Mobile Youth Culture 2.0: A re-conceptualization accounting for the local embedding of the smartphone

Abstract

Mobile Youth Culture is a concept coined early in the new Millennium to capture the growing observation that mobile communication occupies a central role within youth cultures around the globe. More specifically, young people seem to thrive as networked individuals who are perpetually connected to peers, digital content, and the world at large with their smartphones at hand. In the scholarship, it is argued that there are commonalities in youths’ mobile media practices and that these commonalities are informed by shared experiences of transitioning from children to adults. Over the past two decades, however, various scholars have warned that the concept of Mobile Youth Culture overemphasizes the notion of developmental homogeneity, thereby overlooking the heterogeneity of young people and the cultural groups they belong to. As such, it is paramount to consider identity markers beyond age such as gender, race and class if we do not wat to represent mobile youth culture as a monoculture. Thefore, this paper aims to respond to this call by acknowledging the intersectional and socio-cultural constructed nature of youth. Drawing from two larger research projects, one conducted in the (sub-)urban area of Liberia (Sub-Saharan Africa) and one among ethnic minority youths in Flanders (the north Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, Europe), we examine how mobile youth culture manifests on the ground of different local cultures. These two research projects serve as an illustration of how the socio-cultural position of youths gives meaning to and shapes local mobile youth cultures. By lifting the veil over some cultural differences and structural inequalities that these young people face in our contemporary society, and how these shape and are shaped by their uses and understandings of mobile media, the paper aims to re-visit, but also update, the conceptual foundations of the Mobile Youth Culture concept.