Young People and Mediated Private Space

Abstract

The role of private space in youth cultures has been little explored in youth cultural studies, yet it can be argued that for many young people private spaces such as their bedrooms play a central role in providing a context within which they can engage with the media as part of their everyday youth cultural practices. In this chapter I explore the ways in which young people use the realm of ‘the private’ as part of their everyday youth experiences and the role of the media in their navigation of both the public and private spheres between which they are constantly moving.¹ I argue that the media are a key resource for young people and their emerging adult identities, and that young people use the media as a resource through which they constantly reconfigure public and private space, marking out their identities. In this sense, I explore young people’s use of ‘private’ spaces such as their bedrooms and social network sites (e.g. Facebook) using the concept of ‘zoning’ (Lincoln, 2004, 2005, 2012) to examine how young people navigate the blurred boundaries of public and private space and how they make those spaces meaningful to them. In this respect, I argue that private spaces of youth culture are inherently mediated and that this mediation is part of the complex series of online and offline interactions in which young people in contemporary society engage.