Abstract
The findings for this article emerge from data collected in June 2010, during a week-long annual workshop with three groups of 14-year-olds. Working with a central London Academy school, the project as a whole asked teenagers to ‘map’ their journeys through their local environment, using a range of media from static cameras to audio recorders to mobile phones and flip cameras. It asked the teenagers to reflect on those journeys through group and individual interviews and through the editing process of converting their recordings into a mini-documentary of their area. In the course of a week, each group filmed, recorded, edited and produced a ‘documentary’, which was then showcased to their peers. At the end of each day, the audio-visual data was uploaded to group laptops and saved, along with the interviews. Our reflections and comments were also recorded and transcribed, along with our images and recordings of the processes during the day.
The initial premise for the project was to move beyond conceptions of the so-called ‘digital native’ and conceptions of young people per se, and investigate the more nuanced engagements with media and with local environments. Our findings raise pertinent questions around understanding, conceptualizing, and working with young people. They also suggest, contrary to discourse of the so-called ‘digital-native’ (see Bennett et al., 2008, for discussions of the concept, and Thornham and McFarlane, 2011: 258–79), that when teenagers are given innovative and novel media, they rarely use such media in intended ways. Indeed, as Lievrouw and Livingstone argue, although new media may be:
created with particular purposes or uses in mind, they are commonly adopted and used in unanticipated ways – reinvented, reconfigured, sabotaged, adapted, hacked, ignored. (Lievrouw and Livingstone, 2006: 5)
Consequently, rather than focusing solely on anticipated or unanticipated use, we argue that the use of new media has to be understood in relation to the negotiated and sedimented power dynamics in which the teenagers are positioned and position themselves. Further, through the creative and authored acts of producing a documentary, the teenagers intervene in, and disrupt, such power dynamics.
However, in claiming such creative products as evidence of unanticipated use, as authored intervention or as a particular insight into youth behaviour and performance, we potentially open the project to accusations that we assume the language of ‘creativity’ is most appropriate for this age group, and creative methods are the most appropriate in encouraging young people towards self-expression. Indeed, these assumptions are precisely what David Buckingham critiques when he claims:
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the potential of so-called ‘creative’ methods in media research, and in social research more broadly.… Such methods typically, although by no means exclusively, employ visual means of representation, such as drawings, photography and video. Asking people to ‘create’ media … can, it is argued, reach the parts that other methods have failed to reach. (2009: 633)
However, as Buckingham continues, while such methods may at first glance appear to offer an insight into areas that may not be accommodated through more traditional methods, often the content of such research is taken as a transparent and straight-forwardly reflective insight into behaviour, attitude or opinion. This elevates the content produced through such methods to a problematic level, claiming an authenticity and validity which belies critical interrogation or indeed interpretation. It also negates the power politics at play in such research processes and, more specifically, the ‘formative role’ the researcher, media and context all play in the production of such media (2009: 635). Instead of a transparent reflection, Buckingham argues that we need to understand such methods and content more as ‘“fictions” or constructed narratives’ (2009: 635), which in turn need to be interpreted and critically investigated. Indeed, both the produced content and the context of our research highlighted precisely these issues as paramount, as the teenagers interpreted and negotiated the contours of the project in a range of different ways. While we return to these issues towards the end of the article, it seems pertinent to note here that we are not unaware of them, and the creative impetus of the project came, in part, from the necessity to critically investigate the ways young people are approached and made to mean during such ethnographically inflected projects. Further, as we argue below, the status afforded such creative products can be connected to the concept of youth itself and, more specifically, as an agent of their own particular journey.
The rhetoric of the journey
As suggested above, along with the concept of the ‘digital native’, the second premise of the research project was to explore conceptions of youth per se. The concept of a ‘journey’ indicated in the title of this article forms a key methodological and theoretical peg here, and, as Hodkinson (2007: 4) details, emerges from earlier conceptions of youth as both transitional and, more specifically, ‘caught between’ a range of socio-cultural pressures and values. In turn, this articulates adolescence as a particular kind of journey from childhood to adulthood, where the period of ‘instability and transition’ (2007: 1) is nevertheless finite and in need of protection. Safeguarding such journeys becomes paramount so that the journey towards adulthood can be safely experienced and executed.
As suggested, such constructions support wider ideologies of individualism, producing the young person as the agent of their own ‘journey’ (to adulthood), and as ‘naturally’ inquisitive and explorative. Andy Bennett sees this particular construction of youth as in keeping with the discourses of late modernity, where identity becomes an ‘individually managed project’ (2007: 24), and the onus moves from something more akin to collective socio-economic positioning to a neoliberal subjectivity, where adolescent individual self-expression overshadows more ‘traditional’ socio-economic positionings. Gadlin similarly makes such connections when he argues that the journey has at its heart the ‘goal of individual self-realisation [which] overshadows community solidarity and stability’ (1978: 236). Self-realization – the goal of such a journey – is therefore enmeshed with wider concepts of the neoliberal subject, particularly if we draw on Giddens (1991) and Beck’s (1992) concepts of ‘individualistic discourses’ (McRobbie, 2009: 1), which, McRobbie argues, have come to exemplify contemporary identities:
As the old structures of social class fade away, and lose their grip in the context of late or second modernity, individuals are increasingly called upon to invent their own structures. They must do this internally and individualistically, so that self-monitoring practices replace reliance on set ways and structured pathways.… As the overwhelming force of structure fades, so also, it is claimed, does the capacity for agency increase. (McRobbie, 2009: 19)
For Valerie Walkerdine, such neoliberal constructs enhance the fantasy of the Cartesian subject who generates meaning through acts of socio-cultural and media-enhanced interactions. As she argues, such discourses are similarly enmeshed in the notion of active childhood (2007: 8–10), where the image of the ‘child as active maker of meaning’ prevails. Here the child acts on and in the world around them, generating meaning through the active (mobile) elements of such engagements. Indeed, if we return to Buckingham’s (2009) critique of ‘creative’ methods when working with young people, there certainly seems an assumption of creative (active, mobile) agency on the part of the participants, which is embedded not only in the methods of such projects, but also in the theoretical and conceptual constructs of the young people to whom such methods supposedly ‘naturally’ speak.
While we do not have the scope to explore these issues in depth here, there nevertheless seems to be a clear parallel between wider conceptions of neoliberal, individualistic agency and constructions of the adolescent, and these are exacerbated through the conception of a creative and explorative journey. Such constructions are not only the preserve of discourses of youth, they also resonate with the particular concept of the ‘digital native’ to which this project also speaks (see Thornham and McFarlane, 2011: 261–4 for further discussions of the ‘digital native’). Here, individualistic agency is translated into assumptions of the desire and competence for technological investigation, and the liminal spaces of adolescence become the media-enhanced spaces of digital exploration (see also Bennett et al., 2008; Buckingham, 2007; Prensky, 2001; Tapscott, 1998). Further, if, as Buckingham argues, the ‘digital native’ and its counterpart ‘youth-at-risk’ go hand in hand (2006 [2002]: 77), the priority once again becomes protecting that ‘journey’ of the teenager as a space of curiosity and experimentation. Indeed, we could argue that the celebration of creative methods for researching young people is embedded in these wider discourses of youth, where the creative media become innovative tools to evidence such natural curiosity and experimentation.
The ‘journeys’
The concept of a journey also has a more literal use, as we employ it to account for the audio-visual recordings produced by the teenagers in the course of the project. For the purposes of this commentary, we concentrate on two journeys filmed on the first day of the project by one of the all-male groups and the all-female group. There was another all-male group working with us but their work took longer to produce and edit, and they took longer to settle to the task and the group produced no data on the first day of filming. The remit regarding this particular footage was simply to familiarize the teenagers with the technology, and to film around the school in preparation for the subsequent ‘journeys’. It was a very broad remit, and the teenagers dispersed unsupervised around the school, returning an hour later to edit and view their material. Both recordings were filmed primarily on flip cameras, but whereas the first is an ‘unofficial’ recording showing a young black girl being chased through the school, the second is an edited re-interpretation of the school as a haunted building. In the case of the former, the footage was kept on the flip camera, and it was only when the researchers uploaded the footage to the laptop at the end of the day that it became known. The second was filmed, uploaded and edited by the group themselves. We label the first film ‘unofficial’ not only for these reasons, but also because it did not appear in its entirety as part of the final piece of work showcased by this group. By comparison, the second film was enmeshed in the final documentary as a light-hearted end to the film and showcased to the rest of the school.
Both groups’ footage re-articulates the school in different ways, demonstrating unanticipated movements through, and conceptualizations of it. In many ways, both could therefore be seen as an intervention in the power relations of the building, or indeed the research project, or a claim of agency on the part of the teenagers involved. In interpreting these audio-visual recordings, it is clear that we also need to consider Buckingham’s reminder of the ‘formative roles’ of power relations within such projects, as well as the way such content is made to mean. In what follows, we therefore briefly outline the two films, demonstrating first the way they could be conceptualized as an intervention into the research project and as a particular interpretation and production of a journey. We detail how each film constructs the teenagers as performative, as embedded in certain visible and invisible power relations. Finally, we discuss how the teenagers involved interpreted such footage at a later stage of the project, and what this suggests for the power we should afford such texts.
The first film is a two-and-a-half-minute long unedited chase sequence through the school, showing a young black girl being pursued by two white boys. The third teenager films the chase using a flip camera held in his hand. The footage starts with a close up of the back of the girl’s head as she bites the hand of one of the boys, shouting ‘Get off, I’ll bite you’, before she runs away, closely followed by the others. The chase moves from a corridor, through a covered, dimly lit, busy walkway, into a second building. Here the group run past a secretary, who briefly looks up from her desk, and into the stairway, where the boys catch up with the girl on a landing in the stairwell. They throw her to the ground, thrust an audio recorder towards her and ask her repeatedly ‘How’s the day going? Talk! How’s the day going?’ After a few seconds, the girl uncurls from her foetal position on the ground, gets up, crying. She kicks one of the teenage boys, who is keeping the door closed, and is filmed running into the visible and monitored balcony area of the building. At this point, she is not followed, and we hear the boys saying ‘Let her go, man, leave it.’ When she reaches the end of the corridor, she shouts back ‘I’m telling, I’m telling on all of you!’ before running off camera. The footage ends with an image of an empty corridor and the sound of the boys laughing.
The second film is a carefully edited minute-long fictional narrative of a haunted staircase, produced by the all-female group. It incorporates a range of extra diegetic sounds, creative shots and sequences, which are edited together to construct the narrative. The film starts with a shot through one of the glass windows showing a blurred and indistinguishable figure looking back at the camera. We cut to a shot of the wall, with a shadow of a figure moving across it. We then cut to one of the group members, standing in front of a blue door, speaking to camera and saying, ‘This is the spiral staircase. Apparently it’s haunted by a boy who threw himself off of there, and died. As you can see the door is locked to stop people from going up there.’ She pauses and a loud knocking sound is heard. She runs towards camera and off screen. We then cut to a shot of two pairs of running feet, which stop running as they reach a corridor lined with school lockers. A close up of the locker numbered ‘666’ is accompanied by a shrieking sound, before another group member says to camera ‘as you can see there’s a lot of spooky stuff that goes on around our school’.
Teenage interventions?
Although clearly very different, the two films both re-articulate the research project in a number of interesting ways. In relation to the first group, it seems apparent that a particular kind of intervention is occurring here: one where the technology is used as an active tool, rather than a passive recorder of events. The technology actively ‘victimizes’ the girl, while the boys stay out of shot, behind the camera, claiming power over the gaze as well as producing a very particular power dynamic in which visibility and technology play crucial parts. Our argument here, in keeping with Lievrouw and Livingstone’s (2006: 5) argument, is that this unanticipated use implicates not only the technology but also the research project as a whole in the enacted power play between the teenage boys and their female ‘victim’.
The second film also intervenes in the research project. Rather than being used as a tool implicated in a demonstration of power over a particular person, however, this film demonstrates power over representation of themselves. The teenage girls construct themselves as spokespeople and narrators, performing for, and to, the camera. These performances are self-conscious constructions of self, all the more visible because of the fictional nature of the narrative, and the way they display themselves to camera, through open, frontal shots. Their agency is enmeshed with visibility, and contrasts with the hidden spaces they ‘investigate’ through their fictional narrative, which they claim authorship over.
While we could claim this footage as some kind of ‘real’ insight into behaviour and group dynamics, and afford the teenagers ultimate agency over their production and representation, this interpretation is problematic on a number of levels. As David Buckingham argues, such content is not a transparent ‘capturing’ of ‘real’ or truthful behaviour, and such methods do not facilitate some notion of unadulterated expression. Further, the emphasis on the visual and the way it is both utilized and produced here, seems significantly connected to the formative role the technology plays in the construction of these films, which in turn shapes the position from which, ‘it becomes[s] possible for participants to “speak”’ (2009: 635). Indeed, locating agency so straightforwardly with the teenagers and claiming such films as active interventions into the power structures in which they are positioned, also returns us to some key conceptual issues around how young people are then constructed, particularly in relation to activity and agency. Such an interpretation would also elevate the unique event of each film to a meaningful, powerful position. However, as we shall see, these films were subsequently re-interpreted and re-imagined in the course of the week. This demonstrates, at the very least, the need for a more cautious interpretation, and one that contextually situates the material more thoroughly.
Contextualizing journeys, creating fictions
Our final consideration, then, relates to the subsequent re-imaginings of these films, which were observed at later points in the week. Taken together, such observations raise a number of issues about the negotiations and interpretations of such material, and how we may want to make them mean. As suggested, these films were produced in the initial stages of the project, and the content was subsequently uploaded onto the group laptops for later editing and consideration for the final documentary. As mentioned, the researchers uploaded the footage from the all-male group at the end of the day, after viewing the footage on the flip camera. The other film was uploaded by the all-female group immediately following their return from filming and edited into a short piece before ultimately being embedded in the final documentary. Despite these differences, both groups ultimately argued for the inclusion of this footage in the final documentary, and it is worth detailing these discussions here.
In relation to the first film of the girl being chased, the researchers returned from lunch mid-way through the week, to find the footage being played to the other groups. All three groups were laughing and clearly enjoying the footage, and it became clear from their conversation that the teenager being chased was well-known as a target for such behaviour to all of the group members. This raises interesting questions around the power dynamics in which the film was positioned, as well as normative behavioural practices for the teenagers involved. Chasing the girl, throwing her to the floor but ultimately not pursuing her was interpreted as an indication of her pathetic status, rather than an indication of them transgressing any boundaries. The comments heard in the film of ‘Let her go man, she’s not worth it’ were repeated in these conversations, as the group reconstructed the event as one where they were not only powerful but they also they operated in a benign and generous manner, letting her go. The act of ‘letting her go’ was thus reconstructed in relation to their performative power relations within the new context of the classroom, rather than, for example, relating to the fact she runs into a highly visible space of the school. Further, the girl was less a ‘victim’ and more simply an everyday facet of the school, not even worth acknowledging enough to pursue.
The major source of interest, however, was not the girl herself, but the boys, and in particular the moment when one of the teenagers is kicked for holding the door closed to prevent her from leaving. This was a huge source of amusement, and the particular moment was played on a loop to the group as the teenager makes a guttural noise and the door is opened. There are a number of ways we can interpret this. The first relates to the power dynamics of the group. The teenager who is kicked in this moment attempts to perform control and agency by keeping the door closed. But the tenuous nature of this act is demonstrated as the girl kicks him and opens the door. In turn, this continues to construct the teenage boy as less powerful, and his act as a façade. Indeed, this was the role more familiar to the teenager, who became more reclusive and less interactive as the week went on. A second way to consider this reaction is in relation to the concept of visibility, and it became clear that much of the conversation revolved around how uncomfortable each of them was with their own visible performance. At the same time, they laughed at each others’ performance and it became clear that, were they to show this footage as part of their documentary (which they wanted to do), the primary motivation was because the third teenager who is kicked is the most visible and identifiable one. Including this footage was more about the visible construction of both the girl and this particular member of the group. Showcasing this footage was a demonstration of power and agency.
Although this footage was not shown in its entirety, the particular moment when the teenage boy is kicked was embedded in the final documentary showcased by the group to their peers. Here, it was shown alongside some other moments captured by the group – one boy punching another in a classroom and walking off; close-up shots of teachers, distorted and made ridiculous; interviewees who pulled particularly amusing expressions; other group members who had quirky expressions or laughs; and strangers on the street who eyed the group suspiciously. In each case, the expressions were captured, slowed down and distorted, and slapstick music added to the clip. This suggests, we think, a particular concern and awareness not only with the power of the visual, but also the power of the gaze, as each figure (each potentially powerful figure) is constructed and ‘styled’ (to use Laura Mulvey’s term [1989: 19]) in a particular way. Indeed, as Mulvey suggests, classic filmic ways of looking construct a ‘determining male gaze’ (1989: 19), which is invested with not only the power to look but also the power to project its fantasy onto the ‘styled’ and displayed object (seen here as the other characters in the film). The scopophilic pleasures Mulvey discusses in relation to gender in her seminal work (1989: 16–19), are evidenced here, not only through the final product, which plays with and re-assembles the figures in the film, loitering on each character in ways which both expose and invade. Scopophilic pleasures are also evidenced in the discussions around this footage during the research week, and the evident pleasure of controlling the gaze, while simultaneously not being subject to it. Indeed, what was noticeable, of course, was that the two more ‘powerful’ members of this group – the teenager who picks up the girl and throws her to the ground, and the one holding the flip camera – are completely absent characters within the final documentary.
The second film was also shown to the groups during the week of the research, and in a similar vein to the first film, much of the discussion centred on the concept of visibility and performance. However, by comparison with the all-male group, visibility per se was not a problem for the all-female group so much as appearance on camera. Here discussions within the group centred on style, clothing, manner and performance, as the girls objectified themselves and critically commented on their own appearance. Each group member was careful to only criticize herself, while the other members of the group encouraged the self-objectification and offered supportive and placating comments regarding the content of each criticism. Again, there are a number of interesting ways we could think through these conversations. The first relates to the ready self-objectification of the teenage girls in relation to their own appearance. Indeed, as many feminist screen theorists have noted (Felski, 2000; Gill, 2007; Pollock, 1987), the long history of representation of women’s bodies, and the culture of self-control and self-monitoring (Bordo, 2003 [1993]; Grosz, 1994) not only implicate women audiences in the process of criticism, they also celebrate and encourage a critical perspective on images of women. Indeed, the conversations in the group itself encouraged what we could call a culture of self-criticism relating specifically to appearance. One group member would exclaim about her hair or manner, and the others would reassure her or offer helpful tips (particularly around make-up, clothing or style). This seems to closely resonate Ros Gill’s understanding of the postfeminist body, which, as she argues requires, ‘constant monitoring, surveillance, discipline and remodelling’ (2007: 255).
However, while a certain amount of self-criticism was encouraged and expressed within the group, the other two groups were also critical of certain aspects relating to performance and appearance. One of the particular issues focused on by the male members of the third group, was around the voice of the teenage girl who concludes the clip with, ‘As you can see there’s a lot of spooky stuff that goes on around our school’. In the course of the week, her voice, captured on film, and repeatedly laughed at, or loudly proclaimed as annoying, became a central focus point for the other groups, who edited her voice into their documentaries, and threatened to showcase it to the school. This resonated with the power play demonstrated by the all-male group discussed above, and the threat, in keeping with their own documentary, was not only about making this participant visible, but distorting her performance in a particular way. In other words, it was not so much about visibility, as about constructed and reconstructed performance, and the power over representation.
Youthful fictions
Taken together, these conversations and processes of production of the final documentary, along with the final documentary itself, raise many issues about the interpretation of such material. Indeed, we could discuss a number of equally pertinent issues here to do with self-surveillance, identity, perception management, as well as further explore the concepts of power, and agency (for example). However, while there is not the scope to discuss such interpretations here, the discussion of the recontextualization and reinterpretation of the two pieces of footage demonstrate, at the very least, that we need to be cautious about the way we make such content mean. Such footage may be filmed by the teenagers, and may offer a particular mode of (self-) representation, which perhaps, less ‘creative’ methods may not accommodate. They may offer particular ‘insights’ into the behaviours and perceptions of the teenage groups, and the footage may tell us some interesting things about the social dynamics of each group, but we also need to consider the myriad and sedimented ways such footage, and performances are both produced and interpreted. Claiming this material as a transparent insight bleeds directly into the problematic constructions of youth as a particular kind of journey. In turn, this lends itself to further constructions of the individualistic, neoliberal agent who progressively moves through the ‘transitionary’ spaces of youth towards adulthood in order to attain the ‘goal of individual self-realisation’ (Gadlin, 1978: 236).
Along with the formative relations of the media, which seem to reflect the strong emphasis on notions of performance and the visible, it is also clear that these films continue to be used and negotiated in a multitude of ways following their production. Further, such negotiations recontextualize and generate new meanings, so that the footage does not operate as meaningful signifier on its own. It is clear that such films do not simply capture or reflect a particular journey. Instead, we need to consider the sedimented, conflicting and nuanced ways such films are constructed, reconstructed and understood by the teenagers, and the way such performances could be said to generate new activities and performances. Indeed, as David Buckingham argues, visual data does not:
Somehow provide more accurate or authentic representations of individual ‘beliefs’ or ‘attitudes. Data from visual research cannot be seen as transparent evidence of inner mental processes, any more than language can. On the contrary, all research data need to be analysed in terms of the context in which they were gathered, the social relationships among the participants, and the ‘expressive’ resources that are employed. (2009: 648)
As seen here, the audio-visual content produced, performed and negotiated by the teenagers can only ever be a partial, though important, element in understanding their relations with the spaces and places of their everyday. Further, while such methods may facilitate a certain amount of self-expression, they also reproduce the dominant discourses of individual and neoliberal agency that often mask, rather than elucidate the power relations at play. Finally, such content is also part of an ongoing negotiation, rather than an ultimate final conclusion, and to mistake it for the latter is not only to misrepresent such data but also to reproduce the problematic correlation of activity with a unique moment of generative agency.