Digital Culture, New Media, and Youth

The four papers in this special issue focus on practices and cultures of youth in a digitalized world. However, the first contribution by Jasmin Kulterer also goes back to predigital times, asking “Is the Video Star Dead?" and focusing on the role of MTV in young people’s lives in the context of a changing media environment. Brigitte Hipfl and Elena Pilipets refer to youth’s media practices using the example of selfies and (anti-)selfies on the social network Instagram. They use the theoretical concept of assemblage in order to explain the ambiguous forces that shape young people’s media practices. Along with the use of digital media, we can not only observe the emergence of new practices, but new discourses are also developed. This aspect is taken up in Maria Karafotia’s contribution on “New Media, Old Anxieties – Mainstream Narratives of Childhood and Sexting”. Using a qualitative research approach, she investigates Greek newspaper articles of the past ten years concerning the childhood-sexuality-relation and the way in which childhood is discussed in connection to sexting. In her paper, “Always Online - Always Stressed? How Young People in Germany and Finland View the Use of Digital Media in a Mediatized Work Life”, Kerstin Liesem finally picks up another aspect of digital culture by focussing on the world of work.