussions of art, identity and consciousness, represented in the collections edited by Bender and Druckrey (1994) and Hershman Leeson (1996), and the most politically resistant perspectives on digital culture, as in the essays edited by Brook and Boal (1995). Despite an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the ways in which discourses about scientific progress have permeated our understanding of culture and society (see Ross, 1991), as in the last 40 years of writing about the mass media, it has proven difficult to avoid locating explanations of cause and effect in the technology itself. However, the theoretical perspective developed in earlier accounts of the role of technology in social and cultural change may be just as valid here. In particular, Raymond Williams’ (1974) work on television seems to transcend the determinism which increasingly characterizes debates in the digital field. Williams argues that technology cannot be seen either as a wholly autonomous force or as wholly determined by other social developments; on the contrary, we need to look to the complex interrelationships between political, social, institutional and economic interests if we are to explain the ways in which new technologies come to be developed and used.

A second dimension of postmodernity’s relation to the modern lies in the changes in economic and political order which go under the banner of post-industrialization. Thus, questions about the role of digital technologies within the emerging global multinationals, and in particular the convergence of communication systems and the entertainment industries, can be seen as part of the on-going transformation of western capitalism’s structures and activities. A strong sub-theme in this context is the effects of bringing together the previously discrete areas of making and consuming leisure products. Whereas the paradigm of mass broadcast firmly kept the means of production in the hands of few, the computer, and/or being online, appears to allow the consumer previously undreamed of control and participation in the production of entertainment and culture. Here, there are a set of arguments around questions of ownership, control and access. On the one hand, digital technology seems to be facilitating access through the Internet and increased provision in the home; on the other it appears as if the quality of social life is diminished through increased state regulation and submission to market forces.

In this field, issues of the global economy are discussed in conjunction with theories of commodification and consumerism—not least in terms of the ways in which the computer industries make, market and sell their products. Above all, it is how the computer is now positioned centrally as the ‘controlling’ technology in a number of fields, especially entertainment, which makes its presence so pervasive in contemporary life. On one level this discussion leads to a consideration of the so-called information society and the ways in which information may be becoming a new form of capital (Webster,1995). At the same time, these questions about production and consumption are raised in the context of considering the changing face of ‘the public sphere’, that (possibly mythical) arena of democratic debate (Jones, 1995; Shields, 1996). An important issue here is whether the new electronic forum of the Internet is, in effect, a new opportunity for public discourse. Third, much attention has been paid to the ways in which participating in digital culture appears to be based on the inequalities and discriminatory practices of market forces. The telling phrase, ‘the information rich and the information poor’ sums up the thrust of much criticism here (Murdock and Golding, 1989: Sobchack, 1996). Yet again however, it is not clear whether these questions of politi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Notes on Contributors