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

Abstract

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 (preand) 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,