Introduction

Addressing digital culture in relation to children and youth, new cultural phenomena and practices come into play: practices of self-disclosure, connecting, sharing, expressing solidarity and showing political and also civic engagement, as the “Fridays for Future” and the recent “Black Lives Matter” movements impressively demonstrate. In addition to new practices, new discourses develop, which represent the ambiguity of digital media and their everyday use. Yet, those practices and discourses are deeply embedded in power relations, be they political, social, cultural or economical. Additionally, in the digitally immersed society, technology plays a crucial role with non-human agents and algorithms calculating and shaping our medial (and even non-medial) activities and creating a kind of “hyperreality” (Baudrillard, 1994).

The papers in this special issue focus on practices and cultures of youth in a digitalized world.