The Network Factor
Digital media afford young people unique opportunities to participate in media culture, which also has a longer history beyond the Internet. For example, fandom provides an avenue and outlet for youth to participate in mediated cultures via participation in fan communities, writing fan fiction, making art, and appropriating themes, narratives, and characters into their own identities and communities (Jenkins 1992). Amateur bands participate in musical culture via the practice and performance of music. Young women have a long history of being encouraged by adults to write as a way to engage with culture—for example, through the private (and often educational) practice of journaling (Begos 1987; Hunter 1992).
In the 1990s, middle-class girls and young women made their writing public and created a mediated community through zines (mini-magazines), which were part of a counterhegemonic do-it-yourself culture in which girls published and distributed their own zines. Girls often created zines as part of a musical fan culture, the female-centric punk culture known as Riot Grrrl being one of the best-known. These zines were often hand-written and hand-drawn, and often incorporated and responded to images from commercial media texts. Girls used zines as a discursive space to negotiate identities and represent themselves in ways that often challenged mainstream representations of girlhood (Kearney 2006). Unlike journaling, zines were voluntarily self-authored and operated outside of educational or authoritative spaces, in fact, in many ways zines challenged hegemonic and capitalistic society. They offered a mediated space for the formation of supportive girl communities through the negotiation of identities. As Mary Celeste Kearney writes in Girls Make Media (2006, p. 154), “though female identity is a dominant discursive framework within grrrl zines, many female youth who produce these texts reveal their savvy about zinemaking as a mechanism for experimentations with, rather than simply reflections and thus reproductions of, identity.” Zine culture (and, later, girl-centric and feminist blogging culture) enabled young people to participate in the creation of their own public media cultures through textual practices, self-authorization, and mediated community formation.
The affordances of new media technologies contribute to what are referred to as networked publics. Although the term has evolved, it was first defined by Mizuko Ito to “reference a linked set of social, cultural, and technological developments that have accompanied the growing engagement with digitally networked media” (2008, p. 2). The ethnographer danah boyd expands upon this notion to pay more explicit attention to the role of “publics” in shaping identities, community, and our understandings of the world (2010, p. 39): “Networked publics are publics that are restructured by networked technologies. As such, they are simultaneously (1) the space constructed through networked technologies and (2) the imagined collective that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice. … While networked publics share much in common with other types of publics, they ways in which technology structures them introduces distinct affordances that shape how people engage with these environments.” As with previous generations, young people desire to shape their culture and participate in a public life. Yet, owing to limited life experiences, developmental stages, and institutions that attempt to restrict their access to public spaces and civic engagement, they are often silenced and marginalized within public discourse. Young people are talked about, yet rarely provided opportunities to speak for themselves or to be validated and heard by the adult public who are charged with making decisions on their behalf. Furthermore, young people are hanging out together more online precisely because physical spaces designated for young people are increasingly being diminished or heavily regulated and structured by adults (thus diminishing the peer-centric aspects of those spaces) (boyd 2014; Livingstone 2009). Digitally mediated networked publics provide an avenue through which youth can communicate and participate collectively as peers in spaces they define and design for themselves. As boyd also writes (2014, p. 14), “Because of their social position, what’s novel for teens is not the technology but the public life that it enables. Teens are desperate to have access to and make sense of public life.” Yet teens’ foray into public life tends to illicit at best concern or dismissiveness from adults, and at worse restrictions, control, or exploitations.
As will be further discussed in chapter 2, harm-driven expectations lead to policies that attempt to regulate where and what teens can access online. Many high schools continue to ban the use of mobile devices and websites that provide access to a public sphere and avenues for civic engagement (see chapters 3 and 4). Media industries commoditize and naturalize surveillance in many different ways, for example, through behavioral tracking or GPS-enabled mobile devices that allow parents to monitor teens’ geographical locations (Vickery 2014). Embedded within all of these adult reactions are concerns about risk and harm—concerns that are to a certain degree legitimate, but that also detract from the more positive and empowering ways teens participate in networked publics. Rather than demonizing or pathologizing teens’ practices, or constructing all behaviors as risky, society ought to be paying careful attention to helping teens navigate new opportunities and experiences. Gabriel (2014, p. 109) points out that if we believe that young people’s digital practices “constitute unacceptable behaviours because they threaten the well-being, reputations and futures of young people, then the discourses used to make sense of these practices can (and ought) to be subject to critical interrogation,” which is precisely what the rest of this book aims to do.
Teens need guidance in negotiating changing notions of public and private. Digital technologies afford greater opportunities for public participation, challenge traditional notions of formal education, and offer new prospects for civic engagement. As Rainie and Wellman caution (2012, p. 271), “networked individuals need to develop nuanced understandings of what to make public, which publics to make information available to, and how to intermix technologies of privacy with those of public narrowcasting.” Yet media industries often attempt to exploit young people’s online engagement; identities and practices are simultaneously commercialized and constructed as commodities. “In a society in which politicians and the marketplace limit the roles available for youth to those of consumer, object, or billboard,” Giroux explains (2009, p. 14), “it is not surprising that young people are so easily misrepresented.” Instead of compassion, education, and a desire for democratic opportunities, it appears anxieties and harm-driven expectations are the predominant influences mediating the relationship between youth and a public sphere. It is imperative that we help teens navigate a changing mediated landscape alongside broader societal changes in ways that empower youth to fully participate in the creation of their own publics and cultures.
The Power of a Label: Youth at Risk
The categorization of youth is a fluid concept which changes throughout various historical and cultural moments. Current conceptualizations of young people fluctuate between “active, knowing, autonomous individuals, on the one hand, and as passive, innocent dependents on the other” (Scott, Jackson, and Backett-Milburn 1998, p. 689). Discursively childhood has been constructed as a period of vulnerability and innocence, and young people get constructed as either “at risk” or “as risk.” Risk, as a sociocultural and socio-historical construct, serves to identify populations that are deemed to be at risk and serves to position them in need of institutional protection.
However, what is novel in terms of the youth-at-risk discourse is that in contemporary literature potentially all behaviors, practices, and groups of young people can be constructed in terms of risk (Tait 1995). Similarly, new media are almost always constructed as threatening and risky because they either facilitate new modes of interaction or provide access to potentially harmful content that is often difficult to regulate. We can see this throughout history and the ways moral panics circulated around the initial dissemination and adoption of media and technologies including comic books, film, television, and the landlin
e telephone (Springhall 1998). The intersection of youth and contemporary media technology continues to be constructed as risky due to the potential for inappropriate interactions or exposure to potentially harmful content. As young people explore, create, and interact with new information technologies in ways which adults do not understand—or at times are not even aware—adults lose the ability to control, surveil, and monitor their activities. Anxiety stems from a loss of control as young people exert agency in new mediated environments. It is no surprise then that the Internet, social network sites, and cell phones become lightning rods for moral panics. Anxiety stems from the continued historical perception of youth as vulnerable, innocent, and in need of (adult) protection combined with perceptions that online spaces threaten young people’s safety and well-being. Understandably, adults are anxious and want to protect young people by regulating and censoring their online practices. However, as will be further elucidated in the next chapter, it isn’t necessary to establish the probability of harm in order to enact regulations intended to protect presumably innocent and vulnerable at-risk populations who occupy these online spaces.
Peter Kelly’s work focuses on how youth transitions are being remade within networked and neoliberal societies; he has noted how youth and youthful identities are a source of institutional and state apprehension. “A major problem for young people today,” he writes (2003, p. 166), “is that they increasingly cause adults anxiety,” and contemporary society discursively constructs all youth (and by extension youth practices) as potentially risky. Batten and Russell claim that, as a result of the “social stresses and tensions” associated with adolescence, “all youths are in some sense at risk” (1995, p. 1), because adolescence is conceived as a period of risky transition. Elsewhere (2000, p. 465), Kelly argues that the construction of all youth as at risk is a “historically novel development in attempts to regulate youthful identities.” The risk industry serves to identify populations deemed to be at risk, and therefore position subjects as-risk who pose a threat—be it social or economic—to society (Castel 1991; Lupton 1999; Foucault 1991).
Some youth populations are identified as particularly threatening to the social order; such subjects are explicitly labeled “at risk” by institutions such as schools, hospitals, social workers, and law enforcement. “The ‘at-risk’ label,” Lupton writes (1999, p. 114), “tends either to position members of these social groups as particularly vulnerable, passive, powerless or weak, or as particularly dangerous to themselves or others … [which positions] them in a network of surveillance, monitoring and intervention.” Individuals are labeled “at risk” on the basis of characteristics that align them with an at-risk population, thus governmental intervention gets founded on calculable preventative strategies and techniques (rather than individual intercessions). “A risk,” Castel writes (1991, p. 287), “does not arise from the presence of particular precise danger embodied in a concrete individual or group. It is the effect of a combination of abstract factors which render more or less probable the occurrence of undesirable modes of behavior.” The at-risk subject is produced within discourses of youth and the label is used to justify monitoring, measuring, and regulating youth in what Lupton (1999) refers to as a “web of surveillance.”
With this understanding of the power of the “at risk” label, it is no surprise that labeling students as “at risk” has become a common facet of everyday life within US academic institutions, which became commonplace in the late 1980s (Nardini and Antes 1991). Within an institutionalized education setting specifically, Finn and Rock (1997, p. 221) explain the “at risk” label as follows:
The concept of risk, drawn largely from the field of medicine, embodies the notion that exposure to particular conditions, or risk factors, increases the likelihood that an individual will experience certain adverse consequences. In terms of academic outcomes, well-established risk factors include group status characteristics associated with academic difficulty or dropping out of school, for example, being a minority student attending an inner-city school, or coming from a low-income home or a home where English is not the primary language. … All too often, these risk factors are accompanied by a set of risk behaviors, which, manifested by individual students, create impediments to learning, such as skipping school or skipping classes, not attending to the teacher, or not completing required class work or homework.
Schools define as “at risk” students who are deemed to be at considerable risk of failing to make a successful transition into adulthood. By focusing on adulthood, discourses of youth invoke a narrative of future-selves, as Kelly (2001) argues, the construction of youth is largely organized around “becoming” (e.g., an adult, citizen, independent, responsible, autonomous). The future-oriented narratives are internalized by youth as they actively construct narratives of their future identities, expectations, and lives (Livingstone and Sefton-Green 2016). Youthful at-risk behaviors threaten preferable hypothetical futures (for youth and the state) which therefore serve to justify institutional interventions, monitoring, and surveillance. Risk works to responsibilize both youth and the family, and I would add the school. Public schools, as extensions of the state, tend to use the “at risk” label to foreground the economic concerns at-risk youth pose to the state.
It can also be argued that the “at risk” label is a strategy of inclusion and exclusion, of imposing control and order among populations perceived of as a risk (Bauman 1991). More precisely, Jeannie Oakes’ (2005) research focuses on the ways in which American schools track students’ academic performance in order to sort them into different groups: namely high-achieving and low-achieving, which have significant implications for students’ achievement, engagement, and future success. Oakes found that low-income, Latino, and African-American students (all of whom are often labeled as “at risk”) are disproportionately enrolled in low-track classes and are more likely to take vocational courses than are white or middle-class students, who are more likely to be encouraged to apply to college. Oakes argues that low-track and high-track classes offer different opportunities to learn and provide different kinds of knowledge (high-track being the advantageous track). By separating students on the basis of differences, tracking actually exacerbates the inequities between students. “It is through tracking,” Oakes writes (ibid., p. 112), “that these educational differences are most blatantly carried out.” In other words, tracking not only reinforces but exacerbates racial inequalities. I return to the effects of tracking and vocational curriculum in chapter 7 as a way to understand the relationship between digital media, opportunity, expectations, and risk for students in this study.
Notably, Kitty te Riele (2006) argues the “at risk” label problematically draws attention to what is wrong with individuals, rather than what may be wrong with schooling (systemic problems). “In order to redirect attention from deficiencies in students (and their families) to critical reflection on the processes of schooling,” she proposes “replacing the concept of youth ‘at risk’ with that of ‘marginalized students.’” “ Use of this term,” she continues, “easily leads to the question: marginalized by who or what? This is logically answered by considering aspects of society and schooling. Marginalized students are not identified through their personal characteristics, but through their relationship with (mainstream) schooling. In other words, marginalized students are those who are not served well by senior secondary schooling.” The students discussed in the present book are marginalized within the school, within their local community, within their mediated practices, and within society at large. In accordance with te Riele, I also use the term marginalized youth or marginalized students in lieu of describing the students themselves as “at risk.” (I use the expression “at risk” only when referring to how the school has labeled students.) This also transfers the focus of risk and harm-driven expectations away from the individual and instead more appropriately frames risk and harm as a collective and institutional concern.
It is here t
hat I would like to bring discourses of risk and youth into conversations with digital media production. As will be examined later in the present book (specifically in chapters 3–5), fostering digital literacies and enabling youth to create and produce media can serve as opportunities for equity and risk reduction. The lives and stories of the marginalized students in this book make evident that digital media production has the potential to function as “technologies of intervention” (Foucault 1991) insofar as students harness opportunities afforded by digital media. The affordances of the informal learning space, and the opportunities presented by digital media production, allow marginalized youth opportunities for empowerment and facilitate alternative aspirations and identities beyond the marginalized subject position. This compliments the work of other media scholars who have also demonstrated the ways in which media production positions young people as creative cultural entrepreneurs (Kearney 2006; McRobbie 1990; Rose 1994). I want to avoid excessively celebratory and technologically deterministic discourses that posit that digital media alone can solve all problems and create a more equitable society. As will be demonstrated, discourses of risk mediate opportunities, and at times they counter equitable intentions and practices. What is needed is a more opportunity-driven approach to learning and guidance that moves beyond harm-driven expectations of risk and instead acknowledges that the relationship between risk, digital media, youth, and opportunity is contradictory, messy, and diverse. The following chapter examines the ways harm-driven expectations shape policies that inhibit young people’s autonomy, choices, and opportunities.
Worried About the Wrong Things Page 7