Mediated Youth Culutres

I meant to post this at the end of May when this was first released, but better late than never! The special issue of Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies that I have been working on with my supervisor, Andy Bennett, is now online. This issue brings together 13 articles that make visible an international and cross-disciplinary research agenda concerned with mediated youth cultures: 

Contents:

1. "‘Connect and create’: Young people, YouTube and Graffiti communities" by Ben Light, Marie Griffiths & Siân Lincoln
2. "The pedagogy of regret: Facebook, binge drinking and young women" by Rebecca Brown and Melissa Gregg
3. "‘Individuality is everything’: ‘autonomous’ femininity in MySpace mottos and self-descriptions" by Amy Shields Dobson
4. "Leaving MySpace, joining Facebook: ‘Growing up’ on social network sites" by Brady Robards
5. "Female Pressure: A translocal feminist youth-oriented cultural network" by Rosa Reitsamer
6. "From Punks to Post-Hipsters: Exploring Subcultural Models Of A Youth Net-Radio Hierarchy" by Andrea Baker
7. "To Write Love through the indie imaginary: The narrative argument of a mediated movement" by Ryan M. Milner
8. "The Outlaws of Psytrance in the Time of the Vibe-Tribes" by Graham St John
9. "Breaking expectations: Imagined affinities in mediated youth cultures" by Mary Fogarty
10. "Sexting, Consent and Young People’s Ethics: Beyond Megan’s Story" by Kath Albury and Kate Crawford
11. "The landscape of keitai shôsetsu: Mobile phones as a literary medium among Japanese youth" by Kyoung-hwa Yonnie Kim
12. "A Generational Thing? The Internet and New Forms of Social Intercourse" by Fredrik Miegel and Tobias Olsson
13. "Mediating culture in transnational spaces: An example of young people from refugee backgrounds" by Raelene Wilding

My co-editor, Andy Bennett and I would like to thank all of the above contributors for their work. We would also like to thank the many reviewers who provided valuable, constructive feedback on earlier versions of these articles. We hope you enjoy!

The value of reviewing academic monographs

I came across this article via the twitters today, titled 'Why Bother Writing Book Reviews?' The author, Rachel Toor, asks us 'Is the time spent reviewing other people's books more important than writing your own stuff, making your own contributions?' 

Modified stock image c/o thekellyscope

While she points out a few positives associated with reviewing books, especially in disciplines where like mine (social sciences) where the academic monograph is the entry point into academic life, she concludes by saying that no - you shouldn't bother with book reviews: 'It's better to write one good article than to review 20 books, and even better to write one good book'. While I agree with the sentiment that sometimes the monograph and book review 'sausage factories' are not always the best uses of our time, writing book reviews can actually be very valuable for emerging scholars (grad students/postgrads) like myself.

While reading the article, I initially felt a slight twinge of regret at having written five book reviews over the past few years (OMG WHAT A WASTE OF TIME?!), but then I reflected on the positives:

1. I got some free books, and for a poor postgraduate, books are sometimes better than food.
2. My name and some of my thoughts made their way into some stellar journals. I have two review essays in New Media & Society, for instance, one of the leading journals in my field that I dream of getting an article into one day. Sure, as Toor points out, maybe nobody will ever read those review essays. However...
3. ...I get a surprising number of 'hits' on the review essays I've uploaded to my academia.edu profile.  People are searching for book titles or keywords and coming across my work through these book reviews. My guess is that a few of those hits are students googling for quick ways to summarise a book for an assignment, or maybe the authors googling themselves, but I suspect a few are simply from people interested in a subject area who have come across my essay and perhaps even glanced over my other work.
4. Probably most importantly, the task of a book review (with a deadline attached!) makes me read critically and with depth, and then produce something coherent from that reading. This is something all emerging scholars/grad students/postgrads should be encouraged to do. Most do undertake this kind of exercise by way of notes that never get read again. Writing a formal book review, however, makes you articulate yourself with an audience in mind... and someone might read it!
5. Finally, beyond the vague 'networking' and 'marketing yourself' rubbish above, I've actually established some real dialogues with the authors of the books I've reviewed. I was very humbled to get an email from one author who thanked me for my review (even the critical bits!) and asked me about my own work. I've also since worked with another author whose edited collection I reviewed. He contributed to a special issue I've been working on. (This is also why you shouldn't bee overly critical in your review essay, and never cruel or nasty).

So, yes. There are these positives, but there may be other more important things postgrads should be working on: fieldwork, a chapter of your dissertation, converting a chapter into a journal article, an important conference presentation, going out on a date, cooking dinner. Don't throw out the idea of writing a book review or five, though. You might be surprised by the outcome.

internet addiction

I was asked in an interview I did for Triple J recently about 'internet addiction', which was really about 'social media addiction'. I've always really strongly resisted this 'addiction' metaphor, because I don't think pathologising a social practice which has many positives attached to it is healthy (pardon the pun). Sure, I think some people could learn to exercise more self control, but we could say that about lots of things: drinking too much, reading too many books, working too many hours, watching too much television, spending too much time cleaning, and so on and so forth. Some of these investments are framed as more useful than others, but I think we need to keep asking why, something Alan McKee did in a really interesting way with 'put down a book week' back in 2002.


One thing that came up in my doctoral fieldwork with young people who used sites like MySpace and Facebook in the course of everyday life, was that the negative discourses circulating about these sites were being written back into how they understood their own practice. They often reproduced these discourses themselves, embarrassed about engaging in a social practice on a daily basis. Some of them even described themselves as 'addicted' or lamented the time they spent online.

Photo by mandiberg on flickr

I understand why some people get jumpy around having these technologies enter into the everyday: "The kids will forget how to have REAL conversations and will forget how to make REAL friends." For the vast majority of young people, that is simply not true. As I am arguing in my thesis, social network sites are often used to organise, facilitate and document offline social interactions and to strengthen relationships forged offline. Then, they are used to de-brief from and archive social experiences. This is a new form of mediation that will take some time to get used to, but we must push back against those knee-jerk reactions and fears that frame these practices as necessarily negative, inconsequential or even damaging. To witness how these discourses have been written back into young people's own conceptualisation of these sites is much more troubling, I think.


I recently came across an interview by Henry Jenkins with Sherry Turkle on her new book, Alone Together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other. I haven't read the book yet, and I'm looking forward to seeing how this obviously critical edge plays out, but here is a nice extract on 'addiction', from that interview:

No matter how much the metaphor of addiction may seem to fit our circumstance, we can ill afford the luxury of using it. It does not serve us well. To end addiction, you have to discard the substance. And we know that we are not going to "get rid" of the Internet. We are not going to "get rid" of social networking. We will not go "cold turkey" or forbid cell phones to our children. Addiction--with its one solution that we know we won't use--makes us feel hopeless, passive. 

We will find new paths, but a first step will surely be to not consider ourselves passive victims of a bad substance, but to acknowledge that in our use of networked technology, we have incurred some costs that we don't want to pay. We are not in trouble because of invention but because we think it will solve everything. As we consider all this, we will not find a "solution" or a simple answer. But we cannot assume that the life technology makes easy is how we want to live. There is time to make the corrections. 

you have mail!

I got some nice things in the mail this week. A hard copy the journal Sociology which includes an article I wrote with my supervisor Andy Bennett, 'MyTribe: Postsubcultural manifestations of belonging on social network sites', and an advanced copy of the introductory sociology textbook I've been working on, Think Sociology, published by Pearson Australia. Progress!

organising journal articles

Being organised is my main coping mechanism for pretty much anything related to work: labeled folders (physical and digital), class lists, marks spreadsheets, project timelines, budget documents, agendas for meetings, to-do lists, checklists, synchronising all my files across all my computers/laptop/ipad via dropbox, and knowing exactly where every powerpoint/lecture/seminar/conference paper I have ever prepared for is located. Sometimes I wonder whether or not being excessively organised (at work only, I might add) is actually a form of procrastination. Okay, I don't wonder, I know. Let's not speak of this again.

I don't know whether other people are as fussy me, but it works. Just don't mess with my spreadsheets. In this post I will rave on about one of my favourite things to catalogue and organise: journal articles.

happy monday

Even though I spent my last post whining about it, there are some benefits to an 8AM Monday lecture:

1. At 9AM, I'm finished teaching for the day!!
2. I've already had a cup of tea and have been awake for a while, so I'm fully operational while everyone else is is still sleeping or complaining about their Mondayitis. 

Victory! My to-do list for today consists of the following: mark third-year research proposals, clear email backlog, prepare teaching materials for Wednesday and finish book review. Given that I have the entire day at fully operational status, I think these things are doable. Either that, or I'll crash at 1PM and spend the afternoon nursing my newly developed Mondayitis. 

The review I'm working on at the moment is for a book called 'The Internet: An introduction to New Media' by Leila Green. I'll post some preliminary thoughts over the next few days!

Travel mug - not entirely sure why it's reciting Darth Vader quotes... #mondaymysterites!

book reviews

I discovered that a couple of the book reviews I wrote a while ago were published recently. They were good books, too. It was a pleasure to review them.

'Structures of Participation in Digital Culture' (2007) Joe Karaganis (ed.)

'Young People, ICTs and Democracy' (2010) Tobias Olsson & Peter Dahlgren (eds)

the facebook effect, David Kirkpatrick

I had heard some references being made recently (on the blogs of Michael Zimmer and danah boyd, especially) about David Kirkpatrick's new book, 'The Facebook Effect'. Specifically, some of the statements made by Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder and CEO) along the lines of 'you have one identity' were somewhat alarming, especially for those of us working in the terrain of identity studies, interested in how users of social network sites are performing a sense of self online. I'm currently revisiting how Goffman's dramaturgical framework might be (re)applied to identity performance on social network sites (building, perhaps on this wonderful essay by Trevor Pinch), so an insight into Zuckerberg's philosophy on identity was pretty interesting. Thus, I rushed (read: clicked) to fishpond.com.au to order my copy of the book yesterday, and it arrived today. I've spent large chunks of the day enthralled. The history of the site is one thing, but the insights into the people that built it are another. Very interesting stuff.

Here is the paragraph Zimmer and boyd were referring to, and the section which (for my current piece of writing) is the most resonant:

"You have one identity," [Zuckerberg] says emphatically three times in a single minute during a 2009 interview. He recalls that in Facebook's early days, some argued the service ought to offer adult users both a work profile and a "fun social profile". Zuckerberg was always opposed to that. "The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly," he says.

He makes several arguments. "Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity," Zuckerberg says moralistically. But he also makes a case he sees as pragmatic - that "the level of transparency the world has now won't support having two identities for a person." In other words, even if you want to segregate your personal from your professional information you won't be able to, as information about you proliferates on the Internet and elsewhere. He would say the same about any images one individual seeks to project - for example, a teenager who acts docile at home but is a drug-using reprobate with his friends. (Kirkpatrick 2010: 198)

IMHO, there are lots of problems with this line of thinking. This philosophy resists a whole movement in identity theory (and postmodernism) that frames identity as dynamic, fluid and multi-faceted. Identity cannot truly be successfully pinned down, even though we're always trying to do just that. Goffman explains that we perform different versions of self depending on the context we find ourselves in and the audience we find ourselves performing to. Granted, online social spaces problematise these dimensions of context and audience, but you only need to be confronted a Friend request from parents or co-workers or clients or students on Facebook to know that audience, context and (yes) multiplicity in identities is still such an important consideration.

Stay tuned for more. No time for fun speech bubbles today. I'm in srs bsns mode.

structures of participation in digital culture

I've just finished my book review of this charming little volume of essays. It's from 2007, edited by Joe Karaganis. One chapter is written by a favourite scholar of mine, danah boyd. I've also found a few new favourite scholars inside! Stand-outs include T.L. Taylor on player participation in game culture, Mizuko Ito on the rise of Yu-Gi-Oh! trading card culture in Japan and Ravi Sundaram on the culture of the copy and piracy in India. You can download it for free if you're interested.

It's great when you read something (or a collection of somethings in this case) that give shape and articulation to an idea you've been jabbing at subconsciously for a while, but never found a way to express properly. The true value of digital culture and (for my work) the internet is not just that we can chat with strangers on the other side of the planet or that we can do our banking from a phone while standing next to the ATM at the pub or even that we can share our lives with family and friends that we'd otherwise have contact with only rarely. The true value here, it seems, is that digital culture makes our world visible, accessible and open to participation. /end rant. (I'll link my review when/if the journal I sent it to publishes it).