Youth, Identity, and Digital Media: David Buckingham

Youth, Identity, and Digital Media

Buckingham, David (2008).
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press; 209 pages. $16.00/£10.95. ISBN 9780262524834.

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In 2005, frustrated shopkeeper Howard Stapleton invented a “teenager repellent” to deter youth from loitering outside of his grocery store. Operating on the fact that young ears hear higher frequencies than adults’ ears, the device emits an unpleasant sound inaudible to most people older than 25 or so. Yet in a classic move of teenager independence, young people’s ability to hear these frequencies has also been exploited for their benefit in the creation of mobile phone rings and alerts that go undetected by parents and teachers. The Mosquito, as the device is known, and the subsequent appropriation of its operating principle by young people, exemplify the complex relationships between youth, technology and adults in all their roles. The volume Youth, Identity, and Digital Media explores these relationships from a variety of perspectives, and offers concise but lucid challenges to the ways in which we as educators, researchers, and parents understand youth identity.

Conceived for an interdisciplinary audience of youth psychologists, sociologists, educators, communication scholars, media theorists, and rhetoricians, the collection comprises the voices of an equally diverse group of authors. They are all, however, careful to write without resorting to jargon and without sidestepping into tedious disciplinary minutiae. The plurality of perspectives, each beginning from different focusing questions and concerns, results in a volume that coherently pinpoints key challenges in youth identity research today. Collectively, the authors ask how we conceive of identity-as-process. Is it a fragmentation or a bricolage, and is it a disservice to youth identity to refer to the process as “experimentation,” implying as that term does a falseness or inauthenticity? How can we avoid falling into technological determinism when we speak of the influences of digital media on youth identities? What are the power relationships within which youth identity/identities is/are assembled? How do we address power dynamics between individual youth and their peer groups, between youth subcultures and consumer media, between youth and adults of all kinds? As adults ourselves, what responsibility do we have to youth as we understand their digital media practices through our own academic lenses?

In regard to this last question, the authors in this collection are careful to, as Susan Herring writes in her chapter, “consider the more radical possibility of collaborating with youth in an attempt to break down those hierarchies” (87). Indeed, this willingness to allow youth voices to be heard in an academic venue is perhaps the most valuable contribution made by the collection. Although it is organized into sections entitled “Overviews,” “Case Studies,” and “Learning,” in each of these groupings the reader finds essays drawing primarily on the ways youth understand their own digital experiences. This is not to say that the authors always agree with the young people’s interpretations, but they do treat those interpretations with empathy, compassion, and respect. In particular, paying attention to the analysis made by youth of their own digital media practices enables these researchers to ask questions about the role of self-reflexivity in identity processes. This becomes especially salient when analyzing the role played by writing about the self in youth identity work—for example, in blogs and on social networking sites. Similarly, the collection’s emphasis on hearing youth voices helps to avoid the trap of exoticizing or essentializing its youth subjects.

In addition to taking care not to pigeon-hole the youth that they are writing about, the collection’s authors are cautious about assigning too much causality to particular technologies. The volume’s editor, David Buckingham, carefully outlines in his introduction the limits of technological determinism, noting that popular discussions of the Internet and its related technologies often espouse a view wherein technology is seen “to bring about social and psychological changes...irrespective of the ways in which it is used, and of the social contexts and processes into which it enters” (11). Youth, Identity, and Digital Media, by bringing together studies conducted about youth using digital media in places as varied as schools in Britain and South Africa and community centers in New York City, bedrooms in California and street corners in Denmark, succeeds at diversifying those social contexts and processes so that the reader can note both similarities and differences in youth activity. Whether the technology in question is blogging, instant messaging, videography or designing a MySpace profile, each author’s analysis moves quickly from the specifics of the medium to the influences it has on youth identity work—and to the ways in which youth have shaped the technologies to suit their practices.

Given how careful the authors are not to make generalizations or causal statements either about youth or the technologies they are interacting with, does this anthology offer the reader any useful conclusions about youth, identity, and digital media? First, as an archive of a moment in the development of a cultural response to and assimilation of digital media, the collection fulfills its stated purpose. By highlighting a number of ways in which researchers have successfully collaborated with youth, both in and outside of formal classroom settings, the collection also presents researchers with methods and ideas for implementing their own studies. The full value of these articles, however, rests on their strength as a collection. By reading Herring’s take on the generational divide in concert with Goldman, Booker, and McDermott’s study of youth who explicitly challenge that divide via collaborative video documentary projects, the reader comes to appreciate the importance of not separating youth from a multi-generational context. Reading Susannah Stern’s discussion of young people’s blogging practices together with danah boyd’s take on social networking sites and Gitte Stald’s analysis of mobile communication media leads to a fuller understanding of how social relationships continue to dominate adolescent identity processes, both in spite of and because of the specifics of mediating technologies. Although inevitably this collection is an incomplete look at youth identity practices, since they are perpetually being invented anew by the young people in question, researchers and educators will find it a helpful addition to scholarship on the subject.


http://cye.colorado.edu/cye_journal/review.pl?n=269