Helen Thornham

It’s a boy thing’: gaming, gender and geeks

The recent proliferation of videogame theory has opened up a body of work concerned with legitimating the videogame as a viable cultural text. However, there is still a significant gap in research around addressing the lived cultures or cultural practices of gaming as an embedded domestic leisure activity. Furthermore, research into the “cultural practices” of videogames reveals that predications to play, perceptions about, and actual play are highly gendered in ways that reveal gaming as a normalised and normalising technology. This article is the result of nearly four years ethnographic research, during which I interviewed and recorded gamers and gameplay. Six out of the eleven participatory households are represented here. The scope of the research is also expanded through the questionnaire of, at the time of writing, 118 respondents. Included in this demographic are all-female and all-male households, mixed gender, sexuality, and ethnicity and diverse geographical intake from Northern Ireland to southern England. Throughout my research and this article, I argue the political and social necessity of including gamers into research on gaming, in order to better understand the significance of gaming and gaming discourses on our social and political lives.

Discourses of the digital native: use, non-use, and perceptions of use in BBC Blast

This article emerges from a long-term project investigating the BBC initiative ‘Blast’ – an on- and offline creative resource for teenagers. Designed to ‘inspire and equip’ young people to be creative, the research interrogates the assumptions behind such a resource, particularly in terms of the so-called ‘digital native’, and tests such assumptions against the populations actually using and engaging with it. It finds that the conception of a ‘digital native’ – a technologically enthusiastic, if not technologically literate – teenage population, which is operationalized through the workshop structure of BBC Blast, rarely filters down to the teenagers themselves. Teenage delegates to the Blast workshops rarely validate interest based on technological facilities, enthusiasm or competency. Instead, it is peer groups and social alignments which shape declarations and, more importantly, enactments of interest. This suggests that while the concept of the ‘digital native’ may be pertinent for generational comparisons of technological use, or is a useful concept for the operationalization of creative media workshops, it is simply not recognized by teenagers to whom it refers, nor does it adequately define use. Further, technological competency and enthusiasm sits uneasily with social and cultural peer group norms, where certain (and very specific) technological competency is socially permitted. This means that the concept of the ‘digital native’ is problematic, if not entirely inadequate. Focusing on the BBC Blast workshops therefore raises some critical questions around teenage motivations to become technologically literate, and the pleasures teenagers articulate in such engagements per se.

[Im]mobility in the age of [im]mobile phones: Young NEETs and digital practices

This article draws on research with young NEETs (not in education, employment or training) in Leeds in order to contest the assumption that technological qualities informing new media devices (here mobile phones) simply or transparently translate into social or ontological categories. We draw on a long-term ethnographic study of NEET individuals to argue that one of the underpinning principles of mobile phones – that they pertain to mobility and that mobility is positive and agential – is called into question. Our aim is not only to unpack a number of concepts and assumptions underpinning the mobile phone but also to suggest that these concepts unhelpfully (and even detrimentally) locate mobile phones in relation to the technological possibilities on offer without taking into account what is simultaneously made impossible and immobile, and for whom. Finally, when we set the digital experiences of NEETs alongside the discourses around mobile phones, we find that mobility is restricted – not enabling, and that it is forged in, and articulated as part of an everyday life that is dominated by the social and economic horizons set by the groups status as NEET.

Cross-generational gender constructions. Women, teenagers and technology

Despite the supposed inroads of feminism, gender equality and new ‘democratic’ means of technological communication, adult women and teenage girls in the UK continue to emphasise what Valerie Walkerdine has termed the ‘habitual “feminine” position of incompetence’ (2006, 526). This article draws on two complimentary research projects in order to investigate the cross-generational gender constructions women and teenagers articulate. Drawing on Negras notion of a ‘cover story’ (2009, 44), this article suggests that we can read the claims and practices of the women and teenagers in terms of how they frame new ideologies of femininity. Further, the continual recourse to an essential feminine position of exclusion is detrimentally shaping not only technological use, but also the wider operationalization of gender in public and private arenas. Focussing specifically on the female populations of the research projects, we demonstrate how gender continues to emerge and be produced by women and girls in negotiated, but highly problematic ways. Rather than considering gender as a determining force, it emerges here as a carefully constructed tool for engagement, and as a distancing device facilitating a claim of, and towards, disinterest. The two projects suggest implications for future mediations and relations with new media technology; they also suggest that across generations, women are detrimentally fixing and restricting potential and actual performances of gender through the evocation of a more traditional femininity.

Capability in the digital: institutional media management and its dis/contents

This paper explores how social media spaces are occupied, utilized and negotiated by the British Military in relation to the Ministry of Defences concerns and conceptualizations of risk. It draws on data from the DUN Project to investigate the content and form of social media about defence through the lens of ‘capability’, a term that captures and describes the meaning behind multiple representations of the military institution. But ‘capability’ is also a term that we hijack and extend here, not only in relation to the dominant presence of ‘capability’ as a representational trope and the extent to which it is revealing of a particular management of social media spaces, but also in relation to what our research reveals for the wider digital media landscape and ‘capable’ digital methods. What emerges from our analysis is the existence of powerful, successful and critically long-standing media and reputation management strategies occurring within the techno-economic online structures where the exercising of ‘control’ over the individual – as opposed to the technology – is highly effective. These findings raise critical questions regarding the extent to which ‘control’ and management of social media – both within and beyond the defence sector – may be determined as much by cultural, social, institutional and political influence and infrastructure as the technological economies. At a key moment in social media analysis, then, when attention is turning to the affordances, criticisms and possibilities of data, our research is a pertinent reminder that we should not forget the active management of content that is being similarly, if not equally, effective.

Youthful ‘fictions’, creative ‘journeys’ and potential strategies of resistance

The findings for this article emerge from data collected in June 2010, during a weeklong annual workshop with three groups of 14-year-olds. Working with a central London Academy school, the project as a whole asked teenagers to ‘map’ their journeys through their local environment, using a range of media from static cameras to audio recorders to mobile phones and flip cameras. It asked the teenagers to reflect on those journeys through group and individual interviews and through the editing process of converting their recordings into a mini-documentary of their area. In the course of a week, each group filmed, recorded, edited and produced a ‘documentary’, which was then showcased to their peers. At the end of each day, the audio-visual data was uploaded to group laptops and saved, along with the interviews. Our reflections and comments were also recorded and transcribed, along with our images and recordings of the processes during the day. The initial premise for the project was to move beyond conceptions of the so-called ‘digital native’ and conceptions of young people per se, and investigate the more nuanced engagements with media and with local environments. Our findings raise pertinent questions around understanding, conceptualizing, and working with young people. They also suggest, contrary to discourse of the so-called ‘digital-native’ (see Bennett et al., 2008, for discussions of the concept, and Thornham and McFarlane, 2011: 258–79), that when teenagers are given innovative and novel media, they rarely use such media in intended ways. Indeed, as Lievrouw and Livingstone argue, although new media may be:

Raw talent in the making: Imaginary journeys, authorship and the discourses of expertise

In the digital age, it seems that participation has been conflated with literacy, content with engagement, novelty with innovation and ubiquity with meaning (e.g. see Thornham and McFarlane, 2014; Gillespie, 2010; Dean, 2008; Livingstone, 2009; van Dijck, 2013) and encapsulated in terms such as ‘digital native’, ‘digital divide’ or ‘born digital’. In turn, these conflations have done something to technology, which is constructed as malleable, a supportive facilitator, and the user, who is constructed as active agent. Neither of these account for mediations nor for – crucial for us – the notion of the imaginary, which emerges in our research as so central to expertise. Drawing on ethnographic work carried out in Studio12, a media production facility for young people with disadvantaged backgrounds in Leeds, United Kingdom, we propose that the concept of expertise emerges through a bigger array of social capital as well as traditional structures of power such as class, gender and race. Expertise is claimed, evidenced and generated. For us, however, expertise emerged not only as elusive but also because it was premised on a disjuncture between lived and everyday youth and the promises of becoming in a future orientated (technological, imaginary and creative) landscape.

Claiming ‘creativity’: discourse, ‘doctrine’ or participatory practice?

Drawing on empirical work with a third sector community organisation in the UK and the young NEET adults (16–20  years old, ‘not in employment or education or training’) they ‘creatively’ work with, this paper explores the practices and meanings of creativity as they emerged through a project funded through public and third sector organisations. The paper argues that there is an increasing disjuncture between creativity as a process or method, evidenced in the approaches, practices and ethos of the community organisation I worked with, and the notion of creativity as productive outcome seen in wider policy. This is having an impact on the practices and values of community organisations, particularly as they are pushed to rationalise processes as a result of austerity measures. Indeed, in the era of wider public and third sector cuts, creativity as a process or method is becoming harder to sustain on a day-to-day basis.

The digital mundane: social media and the military

This article draws on empirical data with British military personnel in order to investigate what we call the digital mundane in military life. We argue that social media and smartphone technologies within the military offer a unique environment in which to investigate the ways individuals position themselves within certain axes of institutional and cultural identities. At the same time, the convolutions, mediatory practices and mundane social media rituals that service personnel employ through their smartphones resonate widely with, for example, youth culture and digital mobile cultures. Together, they suggest complex mediations with social and mobile media that draw on and extend non-military practice into new (and increasingly normative) terrains.

Claiming Content and Constructing Users: User-generated Content and BBC Blast

This chapter utilizes key findings from a research project investigating teenage user-generated content, creativity and learning on ‘Blast’, an initiative by the BBC, the UK’s public service broadcaster, which ran between 2004 and 2010. It was an on- and offline resource for teenagers, encompassing a range of creative strands (film, music, dance, games, writing, fashion, art and design). The website allowed teenagers to view, comment on and upload creative material: it included a showcase section, message boards, blogs and short instructive clips from professionals in the field. In addition, the project included an eight-month touring workshop, links with local educational and creative groups, televisual output, film and videomaking competitions in conjunction with Media Trust, work placements and work experience for young people. Sustained by user-generated content and with the notion of creative autonomy at its heart, BBC Blast was both inherently flawed and truly exciting. As John Millner, the Executive Producer, noted in the foreword to our 2008 report: Blast is the BBC’s most ambitious and sustained experiment to date in user-generated content … Blast aims to be a catalyst and incubator of teenagers’ creative skills in the fields of art and design, music, dance, video, gaming, writing and fashion … by the beginning of 2007 Blast was growing fast, mounting a nationwide roadshow of creative workshops, attracting tens of thousands of uploads of young creatives’ work to its online galleries, and generating real excitement from everyone who came into contact with the project. (McFarlane and Thornham, 2008, p. 3)