Book Review: L. Pangrazio, Young People’s Literacies in the Digital Age: Continuities, Conflicts and Contradictions

No abstract available

Tactical agency? Young people’s (dis)engagement with WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger

Drawing on empirical data, this article examines the ways in which young people negotiated messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp in their everyday lives, focusing in particular on the read-receipt feature embedded in the applications. While it is important to continue exposing and critically examining the power structures and socio-technological relations in which young people’s everyday engagement with social media platforms and messaging applications are entangled, the article argues that it is also crucial not to overlook the possibilities and forms of agency that can exist in this complex environment. Combining insights from Foucault and de Certeau, the article seeks to shed new light on the ways in which tactical agency can be enacted and cultivated by young people. This article contributes to current debates about agency, resistance and power in contemporary digital society as well as makes recommendations to foster more responsive digital literacies

Diverting and diverted glances at cameras: playful and tactical approaches to surveillance studies

In the lines of Albrechtlund and Dubbled (2005) and their call for a new direction in Surveillance Studies, this paper discusses the overlapping of surveillance, art and entertainment. Indeed surveillance ought to be considered not only regarding its negative implications (e.g. the infringement of privacy or social sorting) but also regarding ‘the fun features and entertainment value of surveillance’ (Albrechtlund and Dubbled 2005: 216). Drawing on this new direction in the recent years in Surveillance Studies, this paper focuses on the interplay between watcher and watched and the possibility of challenging surveillance through artistic, entertaining or/and playful motives. Play and games within this framework participate both to the active appropriation of the surveillant hegemonic values (and therefore their acceptance) and to the creation of a space of negotiations (and therefore the possibility of resistance). Thus this paper discusses, using several examples, the line between art, entertainment and resistance that has become blurry and has left a wider margin to respond to surveillance processes

Rethinking social media for qualitative research: The use of Facebook Activity Logs and Search History in interview settings

Following calls to rethink the repertoires of social research and take advantage of the new possibilities opened by digital data and devices, this article discusses the opportunities and challenges of using Facebook Activity Logs (FAL) and Search History (FSH) as digital probes during interviews. Drawing on empirical data, the article outlines the value of using social media features in qualitative research with regard to generating thick data and encouraging people to reflect upon the range of everyday practices captured by the platforms. This article argues, however, that to use social media features and data in interview settings researchers need to carefully identify and examine the different forms of liveliness generated by their use and the ways in which liveliness mediates and affects the research data and the situation of the interview itself. The article contends that critically engaging with the liveliness generated by these types of probes in interview settings will allow researchers to better discern how digital platforms and data can inform social enquiry while simultaneously forming a part of how we know social lives and practices

‘It is an attitude’: the normalisation of social screening via profile checking on social media

Daily life has been pervaded by surveillance, not only in the ways in which information is gathered about us but also in how we perceive and experience monitoring in our everyday lives. Contemporary surveillance and its normalisation hinge on us actively engaging with, negotiating and sometimes initiating an array of monitoring practices [Lyon (2018Lyon, D. (2018). The culture of surveillance: Watching as a way of life. Cambridge: Polity Press. [Google Scholar] ). The culture of surveillance: Watching as a way of life. Cambridge: Polity Press.]. In this context, this article examines young people’s understandings and deployment of social media profile checking – that is the practices of covertly looking at someone’s profiles on social media platforms to gather and/or corroborate information about this person. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with young people, the article explores how social media profile checking has become taken for granted, not only encouraging surveillance practices as part of social media interactivity but also producing specific understandings of social screening. Combining insights from Foucault and Bourdieu’s works, the article argues that the normalisation of profile checking needs to be understood as a specific type of practical knowledge of the social world which is embedded in broader neoliberal governmentalities and legitimises a greater social sorting of interpersonal sociality

Digital citizenship in a datafied society

No abstract available

Mediated young adulthood: social network sites in the neoliberal era

Young people's engagement with social network sites have predominantly been depicted in binary ways, overplaying either the risks posed by digital technologies or their positive benefits. Adopting a critical perspective, this thesis understands young people’s uses and perceptions of social network sites as continuously negotiated and deeply entrenched in their everyday lives; and analyses them within the social struggles and power structures in which they are embedded. Based on qualitative interview material with 32 young adults aged 20-25 and on an innovative research design incorporating digital prompts, this study explores the meanings that participants ascribed to social network sites and their everyday uses of the platforms. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of practice and Foucault’s work on power and governmentality, the thesis argues that young people actively negotiate social network sites. Yet their uses and understandings of the platforms are constituted through a 'practical knowledge' of the world which reflects existing social divisions and, are embedded within broader neoliberal narratives of entrepreneurship, choice and responsibility, producing corresponding forms of governmentality. Throughout the interviews, participants described their engagement with social network sites, for example their attitudes towards privacy or the ways in which they managed and maintained relationships through the platforms, in terms of individual choice, personal preference and growing up. The analysis of the data suggests, that their engagement were, nonetheless, substantially informed by the economic interests and the monopolies enforced by private corporations; by the technological affordances and playful designs of the platforms; by social processes of differentiation rendering specific uses legitimate; and by neoliberal discourses encouraging individual responsibility and understandings of the self as enterprise. All of the above combined to actively shape and produce participants' understandings of social network sites as 'useful' and 'necessary' tools for managing the everyday and their relationships, for maximising professional opportunities, and for engaging in practices of profile-checking and monitoring. In short, the thesis argues that young people's uses and understandings of social network sites are complex and cannot be reduced to risks or positive leverage, nor can it be understood without an analysis of the asymmetrical relations of powers between private corporations which own the platforms and users, and a critical engagement with the pervasive neoliberal discourses that shape them

Logged in or locked in? Young adults’ negotiations of social media platforms and their features

Drawing on empirical data from qualitative interviews, this article explores young adults’ everyday experiences of ‘logging in’ and their accounts of their engagement with social media platforms, in particular Facebook. By doing so, it shows how ‘logging in’ can turn into feelings of being ‘locked in’ – both in relation to personal data-mining and expectations of participation. The paper highlights the complex ways in which young adults responded to these feelings and negotiated connection and disconnection on social media platforms by deploying tactics of limitation and suspension. For example, in order to regain control of their time and negotiate their relationships, young adults tactically used Facebook Messenger’s previews to bypass read receipts and temporarily suspend connection. Using de Certeau’s distinction between ‘strategy’ and ‘tactics’, the article argues that although young adults managed social media platforms on an individual level (by deploying ‘tactics’), their understandings and negotiations of the platforms were significantly shaped by the platforms’ designs and features, by the strategies of the corporations owning and operating them as well as embedded within the asymmetrical relations of power of platform capitalism

Transition to where and to what? Exploring the experiences of transitions to adulthood for young disabled people

Transition to adulthood for young disabled people remains a major policy failure across OECD countries. The support available is often inappropriate, fails to meet young peoples’ needs and they fall through the cracks, becoming lost in the system. Much of the work on transition takes a narrow approach, focussing on the shift from paediatric to adult services in health and social care. Drawing on interviews with young disabled people, collected as part of an evaluation of a new cash-based transitions fund, we explore transitions for young disabled people in Scotland. Like the wider personalisation agenda, this fund aims to promote autonomy and individual responsibility. We examine and critique this approach and argue that while the emphasis on young people and their families as social entrepreneurs can facilitate transition, it can also act as a barrier by failing to tackle broader structural constraints faced by young disabled people. We argue that whilst it is important to promote individual agency, structural disadvantage and inequality frame the transition process and these also have to be tackled. This is harder, and arguably more expensive, but without it there is a danger that attempts to improve transition for young disabled people will fail

Smart Publics: Public Perceptions of Smart Street Furniture in London and Glasgow: Insights for Policy and Practice

No abstract available