Social Media and Young People’s Sexualities: Values, Norms, and Battlegrounds (original) (raw)
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The Cambridge Handbook of Sexual Development: Childhood and Adolescence , 2019
In this chapter, we argue that a dominant anti-technology narrative in psychological research that informs many popular ideas about technological risk does not reflect the complexities of young people’s experiences with sexuality and social media. We will use research from the fields of gender studies, queer studies, sociology, anthropology, pedagogy, and media studies, as well as our own empirical data to argue for a more nuanced and complex understanding of social media’s impact on youth sexuality. First, we will explore further the dichotomous thinking represented in present-day discourses about youth, sexuality, and social media. After that, we will go into the small, but growing, number of critical, empirical studies that interrogate and challenge these dichotomies by focusing on young people’s own experiences and perspectives, which are much more varied. Building on these studies, we explore our own research findings attempting to broaden the scope of public and academic debates by introducing four different dimensions of online sexuality. For each of these dimensions, we will discuss how young people’s practices and ideas complicate stereotypical, gendered, and heteronormative narratives and dichotomies.
Sexy adventures: An ethnography of youth, sexuality and social media
Doctoral thesis, 2018
This thesis challenges common anxieties and stereotypes about youth, sexuality and social media. Based on one and a half years of online and offline ethnographic fieldwork among Dutch teenagers, it demonstrates how social media provide young people with access to a diverse and complex array of sexual experiences, shaping and transforming four dimensions of youth sexuality: sexual adventures, romantic intimacy, identity performance and sexual knowledge building. Rather than condemning, policing or pathologising young people's digitally mediated sexual practices, the thesis offers a framework for understanding young people's navigations of the chances and challenges that are involved.
Shifts in societal development resulting from economic and technological advancements have had an impact upon the development of human sexuality and behaviour, and with the expansion of developments such as the Internet and associated technologies, it is likely that further societal shifts will ensue. This book recognises the importance of new digital spaces for discourses surrounding sexuality, examining issues such as pornography; sex education and health;
Social media’s challenge to the promotion of young people’s sexual health
Drawing from young people’s accounts of Facebook practice, this paper challenges current public health attempts to promote sexual health via social media, arguing that health interventions must engage with the complexities of young people’s online intimacies. Using data from focus groups with young people (16-22 years), I propose an interdisciplinary approach to sexual health in which media studies inform public health agendas. Facebook will be the focus of this paper since it was commonly discussed by research participants. While current public health literature reports on the feasibility of promoting sexual health to young people via social media, to date there are few reports of where this has been successfully undertaken. Most health research discussions consider SNS as cloistered sites inhabited by young people, ripe for site-specific interventions like those administered in schools, universities, or youth services. I critique this approach by drawing from theories of media as practice (Couldry 2004), digital media use as a form of media production (Bruns 2006), and recent scholarship on young people’s digital media practices and expertise (see for e.g. boyd 2008, Marwick 2005). I draw upon Lyotard’s concept of ‘narrative knowledge’ (1991) to argue that knowledge is continually (re)produced through practice and discourse, rather than an agreed upon series of facts, supporting Certeau’s theory of everyday practice and his attention to dynamic, creative, and tactical practices that threaten the authority of ‘the Expert’ (1988), as can be seen in young people's social media practices.
Exploring young people's digital sexual cultures through creative, visual and arts- based methods
PhD thesis, 2020
This thesis explores how digital technologies such as social media, smart devices and gaming platforms are shaping young people’s sexual cultures. While the majority of research on young people’s digital sexual cultures has maintained a narrow focus on risk and harm, and limited what digital practices are considered relevant and for whom, this thesis contributes to a growing body of scholarship that seeks to support children and young people to navigate the complexities of an ever-changing digital sexual age. I worked with a socio-economically and culturally diverse sample of twenty-five young people aged 11 – 18 years from England and Wales. Rather than focusing on a pre-defined set of digital practices, I set out to foster a creative, curious and open-ended approach that allowed participants to identify which digital practices mattered to them. Over a period of fifteen- months, I employed a range of creative, visual and arts-based methods in group and individual interviews to explore a flexible set of core issues including digital worlds, relationships, networked body cultures and media discourses. Taking inspiration from feminist posthuman and new materialist concepts of ‘assemblage’, ‘affect’, ‘phallogocentricism’ and ‘feminist figurations’, I trace normative articulations of gender and sexuality as well as activate different ways of seeing and relating to young people’s digital sexual cultures. My data highlights the enduring force of heteronormative and phallogocentric power relations in young people’s digital sexual cultures through the publicisation of intimate relations online, social media’s visual culture of bodily display and gendered harassment online. However, it also maps ruptures and feminist figurations that displace vision away from the heteronormative and phallogocentric mode. I illustrate how young people’s digital sexual cultures can be the site of unexpected and unpredictable relations that move beyond normative notions of (hetero)sexuality and towards possibilities for re-imagined sexualities that exceed heteronormative and phallogocentric norms.
Young people, sexual health, and social media
This paper considers the potential for sexual health promotion to engage with young people via social media. Media/cultural studies accounts of social media practices are drawn upon to highlight key difficulties in adapting current health promotion strategies to young people’s digital media cultures. Health interventions often approach social media as an opportunity to reach young people but do not always consider the compatibility of health promotion and social media. This paper proposes a need to re-think the provision of static information to young people in spaces where they interact as media producers rather than observers. I also ask how health promotion might better engage with social media and its central tenet of friendship intimacies. Drawing from ethnographic studies of young people’s digital media practices, I encourage health promoters not to conceive of social media as opportunities to reach young people, but as channels through which to engage with young people. This engagement requires listening and response to concerns and practices of young people, as is typical of these media. Lastly, opportunities that social media offer young people regarding negotiations of sexual safety, such as friendship care and support, should be explored and better supported by health promotion strategies.
Resource and risk: youth sexuality and new media use
Sexuality Research and Social Policy, 2011
Some contemporary moral panics orbit around youth sexuality and new media use. This article addresses those moral panics by investigating teenagers' practices regarding new media and sexuality. New media technologies are central parts of young people's social, romantic, and sexual lives. These communication technologies are important in their practices of meeting, dating, and breaking up. New media technologies also provide important resources about sexual health and identities. However, these informational and relational resources are not equally available to all young people. Indeed use and access to new media technologies often mirrors the contemporary ordering of economic, racialized, and gendered power. Additionally, while youth are aware of online safety practices, some youth are more vulnerable to online risks than others.
International Journal of Bullying Prevention, 2019
Educational interventions on youth sexting often focus on individual sexters or would-be sexters, and are driven by the aim of encouraging young people to abstain from producing and sharing personal sexual images. This approach has been criticised for failing to engage with the complex sociocultural context to youth sexting. Drawing upon qualitative group and one-to-one interviews with 41 young people aged 14 to 18 living in a county in south-east England, I explore young people’s perceptions and practices surrounding sexting. By taking a grounded theory approach to the research, I reveal how young people’s shaming of digitally mediated sexual self-expression shaped and was shaped by a denial of rights to bodily and sexual autonomy and integrity. This denial of rights underpinned harmful sexting practices, including violations of privacy and consent, victim blaming, and bullying. I conclude that responses to youth sexting should attend to this broader youth cultural context, emphasise the roles and responsibilities of bystanders, and encourage a collectivist digital sexual ethics based upon rights to one’s body and freedom from harm (Albury, New Media and Society 19(5):713–725, 2017; Dobson and Ringrose, Sex Education 16(1):8–21, 2015).
The Routledge Companion to Media, Sex and Sexuality, 2017
This chapter considers the recent history and practices of promoting sexual health through social media. It considers dating/hook-up apps such as Grindr and Tinder, and common social media platforms like Facebook. In the past decade, public health researchers have entered these spaces to extend their reach to key populations, particularly the designated 'risk populations' of young people and men who have sex with men (MSM). Through its attention to new media, public health often expands its risk focus beyond the concept of sexual 'risk behaviours', to encompass digital media practices as risky, or as contributing to sexual health risks. This has generated claims that social media users (particularly users of geo-locative dating/hook-up apps) are more likely to engage in sex that puts them at risk of HIV/STI transmission. However, there is disagreement on these claims, and media studies and cultural studies approaches have offered more complex understandings of how risk and safeties are negotiated through digital and social media. This can be seen in accounts of the opportunities and affordances of these media. This chapter will trace some of these tensions within recent public health and cultural/media studies literature.
Troubling expertise: social media and young people’s sexual health
Social media are integral to young people’s everyday lives, and sexual health promotion strategies seek to capitalise on this. Drawing from recent health promotion research and digital media ethnographies, this article considers research discourses of social media use by young people and health professionals. While health promotion commonly engages with social media as a ‘setting’ for the dissemination of static information, this neglects the participatory aspects of social media and overlooks young people’s digital media competencies. Focus groups with young people further highlight these competencies, the centrality of friendship in social media, and the stigma of sharing formal sexual health information. Considering these literature and data, this article draws from post-structural theories of knowledge to consider how formal ‘expertise’ is leveraged through the subjugation of young people’s knowledge, and how this is problematic for sexual health promotion seeking to engage with young people through social media.