Youth Positioning on and Vis-à-Vis Social Media: A Participatory Connective Ethnographic Research in India

• In Event: Digital Literacies for Global Meaning-Making: Learning From Four Cases From the Global South

Abstract

Purpose
This study emerged from a writing project started in 2016 with 6 adolescent boys at a home for ‘children considered at risk’ in an urban city in India. They attend school through the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act that mandates 25% reservation in private schools for students from economically weaker sections (EWS) of society. This study looks at how youth marginalized by their religion, caste, class, or gender position themselves on and vis-à-vis social media and literacy practices that circulate locally and globally.

Perspectives
In line with Tierney’s (2018) model of global meaning making committed to democratic decision making, participatory notions of literacy, and research and pedagogy that counters exclusionary practices, this ethnographic study decenters researcher voice as the youth bring in their choice of participants, platforms, interface, and media/digital movements supported by them.

Methods
In this participatory ‘connective’ ethnography - a methodological approach to study internet-related and offline literacy practices and sites (Leander, 2008) - along with interviews, surveys, and focus groups, we combined different digital methods. Video Cued Elicitation (VCE) was used to (de)construct participants' interactions with and on social media. An online data visualization tool (www.Voyant-tools.org), further positioned youth researchers as authors of their data and made central their perspective on their data (Stornaiuolo, 2020).

Data Sources
Data included field notes, pre-research surveys, participant designed questionnaires (as artifacts), interview transcripts, audio/video recordings of researchers’ discussions, screen capture videos, VCE transcripts, and data visualization charts.

Findings
Social media allows participants to stay connected with peers and on top of schoolwork (e.g., schoolwork shared over Facebook messenger). However, their life conditions impact social media usage and their relationship to it; they situate themselves not as ‘active users’ but as ‘lurkers’ who can never be fully present (“I feel, I don’t have interesting things to post on social media”). Political events in India in 2019 (e.g., Citizen Amendment Act) further highlighted this complexity that marginalized youth navigate on social media. While participants' social media activity (likes and follows) reflects a desire to be part of online activist conversations, locally and globally, by not ‘sharing’ or ‘creating post’, they make themselves invisible.

Significance
Youth’s engagement on the internet is often studied within the framework of ubiquity and proliferation of digital media, however differing levels of access means that youth adopt and use technologies in diverse ways (Magee, Agosto, & Forte, 2017). Understanding choices (including no use and self-regulating, restricted use) is important to understand their practices (Anderson & Jiang, 2018; boyd, 2014; Magee et al., 2017). These youth are both hyper-visible - in schools as ‘EWS kids’ and digital spaces (under surveillance) – and invisible – their experiences of marginalization buried under the global rhetoric of education or access to the digital world. Though these youth do not see themselves as active social media users, they are actively engaged. This study calls for approaches to understanding youth digital engagement that remix, adapt, fuse or refute existing frameworks, and are at once local and global (Tierney, 2018).

Author

• Rabani Garg