Koen onderzocht het gebruik van sociale media onder Londene jongeren met een niet Engelse achtergrond.

As young people move from one hot app to the next, Koen Leurs explains social media practices among working and (upper) middle class youth in London and finds significant differences in relation to family contexts. Koen is a researcher in the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE. He has a background in gender studies and currently seeks to understand how young Londoners engage with cultural diversity using social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

For young people in London, life is characterised by movement – across and between on- and offline ‘platforms’, across the city, waiting at bus stops, checking phones, communicating with friends and family who live both nearby and/or across the globe. For these urban youth, digital technology provides an opportunity to imagine themselves as part of a ‘community’ of fellow users, and to distinguish themselves from others. Shaped by their specific age, social class, urban location or ethnicity, these ‘digital imaginaries’ reveal how young people achieve independence online as they work out their relations with their parents and their peers.

In my research I interviewed in-depth 84 young people aged 12-21 living in the London Boroughs of Haringey, Hammersmith & Fulham and Kensington & Chelsea. These reflect three different urban environments – working, middle and upper (middle) class. All of the young people participating in the study owned smartphones and used a range of social media applications, reflecting access and user patterns among children in the European Union.

The importance of digital imaginaries – whether self-defined or in response to corporate ‘brand identities’ – emerged across my interviews. For example, 21-year-old Keith¹ described why young people prefer certain social media platforms: “… with my generation, it’s like everybody wants to be on the hottest thing, and when Facebook came out, you started to see fewer and fewer users on MySpace and everyone is on Facebook. It’s like, now, no one is really on Facebook, they are more on Twitter.” Because young people constantly move to the next ‘hottest thing’, most parents don’t think new technologies make ‘parenting any easier’, as a recent national survey of American parents reports.

Working-class youth fear their parents will catch up.

P.S. Koen neemt nu, op verzoek van de Londense Universiteit LSE, deel aan een groot congres in Porto Rico in de USA. Als U op de rode tekst drukt krijgt U meer achtergrondinformatie.