Presentation by: Morgan O’Brien
Presentation Title: Consuming Talk: Youth Culture & the Mobile Phone
Research Objectives:
•To provide a descriptive account of young people’s use of the mobile phone,
with specific reference to the context of everyday life
•To situate this use of the mobile phone within the context of youth cultural
consumption
•To employ the example of young people’s mobile phone use to address
theoretical debates about youth cultural power and agency
Fieldwork:
The study used both quantitative and qualitative methods:
•Quantitative – surveys administered to first and transition year students
•Qualitative – focus groups with transition and fifth year students
An emphasis on exploring young people’s own experiences of the mobile
phone and the ways in which they use it as a medium of cultural expression
Research Context:
•
Growth of sociological interest in the mobile phone (e.g.
technological change, shifts in communicative practices
and
interpersonal relationships, etc.)
•
Limited interest in the role of the mobile phone in Ireland
•
Studies of the mobile phone have lacked a discussion of its
cultural significance or its role as a cultural object
Theoretical Framework:
•Youth cultural theory (post-subcultural debates) & theories of consumer
culture (the role of the consumer)
•The theoretical arguments of the research relate to understanding the role of
young people as consumers
•The research argues that young people are active participants in the
creation of cultural meaning and make use of cultural products (such as the
mobile phone) in a way that demonstrates forms of cultural agency
1. Between Dependence and Independence
• Youth as a liminal phase between the dependence of childhood and the
independence of adulthood
• Structured and controlled by a range of institutions (e.g. family, school, the state,
etc.)
• Use of the mobile phone as a means to mediate and manage this relationship
Example – Family Life
• Parents get their children a mobile phone for reasons of safety/security; and also
surveillance of their activities
• Young people make use of the mobile phone to expand their social and personal
space:
Like your parents can still contact you so they’re happy; and you’re happy ‘cause you
can go off and you know that your parents aren’t going to be worried, and you’re not
going to get in trouble for going off so I think it kinda helps that way… between like
being totally dependent and still being independent
• ‘Micro-coordination’ of daily life:
You need some way of communicating with them like if you need a lift home or
anything like that, whereas if you like if you have an arranged time with your parents
and you don’t wanna go home at that time you have to go home ‘cause they’re after
driving all the way in to collect you
2. Thumb Tribes – the role of the mobile phone in youth peer
cultures
•Neo-tribes originally articulated by Maffesoli (1996); and subsequently used by
Shields (1992), Hetherington (1992) and Bennett (1999 & 2005)
•Three key aspects for this research:
1. Fluidity of associations & adoption of persona replaces individual: “it refers
more to a certain ambience, a state of mind...” (Maffesoli, 1996: 98)
2. Symbolic rituals of identification: “orientation around rituals of inclusion and
exclusion, membership and rites of passage rather than legalistic codes of
conduct and membership” (Shields, 1992: 108)
3. Sociality and sociability: ‘may have a goal, may have finality; but this is not
essential; what is important is the energy expended on constituting the
group as such’ (Maffesoli, 1996: 75)
•The concept is useful for understanding how young people use the
mobile phone to move within and between multiple associations and as
a medium of everyday forms of sociality and sociability
Fluid forms of association
•The coordination of more informal social groups and practices:
People want to do something with their Friday or Saturday night. They want
to go somewhere so they give someone else a ring… [and] instead of
everybody meeting up at a certain place at a certain time, and people having to
wait behind for other people, you know the kind of usual crap that people do,
you can just all get out like whenever you want
•The evolution of temporary and looser forms of collective association:
If you have friends far away, like I have friends in the Gaeltacht and I text
them the whole time, just to keep in touch like…
•The management and representation of different personae:
You can work out what you’re gonna say, you’re not on the spot or
anything …
Whereas if you’re just in conversation with someone face-to-face you come
away and you’re like “Oh why didn’t I say that or why didn’t I say that?”
Whereas in a text message you have time to think about it or whatever
Ritual and Symbolic Behaviour
•Symbolic conferral of group status and inclusion amongst peers:
If I had my phone and nobody rang or if I left it at home all day and
I have no missed calls there’d be some arguments going on… ‘Cause
that means nobody’s thinking about me
•Use of mobile phone is a means of identification and differentiation:
With your phone you can just interact with people by yourself
without your parents nosing in
•Appropriate and proper use – young people vs. parents/children:
you text your friends, but you don’t, you’re not gonna go texting
your parents…
I don’t text my parents ‘cause they don’t understand what I’m
saying
Sociality & Sociability
•Interaction for its own sake: ‘no ulterior end, no content, and no result
outside itself’ (Simmel)
It’s just like if you’re bored you can just text somebody and see
what they’re doing, then just kind of involve someone and keep talking
about stuff, that’s all…
•Mediation of everyday forms of chat and conversation
you can be able to be in touch, for people to be able to contact you
and you can contact them. You don’t know what’s going on around the
place if you don’t have a mobile
•Encourages and creates forms of emotional and affective ties
You can take pictures of, like, you know when you just see
something really funny you’re like I wish I had a camera and like you’d
have your phone with you and you can just take a picture of it, or when
you’re going out you can take a picture of people
3. The Cultural Consumption of the Mobile Phone
•The practices of mobile phone use evident in this research are viewed as
examples of cultural creativity and agency
•They are immersed in what Willis (1990) terms ‘meaningful symbolic work’
•A form of secondary production (i.e. consumption); what de Certeau terms
‘poiesis’, which is revealed by ‘ways of using’
Michel de Certeau The Practice of Everyday Life
•Concerned with how ordinary, everyday practices are a means to “escape
without leaving… the dominant social order”
•Strategies/Tactics –
• Strategy - is a function of place that operates as a spatially-determined
focus of power relationships
• Tactic – “takes advantage of “opportunities” and depends on them,
being without any base… a mobility that must accept the chance
offerings of the moment, and seize on the wing the possibilities that
offer themselves at any given moment”
•A tactic then can be seen as the inventive use of possibilities within strategic
contexts. Tactics do not operate externally to strategies; they are the ‘other’
inside, that which escapes without leaving the dominant order.
Tactics of Mobile Phone Use in the Everyday Practices of Young People
•Young people make use of the mobile phone in ways that allow them to evade
forms of social control
•For example, to circumvent forms of parental surveillance:
Like if you’re in [town] or if you’re in like the back arse of nowhere and you’re
supposed to be down the road you’d be just like ‘yeah I’m just down the road I’ll be
home in ten minutes’, but it might take you half an hour to get home
•or to subvert the rules of school:
You’re not allowed phones in the class; if they catch you they take them off you,
but everyone texts in class anyway
•These are clandestine inventions that insinuate themselves into the current of
domination
•Expression of ‘semiotic power’ rather than ‘social power’ (Fiske, 1989)
•Rather than being forms of resistance against social or cultural control they are
forms of resilience within it
•‘localized acts of subversion’, which, rather than being subversive in the broad
political sense, are ‘locally assembled resistance against an established set of
social structures or “rules”’ (Taylor, 2005)
Conclusion:
• Young people play a significant role in the construction of cultural meaning
and the creation of cultural practices
• Young people’s use of the mobile phone is a form of ‘resilience’ within
particular sets of constraints and controls, rather than acts of resistance
against them
• These processes are not necessarily a means through which young people
resist and change the broader character of their social situation, with social
power still resting largely with forms of adult authority (e.g. parents, school,
the state, etc.). Nevertheless, the ways in which young people make use of
the mobile phone displays their own cultural values and preferences; and
demonstrate how young people’s cultural practices are an important part of
making life liveable for young people, rather than a site of politicised
resistance.
•
•
Continued Research on the Role of Media in Young People’s Everyday
Lives
An Emphasis on Understanding the Ordinary, Everyday Activities of Young
People