Conferences on young people’s being together

We are starting to translate the months of fieldwork and research in the research project on the technological mediation of taste in music in ideas that we want to explore (we are also finishing the fieldwork on family socialization in new technologies). We had the ocassions to share them with researchers in two fantastic settings last week: the 1th NYRIS symposium on Global / Local Youth – New Civic Culture, Rights and Responsibilities (at the University of Turku in Turku, Finland) and Rethinking Youth Cultures In The Age Of Global Media (at the Institute Of Education, London).

The papers presented by Roger Martinez and Irene Curssó were untitled ‘Tuning-in through Youtube, Facebook and P2P: Growing up, making sense of popular music and the Internet’ and ‘Being Together Through The Internet: Class Differences in the Direct and Indirect Experience of Others’, and have been very useful in pushing us to put together part of the fielwork and start drawing some generalizations which develop some of the ideas Toni Cambra is also pushing on his PhD about Electrodance. These were the focus of both papers:

Tuning-in through Youtube, Facebook and P2P: Growing up, making sense of popular music and the Internet

When growing up, young people try to make sense of youth cultural geographies, and in this symbolic work music plays a very
important role. Contrary to what an important part of popular music research tends to imply, moreover, taste in music is homologically related to social geographies. During the last 10 years, the way young people access and share their music knowledge and preferences has notably changed because of the Internet: P2P file exchange, social network sites like Myspace or Facebook, and the importance of Youtube, just to name a few, have revolutionized young people’s relationship with music. In this paper, the impact of these technologies is scrutinized through a comparison of how taste in music was and is culturally produced in 2000 and 2010 in three secondary schools in Barcelona, Spain. Through the analysis of qualitative interviews to more than 120 youngsters between 15 and 16 years old, attention was paid to the changes in the way young people learn, make sense and experience the differentiation between different music genres and the tension between the commercial centre and the anti-commercial peripheries, with the goal of understanding how their homological relation to social meanings like gender, class or ethnic, linguistic and national identification are being produced and re-produced.

Being Together Through The Internet: Class Differences in the Direct and Indirect Experience of Others

We reflected about how youngsters in opposed positions of generalized advantage use digital media to build differentiated ways of communicating – understood as ‘being together’ in terms of actual social interactions as well as shared meanings and imagined cultural spaces. When growing up, young people try to make sense of youth and general social geographies through both direct and indirect experiences of others. Contemporary youth cultures, tastes and styles have always provided a stock of typified knowledge mediating young people’s experience of their social world. With the rise of digital technologies and the importance of user generated content, the way these meanings are being generated, disseminated and accessed are changing, and thus is presumably having an impact in young people’s cultural production of youth cultures and their ‘being together’. Through the analysis of in-depth qualitative interviews to youngsters between 15 and 16 years old, we analysed the importance of social network sites, messaging, Youtube and other on-line resources in the way young people in different positions of generalized advantage make sense of their position in youth cultural and social geographies.