Young People's Literacies in the Digital Age

Continuities, Conflicts and Contradictions

Luci Pangrazio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351395151
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Computer Science General

What do young people really do with digital media? Young People's Literacies in the Digital Age aims to debunk the common myths and assumptions that are associated with young people's relationship with digital media. In contrast to widespread notions of the empowered and enabled 'digital native', the book presents a more complex picture of young people's digital lives.

Focusing on the notion of 'critical digital literacies' this book tackles a number of pressing questions that are often ignored in media hype and political panics over young people's digital media use, including:

• In what ways can digital media enhance, shape or constrain identity representation and communication?
• How do digital experiences map onto young people's everyday lives?
• What are young people's critical understandings of digital media and how did they develop these?
• What are the dominant understandings young people have of digital media and in whose interests do they work?

These questions are addressed through the findings of a year of fieldwork with groups of young people aged 14 to 19 years. Over the course of eight chapters, the experiences and views of these young people are explored with reference to various academic literatures, such as digital literacies, media and communication studies, critical theory and youth studies. Starting with their early socialisation into the digital context, the book traces the continuities, contradictions and conflicts they encounter as part of their practices. Written in a detailed but accessible manner, this book develops a unique perspective on young people's digital lives.

1

Young people’s digital lives

An introduction

Young people’s relationship with digital media is widely discussed, yet there is something significant about this relationship that merits sustained attention. During the teenage years, young people start to develop a sense of themselves as independent of family, with peers and social networks taking on far greater importance. The digital is very much bound up with these changes. It has become an important part of how identities are experimented with and represented and how socialities are enacted. It is also how careers are imagined and realised. But digital technologies are not just neutral tools in any of these actions—they broker processes and interactions in particular ways. Social media platforms, for example, do not just enable socialities, but influence the audience and purpose of communicative acts. As with many changes, there are advantages and disadvantages. Such changes can occur incrementally and often go unnoticed. Yet how young people negotiate and understand these changes, and the tensions and issues that accompany them, is increasingly connected to their future prospects as socially engaged and informed citizens.

Young people

Adolescence is a stage in life marked by biological, cognitive and social change. In the teenage years, young people begin to contemplate what their future might look like, as they try and test different identities and career pathways. These fledgling identities and dispositions have a certain fragility.

This fragility is not particular to young people—any stage in life that involves change is challenging. However, young people have not usually had the repertoire of experiences that enable them to see these moments of change as a normal part of life. While the demands of their social lives are grounded in the now, young people are routinely encouraged to be mindful of the future and how the decisions and choices they make might affect their prospects. They are required to consider the subjects, courses and programmes they need to take in order to get on the right ‘track’ to a particular career or vocational path.

At the same time, it is becoming increasingly difficult for young people to reach the traditional milestones of adulthood, such as full-time employment, independent living and home ownership. We now see young people living at home for longer periods of time, sometimes well into their adult years, in order to have financial and material support (Muir et al., 2009). Amidst these challenges, precarities and tensions, there are competing academic perspectives on children and young people, each with a different theoretical focus and ontological viewpoint.

Attempts to delineate and define ‘young people’ as a distinct social group brings to light many of the theoretical tensions that underpin ‘youth studies’. I have already used several different terms in the opening pages of this book—‘young people’, ‘teenagers’ and ‘adolescents’—yet each term has slightly different uses and connotations. The term ‘teenager’, for example, is used to refer to someone in the age range of 13–19 years, and came into popular use in the 1950s as a marketing category (Buckingham, 2008). It therefore has problematic associations with advertising and consumption. Although there is some variation in definition, a ‘young person’, is generally considered to be someone between the ages of 12–25 years (McGorry et al., 2006). Psychologists adopt the term ‘adolescence’ to refer to the time between childhood and adulthood. Sociologists, on the other hand, tend to use the term ‘youth’, which, in a similar way to psychology, is defined as the stage between childhood and adulthood. Andy Furlong (2013) argues, however, that ‘youth is a broader category than adolescence’ as it is not linked to ‘specific age ranges nor can it be linked to specific activities, such as paid work or having sexual relations’ (p.19).

Throughout this book I use the term ‘young people’ to refer to the participants in the research. This avoids the associations that the label ‘adolescence’ has to psychological theories, which tend to position young people as somehow incomplete or simply in transition to adulthood. I approach young people as ‘complete’, even if they are looking to build future careers and lifestyles. As Kehily (2007) explains, the transitional period of young personhood is ‘between being dependent and becoming independent’ (p.3), rather than any form of arrested adulthood. In a similar way, I have made a conscious decision to avoid labelling the young people as ‘youth’. While there is a diverse body of work on the sociology of youth, the term has become associated with normative or correctional processes, which inadvertently position young people as needing education, regulation or help; i.e. ‘youth at risk’ (Capuzzi & Gross, 2014).

In exploring the digital lives of these young people, I start from the premise that their experiences are unique, meaning they should not be treated as a homogenous group. As Helsper and Eynon (2010) point out, young people vary greatly in their skills, resources and motivations when using digital media, meaning their dispositions towards it vary markedly. In the context of this book, ‘disposition’ is taken to mean the attitudes and beliefs young people have toward digital media, which predisposes them to particular digital practices. In Chapter 3 I trace the origin of these dispositions using Foucault’s (1980) concept of the ‘dispositif’. As such, my use of the term ‘disposition’ differs from Bourdieu’s, who sees it as a set of pre- or unconscious inclinations that lead to a particular ‘way of being’ or ‘habitual state’ (Bourdieu, 1977/2011, p.214). By contrast, I analyse the array of discursive and non-discursive factors that shape young people’s beliefs about the digital, as well as their sense of agency in this context.

The digital age

Digital technologies have changed the arrangements and patterns of contemporary life. Much of this is to do with the explosive growth of the internet and its capacity to connect people, open markets, redefine boundaries and carve out new spaces for cultural engagement. Social media have opened up new avenues for participation. While crowdsourcing, citizen journalism and online activism often fall short of their promise, such developments have undoubtedly changed the ways in which civic and social life are enacted (Hinton & Hjorth, 2013). At the same time, the increasing commingling of bodies with technologies, principally in the form of wearables, such as fitness trackers, ear buds, smart watches and virtual reality headsets, is imbued with both excitement and trepidation with regard to what the technological future might hold. Key here is the fact that these technologies are built on and operated by code, which is invisible and pervasive, making it very difficult to identify and understand the potentialities and pitfalls that might unfold.

Bearing this in mind, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (2008) suggest three implications for what it means to live in the digital age. First, they argue digital culture ‘literally remaps, rewires, and recodes life itself using complex algorithms’ (Kroker & Kroker, 2008, p.3). Through algorithms and machine learning, the processes that drive the functioning of everyday digital culture are increasingly automated, meaning that many of the decisions that shape the spaces and processes of sociality happen without our knowing. Due to algorithmic profiling, we are often not aware of the myriad identities that are created on our behalf. As Cheney-Lippold (2017, p.6) notes, ‘online you are not who you think you are’ due to how various digital traces are generated and processed by unknown actors in the digital economy. There is a pressing need for us to understand how socialities are reshaped through algorithmic processing, and the implications this has for embodied experience.

Second, they contend digital code blurs boundaries between ‘flesh, machine and images’ (Kroker & Kroker, 2008, p.3), where clear distinctions once existed. In doing so, the motivations instantiated by machines are seamlessly intertwined with those of the individual, raising questions of agency and autonomy. Finally, while much is made of the potential for digital transmission to take place almost instantaneously, it inevitably slows when it interacts with ‘putatively solid objects of society—bodies, politics, economy, gender, sexuality’ (p.3). It is easy to see how ideas of borderless, ubiquitous digital communication quickly translate into utopian promises for liberation, freedom and democracy. Yet, despite its boundless potential, when digitality is inflected with the very real and material qualities of the world, it is ‘all the more physical, concrete, stubborn, as regressive politically as it is progressive’ (Kroker & Kroker, 2008, p.3). O’Neil (2016) argues that digital processing has actually increased inequalities, particularly with regard to the datafication of everyday life.

As with many sociotechnical phenomena, the digital is neither wholly utopian nor dystopian—its determination lies in the interplay between human practices and values and the capabilities of digital technologies. However, many of these issues have their antecedents in the principles of digital encoding. While ‘the digital’ is made manifest through digital devices and systems, a more granular understanding of digital encoding provides an important lens through which to view the themes and concerns of this book.

At the most basic level, the digital can be described as a binary code in which there are only two possible states: off and on, symbolised by 0 and 1. The flow of information that is ‘captured’ by binary code is discrete and discontinuous, so that each tenth of a second on a clock may be captured, for example, but not each point in between. By comparison, analogue processing continuously translates information via electric pulses of varying amplitude. The aim of code, then, is to ensure that the output is always greater than the input. These changes can be traced back to the invention of the Turing machine in 1936, which Kittler (2008, p.45) argues, ‘banished the infinity of numbers’ involved in coding to just 0s and 1s. With technology, code has been put into ‘the practice of realities’ (Kittler, 2008, p.44). However, with it came an inevitable reduction that enabled the exactitude of computer science.

Encoding information digitally has advantages. By using binary code, large amounts of information can be compressed so that transmission and storage of data is far more efficient. Further, being composed of only two signals, data are more easily decoded. In short, digital data are easier to store, manipulate and replicate, affording the user greater control and precision of information. Analogue, by comparison, has infinite values of data so the process of decoding is more time consuming and prone to errors. While the vast amount of information involved in analogue transmission is its greatest shortcoming, analogue is able to represent changing values and continuously variable qualities, which is more akin to the way humans experience the world. It is easy to see why many commentators have lauded this as an era of change and transformation. While these changes are being driven by financial and governmental factors, digital technologies are also implicated in many of these developments. However, it would be short-sighted to focus on digital technologies as the sole catalysts of change.

The mutual shaping theory of technology sees technology and society as mutually influencing and shaping each other. I draw on the work of Williams (1974) and Buckingham (2008, p.12), which explains that technology is ‘socially shaped and socially shaping’. Seen in this way, what people do with technologies is determined by the ‘inherent constraints and possibilities which limit the ways in which it can be used’, which are, in turn, ‘largely shaped by the social interests of those who control its production, circulation, and distribution’ (Buckingham, 2008, p.12). This book pays close attention to the relationship between the technical and the social, as well as the economic and political systems in which they are embedded. With the recent proliferation of digital technologies, this relationship has been thrown into sharp relief, as individuals increasingly rely on technology to carry out their everyday lives.

Young people in the digital age

In May 2017, The Australian newspaper leaked a document that Facebook, the largest social media platform in the world, has the capacity to share details about the psychological state of teenage users with its advertising partners. According to the document, Facebook can identify when teenagers are feeling ‘insecure’, ‘anxious’, ‘depressed’, ‘silly’, ‘useless’ and ‘a failure’, which can help advertisers pinpoint when these young people might be interested in ‘working out and losing weight’ or ‘needing a confidence boost’ (Levin, 2017). Over 6.4 million young people use Facebook in the Australian and New Zealand region. According to the report, Facebook have detailed information about these young people’s communicative practices on the platform, such as the days in the week when they are likely to be ‘broadcasting achievements’ or ‘building confidence’. Facebook issued an apology for their ‘oversight’ (which has not led to any changes in policy)—it was the first time they had tacitly admitted that they collect and exploit young people’s social media data.

This is not the first time Facebook has been found taking advantage of their users. In 2014, Facebook manipulated the News Feed of almost 700,000 users to investigate the influence of emotional contagion (see Kramer et al., 2014). In early 2018, it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm, paid US$1 million to harvest tens of millions of Facebook user profiles to target individuals with messaging that aimed to change their opinion on issues. These large-scale intrusions into privacy and the capacity to affectively manipulate users’ opinions are indicative of the power held by such companies. For many individuals, the desire to connect with others overrides concerns over security and privacy, meaning that individuals unwittingly become a party to the agenda of large multinational companies. On social media, users share detailed and emotional information with their friends and followers, making these platforms rich sources of personal data for the platform operators.

These issues relate to people of all ages...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Beginnings
• 1. Young people’s digital lives: An introduction
• 2. Digital narratives: A case study
• 3. Digital dispositions
• 4. (Re)presenting identities
• 5. Connecting with others
• 6. Critical understandings of the digital
• 7. Toward a critical digital disposition
• Appendix 1: detailed description of the fieldwork
• Appendix 2: participant snapshots
• Index