Siân Lincoln

‘Connect and create’: Young people, YouTube and Graffiti communities

Dominant discourses around young people and social networking in the mass media are littered with negative connotations and moral panics. While some scholars challenge this negativity, their focus has predominantly been upon the formation of friendships, the construction of identity and the presentation of the self online. We argue that as well as engaging in such areas, young people are also appropriating social networking sites, such as YouTube, as spaces in which they can engage in what Jean Burgess terms, ‘Vernacular Creativity’ – a way of describing and surfacing creative practices that emerge from non-elite, specific everyday contexts. Using case study material we consider the processes of Vernacular Creativity as engaged with by young people in relation to doing graffiti with YouTube. Through this, and given that graffiti is a cultural practise traditionally associated with physical space, we also consider points of continuity and discontinuity in relation to Vernacular Creativity mediated with YouTube and the significance of such things in enabling young people to connect and create with like-minded others.

“I’ve Stamped My Personality All Over It” The Meaning of Objects in Teenage Bedroom Space

“Private,” personal spaces such as the teenage bedroom are arguably one of the first spaces within which young people are able to articulate and represent their social and cultural lives, their transitions, experiences, aspirations, and identities. In this article, the author explores how bedrooms can be understood as constantly evolving and changing “material” spaces within which objects play an important role for young people in their articulations of youth culture in everyday life. Using Henri Lefebvre’s work on social space as a framework, the author argues that such spaces can be understood both as complex, rich “containers of meaning” within which teenagers articulate their current youth biographies as well as spaces within which “residual trails” can be found, thus a teenage bedroom takes on an important historical dimension, the space of which tells tales about its occupants, present and past.

Youth: identities, transitions, cultures

Young people are a priority of the European Union’s social vision. Youth policy arises from the recognition that young people are an important resource to society, who can be mobilised to achieve higher social goals. The EU approach acknowledges that youth policy – being crosssectoral – cannot advance without effective coordination with other sectors, such as education or health. In turn, youth policies can contribute to delivering results in other areas, such as gender equality. The integration of gender concerns in youth policy is increasing, yet most research and policy documents are rarely concerned with gender differences and an explicit and clear gender perspective is still lacking.

10 years of Facebook

In early 2014, Facebook had been online for 10 years. On the social network’s 10th birthday, creator Mark Zuckerberg posted a message on the site reflecting on what he referred to as the ‘Facebook journey’, where he considers why the site has not only lasted so long, but has become integral to the lives of so many. How was it possible, he asked, that a group of students could create a global phenomenon?

Uncovering longitudinal life narratives: scrolling back on Facebook:

This article explores the potential role of sustained social media use in longitudinal qualitative research. We introduce the research design and methodology of a research project exploring sustained use (five or more years) of the social network site Facebook among young people in their twenties. By focusing on this group, we seek to uncover how ‘growing up’ stories are told and archived online, and how disclosure practices (what people say and share on social media) change over time. We question how we can understand the ‘digital trace’ inscribed through the Facebook Timeline as a longitudinal narrative text. We argue that ‘scrolling back’ through Facebook with participants as ‘co-analysts’ of their own digital traces can add to the qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) tradition. QLR and the scroll back method attend to a similar set of concerns around change over time, the depth of inquiry, and uncovering rigorous, rich life narratives. We explore limitations (especially around intentionality) and ethical challenges, while also arguing for the inclusion of these often highly personal, deep, co-constructed digital texts in qualitative longitudinal research. We also consider how the scroll back method could apply to other digital media, as the sites and applications that people use diversifies and changes over time.

Young People and Mediated Private Space

The role of private space in youth cultures has been little explored in youth cultural studies, yet it can be argued that for many young people private spaces such as their bedrooms play a central role in providing a context within which they can engage with the media as part of their everyday youth cultural practices. In this chapter I explore the ways in which young people use the realm of ‘the private’ as part of their everyday youth experiences and the role of the media in their navigation of both the public and private spheres between which they are constantly moving.1 I argue that the media are a key resource for young people and their emerging adult identities, and that young people use the media as a resource through which they constantly reconfigure public and private space, marking out their identities. In this sense, I explore young people’s use of ‘private’ spaces such as their bedrooms and social network sites (e.g. Facebook) using the concept of ‘zoning’ (Lincoln, 2004, 2005, 2012) to examine how young people navigate the blurred boundaries of public and private space and how they make those spaces meaningful to them. In this respect, I argue that private spaces of youth culture are inherently mediated and that this mediation is part of the complex series of online and offline interactions in which young people in contemporary society engage.

‘My Bedroom Is Me’: Young People, Private Space, Consumption and the Family Home

A bedroom in the family home is often regarded by young people as one of the first spaces over which they are able to exert a level of control, ownership and regulation and in which they can achieve some level of privacy away from the challenges of everyday life. It is a space that young people can call their own, can decorate according to their current tastes and can regulate in terms of who and who cannot enter that space. While bedrooms are in many ways functional spaces for young people, e.g. they provide a space to sleep or do homework, they are also meaningful spaces that can tell us much about teenage life, youth culture and consumption. Bedrooms are worked upon, albeit at varying levels, and even when the space seems to change very little visually, the mere presence of a young person consuming within it, living out their social and cultural lives, means that it is a space that is never static. Moreover, for many young people, these are ‘worked upon’ spaces of identity and biographical display and representation, capturing both through cultural practices and the materiality of the space itself those often turbulent transitional years of growing up (Griffin, 1993; Roberts, 2008). Young people’s bedrooms are also quite complex spaces to understand, often spaces of contradiction.

Mediating Young People’s Bedrooms: The ‘Virtual Bedroom’?

Young people’s bedrooms are not just physical spaces within which their identities can be represented but they can also be understood as ‘mediated’ spaces within which there are continual and complex interactions between young people and physical, virtual, public and private spheres. It is within the interactions of these spheres that young people often find themselves suspended and in a perennial state of ‘in-between-ness’; in the ‘blur’ of the many boundaries created between these spheres. In the previous chapter I utilised the concept of ‘zoning’ (Lincoln, 2004, 2005) as a way in which to understand the uses of personal and private spaces such as bedrooms by young people as spaces within which the boundaries of public and private are inherently blurred and within which the negotiation of these boundaries is done. As I have argued, young people commonly find themselves suspended in this ‘blur’ and thus use ‘fixed’ physical spaces such as their bedrooms as spaces within which to authenticate and legitimate their identities, or at least some elements of them, in a world of risk and uncertainty.

Conclusion: Youth Culture and Private Space

Whatever the extent of young people’s uses of private spaces such as their bedrooms or social networking sites, they are without any doubt integral to their everyday lives and to their youth cultures as I have demonstrated throughout this book. The physical space of the bedroom provides young people with a place of refuge and escapism, exploration and experimentation, an island to be alone in or a hub from which to connect and communicate with friends and the outside world. It offers a space within which a young person can explore and express their identities and figure out who they are at any given moment in time. Importantly, it is a space that evolves and changes in accordance with young people’s experiences as they move towards their adult years.

Mediating Young People’s Bedrooms: ‘Zoning’ Bedroom Cultures

Material ‘things’ in bedrooms are made meaningful in a number of different ways by young people and as I considered in the previous chapter, they acquire their meaning with reference to a variety of contexts that are both unique to the life-worlds of individual young people as well as through discourses of wider ‘public’ cultures of media, consumption and identity that govern and shaped this materiality. In examining the meaning of things in Chapter 4, I considered the constant interplay of the public and the private realm, concluding that as a ‘container of meaning’ a young person’s bedroom is rarely stable, its variation in content potentially being as fluid and interchangeable as the life of the young person who occupies that space. However, I argued that within this context of flux and change young people use material ‘things’ in their bedrooms as a way to ‘cement’ their identities, or elements of it, and make their personal space meaningful, and in many ways more fixed, in what feels like an ever-shifting cultural world, particularly one characterised for young people by a new social media environment.