“Some of it is Luck”; Youth’s Cross-platform Media Making Practices that Resist, and Challenge Algorithms

• In Event: Cross-Platformization, Digital Media Platforms as Global Ecosystems, and the Shifting Understandings of Critical Platform Practices

Abstract

Objective
As the most digitally engaged generation, youth participate in literacy rich media ecologies (Korobkova & Collins, 2019), engaging with different interconnected platforms and spaces– their experiences on these platforms are, however, shaped by their social locations and identities (Brough et al., 2020). This paper, by tracing the cross-platform practices of youth artists (ages 15 to 21) in two hip hop collectives in New Delhi, India, highlights how youth draw on the affordances of digital media platforms to work simultaneously across multiple platforms, and build networks for themselves, curate identities for imagined and real audiences, and challenge platformed logics (Author, 2022).

Perspectives
This research draws upon postdigital scholarship (Jandrić & Knox, 2022) to foreground how people and platforms as dynamic participants in sociotechnical assemblages (Knox 2019), mutually shape one another. This research engages with Lu and Steele’s (2019) study on the simultaneous cross-platform practices of users that allow for the (re)invention of platforms as critical sites of resistance, and practices of Jugaad (a way to work around obstacles) as theorized by Amit Rai (2019) to understand how youth playfully work against technological/ resource constraints. Finally, this study draws on scholarships that push for ethics, equity, and justice in design of platform architectures (Nobles, 2018; Benjamin, 2019).

Method/ Analysis
Over a period of 12 months, this critical ethnography (Madison, 2005) traced the cross-platform practices of two hip hop collectives (12 youth) using connective ethnographic approaches (Hine, 2015; Leander, 2010; Burrell, 2009). To trace the movement of these collectives’ digital artifacts across platforms, multiple screencapture methods were used: Media go-along (Jørgensen, 2016) (n=10) and scrollback (Robards & Lincoln, 2017) (n=8) interviews were conducted to center youth perspectives on their social media platforms. Researcher generated screencapture (Bhatt & De Roock, 2014) was used to center research/er questions. The study adopted abductive analysis (Timmermans & Tavory, 2012) approach– data (via Atlas.ti) was analyzed using critical technocultural discourse analysis method (Brock, 2018) to study the discursive properties of digital artifacts, platform affordances, and youth’s relationships with platform interfaces.

Finding/ Significance
The youth rappers are cognizant of how algorithms and platform logics shaped their presence/ absence/ reach/ searchability on social media . To counter these tensions, they draw upon the affordances of individual platforms, using one platform in connection with another, for example, media content is shared simultaneously in different formats across platforms (e.g. a hyperlink to their full video/audio on YouTube/spotify is shared on instagram), thus increasing reach and audiences. This cross-platform interplay also offers algorithmic resistance (Bonini & Treré, 2024) through youth’s practices of jugaad. Digital media platforms as global infrastructures where youth culture is produced and shared offer a rich site to understand how local cultures get produced within these ecosystems while also highlighting how injustices continue to be reproduced for those who are on the margins across the world. This study hopes to contribute to the research on global media literacies and practices, by bringing in youth voices and perspectives from other parts of the world that are missing from research.

Author

• Rabani Garg, University of Pennsylvania