Teens, Social Media, and Pop Culture
Popular culture was also a key driver in the social media practices among Freeway students. While considerable attention has focused on matters like the increase in screen time and media consumption, teen social media practices also enable new modes of identity work and expressive culture.
Freeway students coveted social media and mobile devices because they offer an unfettered path to games, videos, and music. Social and mobile media also offer teens opportunities to explore their creative aspirations and new notions of self. As with previous generations of teens, for example, pop music was a central force in the lives of Freeway students. Music is central to the identities and communities that teens carefully construct and serves many different purposes—social, psychological, political—in their lives.29 Social media remakes the pop music rituals of teens in a variety of ways. In their engagement with social media, teens make meaningful social and psychological investments in music artists, genres, and narratives that reflect their desires, sensibilities, and aspirations.
No matter where they were in school—in class, in the hallways, hanging out with friends—Freeway students always seemed to be plugged into music via their mobile devices and earbuds. At Freeway, students followed their favorite bands and music artists through social media. Gabriella maintained a separate Twitter account just to coordinate her music interests. She enjoyed getting updates from the bands that she follows and hearing excerpts of their songs. Selena and Amina both posted lyrics they favored on Twitter. Users of Tumblr covered their walls with images and lyrics from their favorite artists. Fans of rap music used social media channels to explore hip hop’s digital underground, a creative world bustling with mix tapes (i.e., original rhymes accompanied with elaborate remixes of popular songs and beats), homemade videos, and constant social media chatter about culture, politics, and the mundane aspects of everyday life.30
Some students also developed customized media channels to coordinate their personal investments in pop music. In instances like these, teens took to social media to curate their own pop music interests and experiences. Kyle was among a handful of students in our sample who used YouTube as a music media destination. Music-related content on YouTube was a source of creative inspiration for him and the hip hop band that he experimented with. Many aspiring musicians and bands have adopted YouTube as a channel for sharing their music in hopes of connecting directly with audiences.
Sergio also used YouTube as his very own personal music platform. He visited the world’s biggest online video site every day, in part, to discover new bands. Sergio subscribed to nearly three hundred music channels, “mainly like independent musicians or bands who are promoting themselves on YouTube,” he told us. Students adopted YouTube to watch music videos, follow their favorite music artists, and build a community around their music-based affinities and identities. In 2014, Google moved to convert these kinds of music-driven interests and practices into a formal and more viable music streaming channel and revenue source called YouTube Music Key.31
Whereas corporate radio and pop culture brands like MTV were once the undisputed gatekeepers of teen pop music interests and identities, teens are immersed in a steady and fluid stream of social media interactions that are profoundly transforming the traditional flows of power and influence in the pop culture landscape. Corporate media remains powerful, but the intensity of its influence has been subtly and steadily altered by the practices and relationships enabled by social media. Many bands, especially upstart and indie artists, view social media as an opportunity to fashion their creative identity and connect directly with fans. Moreover, fans view social media as an opportunity to connect with each other and fashion their own distinct identities, communities, and sensibilities. Social media channels are just as likely as traditional media channels to influence teen pop music interests, tastes, and consumption. Among other things, shifts like these allow black and Latino teens to assert greater control over which media they consume, thus serving to bring greater diversity to the stories and storytellers they encounter in pop culture.
Pop culture is also a vital terrain of cultural capital for teens. It is a primary resource in the acquisition of in-group prestige and status.32 Through these and other social media activities, teens are not simply consuming pop music; they are actively fashioning a social identity that affords them a sense of self, status, and recognition among their peers through their engagement with pop music specifically and pop culture more broadly.
We observed similar dynamics in other spheres of pop culture, including gaming. Virtually every student that we met at Freeway played games. Jasmine used social network sites to play The Sims. Some preferred casual mobile games like Angry Birds. Other students made more intense titles like Call of Duty or immersive gaming experiences like Perfect World their primary gaming experience.
Students such as Miguel, Marcus, and Diego made substantial social, psychological, and personal investments in games. In years past their deep engagement with games would have easily been dismissed as a distraction from more meaningful uses of their time, especially time spent on academics. But their gaming and media practices challenge traditional concerns about screen time and screen-based media. More specifically, their activities underscore why adults should focus less on the amount of time that teens spend with media and focus more on the repertoire of activities they are engaged in and the kinds of literacies that they develop.
Miguel, Marcus, and Diego spent time playing games, but they also spent time studying the technologies used to create games. Miguel and Marcus did not simply “play” Minecraft; they used Facebook to join affinity communities around the platform and turned to YouTube to keep up with Minecraft channels that offered tips and tactics for developing a richer gaming, design, and user experience. Diego’s experience designing games in a summer enrichment project inspired him to start studying online tutorials during his quest to make games (in school) and build his own gaming computer (out of school). On closer inspection, their gaming activities established pathways to the kinds of literacies (e.g., media, technology, and design) and dispositions (e.g., exploration and experimentation) that schools struggle to develop. In fact, whether it was listening to them describe their gaming practices or observing their practices, it was impossible to discern the difference between playing and learning.
The Hidden Legacy of Social Media
For all of the criticism about the amount of time that teens spend with screens, one fact is undeniable: social media transformed black and Latino teens’ relationship with computer-based technologies and the Internet and arguably for the better.
In the 1990s a group of researchers from the University of Texas examined the digital divide in what they called Austin’s technopolis.33 The technopolis was a reference to the elaborate coordination between business interests, city leaders, and university officials to create a vibrant technology and knowledge-driven economy in Austin. One of the group’s more secondary findings was that some black and Latino teens, especially males, associated the computer and the Internet with geeks. During this period most African American and Latino teens had limited exposure to people using computers, and the majority of ads did little to dispel the viewpoint that the Internet was a predominantly white and middle-class activity. Thus, the primary image many black and Latino youth had of computer users were geeks whom they interpreted as uncool and unrelated to them. A decade later black and Latino teens’ notions of the Internet—who uses it and what it can be used for—had been dramatically altered, in part because of their widespread adoption of social media.
If the early years of computers and Internet use were constructed as predominantly white, male, and middle class, the adoption of social media by black and Latino teens certainly rewrote that narrative. A part of social media’s hidden legacy is how it transformed black and Latino teens’ relationship with computer-mediated technologies. Through their vigorous adoption of social media platforms like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, African American and Latino teens, and teens from modest social and economic circumstances began to cultivate a mix of computer-mediated literacies and forms of social capital that had never been associated with them. In other words, they began to develop their own distinct techno-dispositions while also charting very distinct digital media practices.
When Freeway students shared memories of their earliest experiences