Youth self-designs at the social media interface Aesthetic articulations of youth on and with social media platforms between 2012 and 2018.

Abstract

This cumulative dissertation is dedicated to the reciprocal relationship between youth practices and social media platforms. Seven essays discuss the results of two empirical studies in the research field of cultural media worlds of young people. The focus of the empirical research is the question of the design principles embedded in the practices of young people on social media platforms. On the basis of these principles, patterns of self-presentations that manifest themselves in the field of tension between platform and practices are worked out in a qualitative-reconstructive approach. From a transactional perspective, practices and platforms, modes of subjectivation and subject formations are examined as mutual constructions. A special focus of the evaluation here is on the media-structured exclusions and invisibilities of specific groups and practices. In order to understand the practices of young people in hybrid networks in terms of (educational) theory, a theory of transformative education that takes into account processes structured by media and a relational theory of education are brought together. Educational processes in this sense do not necessarily take place within the subject, but are located in hybrid networks. The dissertation project shows that in the context of the research field, a fundamental change in the relationship to the world and the self can only emerge with a systematic change in aesthetics and the associated expansion of the field of what of what is seeable and sayable. Show more