In recent years, there has been a proliferation of academic and popular interest in the ways young people engage with digital media as a pervasive, integral and immersive part of their everyday lives. On the one hand, celebratory approaches position youth as generational leaders with unique knowledge and skills to operate devices and applications, navigate complex networked environments, design and code digital texts and collaborate creatively. Valorized as âdigital natives,â the experiences of youth become totalized in ways that naturalize competence as a given and overlook broader social conditions that produce inequities and differences within and between young people. On the other hand, young people are positioned in passive ways as compliant users of adult-driven media systems, or even more disturbingly as victims of corporate technologies that shape their identities and delimit their social relations within narrow and normative boundaries. Big data and overarching structures become primary sites of fascination, losing touch with the voices, embodiments, feelings and practices of youth within their local contexts of learning, creativity and socialization. In both these framings, young people are homogenized according to dominant cultural notions and institutions of the digital capitalist economy. Neo-liberal ideologies of individualism, along with sweeping critiques of them, leave out the provisional, messy and ambiguous relations through which young people learn over time and through diverse modes of engagement across a range of digital media.
Alternatively, the desire to hone in closely on young peopleâs media practices has often proven to be invasive, bound up with moral evaluations that rigidly interpret the subjective and interpersonal lives of young people, judging how they connect, play games, make profiles, text each other, upload images and gather information. And within this process, it is striking how much interest and surveillance get placed on the emotional and affective dimensions of young peoplesâ experiences. It is precisely the feelings, passions and bodily encounters of young people that grip moral panics about the excess and dangers of online interactions: sharing too much information, immersing too fast, going too far within virtual realities, fictionalizing the self, taking sexual risks, becoming violent or addicted, and losing control. What seems to trouble adult onlookers are precisely those facets of youth digital culture that appear to be too intense, to evoke unruly sensations, suggesting bodies and emotions gone awry. The affective lives of young people online are sites of intensified adult concern and action as they appeal to rationality and often conceal their own affective investments. In this way, young people come to bear the burden of affective excess to be tamed by the implementation of knowledge and power that tries to make sense of it all. This approach reduces youth to dramatic examples that highlight visible transgressions, spectacularizing youth at the level of their passions, bodies, desires, abstracting them from the relational dynamics through which youth respond to each other in specific and changing ways. What is often lacking are materially and relationally honed, along with empirically detailed and ethically nuanced, ways of understanding connections between youth, affect and digital mediations.
Multiple Approaches, Directions and Visions
Responding to the historical and contemporary predicaments that have limited conceptualizations and representations of young people, scholars have taken up affect theories as speculative and practical tools through which to approach youth with an openness to the unpredictable and marginalized dimensions of their mediated embodiments and relationships. Innovative scholarship has begun to grapple with the affective contours of youth mediations using supple and complex interdisciplinary tools that recognize the urgent need to think beyond conventional binary paradigms and imagine alternatives. Nancy Leskoâs deconstructive approach (Lesko 2012) to modern normalizing conceptions of youth offers a brilliant starting point to reconsider how youth affect gets erased, reified and misrepresented. Feminist approaches to the study of girls media engagements have been especially responsive to the creative emotional and symbolic negotiations of young people across a range of media formats (McRobbie 2007; Fine 1988; Harris 2003; Coleman 2009; Coulter 2014; Ringrose 2012; Keller 2015; Hickey-Moody and Page 2015; Renold and Ringrose 2011). Critical attention to youth sexualities has also turned toward the ways desire and power play out in a multitude of ways, against restrictive heteronormative expectations (Halberstam 2005; Talburt 2008; Monaghan 2016; Stockton 2009; Driver 2007; Rasmussen et al. 2004). Focusing on how racial and national identities and embodiments become articulated and resisted, scholars have designed research to consider how and why race matters across media (Rose 2008; Pough 2004; Dimitriadis 2009; Maira 2016; Gopinath 2005). These lists are in no way exhaustive but what is striking are the ways in which thinking through affects of joy, fear, desire, anxiety, hope, longing, anger, pleasure and grief (among many others) become central to the process of understanding young peopleâs mediated lives across a range of youth scholarship. Recognizing the interconnected embodied, affective, psychic, social, cultural, political worlds of young people becomes vital within research grappling with experiences of marginalization and oppression. These diverse and overlapping bodies of work are at the forefront of attending to the historically mediated and situated dynamics of young peopleâs affective lives and the conceptual mappings and discursive formations that make them thinkable and politically relevant.
Our book aims to expand upon this emerging research, insisting upon theoretical applications that are partial, specific and historically grounded. Attending to the emerging networked publics and social media landscapes that elicit young peopleâs intense interest, we want to address changing intersections of technology, practice, representation and affect. We are excited to explore how youth activism and networking have been propelled through the affectively charged and nuanced participations that mobilize a range of political, social and cultural practices by, for and about young people. We also want to attend to the detailed ways youth use and transform media technologies and platforms, for multiple purposes, faced with unequal opportunities and drawing upon a range of resources. As the title of a recent book linking youth online cultural and political participation asserts, young people seek to connect and communicate with others âBy Any Media Necessaryâ (Jenkins et al. 2016), working out of the constrained material conditions and local vernacular styles that shape and propel them. With the popularity of sharing user-generated content on mobile devices through platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and Tumblr, youth are telling stories, imaging themselves and forging connections in prolific ways that articulate relations between selves and others, intimacy and community, creativity and politics that go beyond adult expectations. We value research that engages with the small data realms of young people through which ephemeral and fluid online interrelations become noticeable and meaningful, giving rise to new interpretive styles and methodologies that refuse totalization and closure.
Passionate Research: Questioning, Participating, Researching, Writing
This collection acknowledges and builds upon the exciting work by youth scholars interested in the productive possibilities of considering affect as a mobile term, with multiple genealogies and potential directions. Affects move and traverse human and nonhuman bodies, acting as connective and/or disruptive forces, propelling new social configurations and shifting symbolic meanings. Affect is an intrinsically relational concept that defies rigid borders and either-or formulations, shifting toward in-between dimensions that are impossible to reduce to binary and individualizing ways of thinking. Along these lines affect defies stable boundaries, compelling us to think outside the lines through which youth have been positioned, defined and controlled. There are very different theoretical approaches to the articulation of affect ranging from a focus on realms of psychology, phenomenology, political economy, material assemblages, posthumanism and immaterial labor to name a few. And contributors draw upon these expansive interdisciplinary fields of thinking, using ideas as tools that help to reconfigure how selves, bodies, technologies, belongings, and institutions are affectively imbricated. Tracing various workings of affect to understand how hierarchies of power are reproduced within ordinary micro spaces of everyday life, the essays simultaneously consider openings through which youth exceed expectations, creating relations and paths unforeseeable within dominant frameworks of knowledge.
Philosophical speculations about affect have elaborated those dimensions of affects that precede and exceed language, emotion and cognition, attending to intricate bodily relations of force and intensity (Spinoza, Deleuze, Massumi). These ideas have been a basis for a wide range of applications by youth researchers, who make use of concepts in ways that help provide insights into the fractious experiences of youth within concrete spaces of media participation. In this way, notions such as affect unfold through the ethical and methodological considerations of youth doing things with media in specific ways. What matters is not the purity of the ideas but their effectiveness in spurring questions and new ways of approaching youth with curiosity, care and imagination. The pragmatic research projects on youth and media within this book take up affects in ways that grapple with their entanglements with material and discursive processes such that it is impossible to consider them in isolation or opposition. Analysis of discursive and mediated power is vital to understanding affective dynamics but at the same time they resist reduction to dichotomous ways of approaching bodily and textual worlds. Grappling with ephemeral intersections of affect helps to overcome dualistic ways of thinking that have tended to simplify and delimit how we understand young peoplesâ engagements with media. Rather than isolating the effects of representation, approaches attuned to affect think through representation within broader ecologies linking language to social, corporeal, technical and material practices. Attending to these interwoven dimensions of youth experience helps us to consider areas overlooked within social scientific accounts centered narrowly on the effects of media representation or too broadly on institutional structures; at the same time, it also decenters fixed categories and identities bound to rational individualism.
The essays here offer glimpses into the relational processes through which affect circulates within the everyday lives of young people as they engage with social media to socialize with friends, explore queer desires, protest injustice, share stories and express their suffering and joys. The turn to affect and youth does not focus on isolated texts, bodies or subjects, but rather stays close to young peoplesâ relations with others and the worlds around them, attending to how they respond, feel and think in the flux of their daily networked lives. As the contributors explore, there are many ways of practicing and experiencing digital mediations, and by turning attention onto the active and diverse doings and becomings of youth in relational formations, it becomes possible to resist universalizing conceptions of youth. Vital to this work is a questioning of static ideals of what it is to be a child, to develop as an adolescent or to struggle as a teen, since the terrain of research becomes the living contingencies that shape multiple becomings rather than unified subjects. At stake is a process of challenging the ways youth are stabilized for the sake of epistemological and moral evaluations. In this way, an ontological richness and variability of becoming afford a way to shift how research on youth is framed and carried out.
What connects the essays is an acknowledgment that the process of becoming a âyouthâ is amazingly complicated not only because of accelerated technological transformations but equally contingent on the changing contours of young peoplesâ specific passions, embodiments, histories, and locations. The research explored in this book is attentive to the changing mediated social conditions of the affective relations of young people across gender, sexual, racial, national and class differences. Through an affective lens, differences are not abstract categories, but dynamic embodied relations that are in a continual process of articulation. And while dominant media systems seek to capture these differences and commodify their value, youth are amazingly nuanced and unpredictable in what they do in response. This is vividly demonstrated throughout the chapters as authors pay close attention to creative endeavors by youth in the process of making apps, playing games, sharing selfies, vlogging experiences, protesting through memes or networking events. Many of the authors in this collection are or were participants in the communities and networks they study, and perhaps this allows for a sharper attunement to the ways affects shape not only what happens online but also in the layering of offline experiences as they complicate and give rise to knowledge by adult researchers. Participatory involvement does not erase the ethical dilemmas of researching youth, but it does enable a degree of intimate experiential entanglement through which the hierarchies of researched/researcher and the distancing of academic protocols become recognized and reconsidered. Personal connection does not guarantee clarity or authenticity, but it does allow little things to get noticed, unforeseen problems to be addressed in specific ways and difficult questions to be posed using the language of youth themselves. These chapters provide engaging and accessible examples of emerging scholarship precisely because they unfold from the relational flux of feeling and thinking in close proximities to the worlds they seek to understand, offering partial yet passionate perspectives that push read...