Figure - available from: New Media & Society
This content is subject to copyright.
Source publication
This study examines the role of social media in the lives of youth living in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Feminist Standpoint Theory, which privileges the voices of marginalized communities in understanding social phenomena, suggests that youth at the margins have specific knowledge that helps us understand social media more broadly. We conducted s...
Similar publications
Sexual health of justice-involved youth in Australia
Citations
... Research on virtual third places in the U.S. have noted the relative ease to enter and leave these virtual spaces, for example, by withdrawing or signing-up to different social media platforms (Stevens, et al., 2017). Still, some platforms may require more user authentication, such as the NextDoor platform connecting physical neighborhoods (Gibbons, 2020). ...
... Widespread social inequalities exist in the U.S., especially on race, ethnicity, gender, economic status, and risk to violence. Regarding virtual spaces, while digital divides on access to the Internet have been closing, using the Internet as a source for financial, health, and educational information is still unequal (Gibbons, 2020;Stevens, et al., 2017). In MMO game spaces, there is still some stratification among users about the ability to play the game in question Williams and Kim, 2019). ...
... Virtual spaces can amplify conversations of conflict and violence of physical places (Stevens, et al., 2017) but also of neighborhood offline socializing (Gibbons, 2020;Shaw, et al., 2022). In MMO games, scholars found conversation to be critical. ...
Youth online engagement and well-being are especially important in emerging countries, but they tend to be understudied. Rather, the existing research tends to be more on the United States. This study examined third place theory of virtual spaces on individual-level well-being among the Generation Z from Brazil and China, especially comparing them to their U.S. counterparts. Well-being, both related to realizing your full potential and lowering psychopathology, is relevant to youth engagement in online spaces, because the spaces can help the youth express their true selves and engage in supportive online communities. The participants were players of a mobile video game whose three months of pre-survey gameplay data and survey data (N = 986) were analyzed. We compared countries on several third place characteristics, on well-being, and how the third place characteristics predicted well-being. We found that players from the three countries were significantly different in several third place characteristics (i.e., neutral ground, leveler, and conversation). Well-being was also higher among the Chinese players. Moreover, the leveler characteristic–commonality of game levels among players and their in-game friends–significantly predicted well-being. These findings from a mobile game help better understand youth online perceptions and behaviors in different countries, correlates to well-being, and contribute to the theory development of virtual third places and digital public spheres.
... Calderón señala que mientras el capital cultural se transforma en capital digital mediante la socialización tecnológica, el capital social se convierte en capital digital a través de las prácticas sociales y el apoyo. Finalmente, advierte, el capital digital puede transformarse en capital económico, vía redes profesionales y acceso a bienes, en capital cultural vía acceso a conocimiento, y en capital social, vía manejo diferenciado de relaciones sociales.En cambio,Stevens et al. (2017), realizaron un estudio cualitativo que examina el papel de las redes sociales digitales en la vida de jóvenes afroamericanos y latinos que habitan barrios con rezago social en Estados Unidos. Ellos encontraron que los usos de las redes sociales digitales tienen interacción con los escenarios offline del barrio, y reproducen las dinámicas negativas de agresión y violencia. ...
El artículo presenta un balance de los estudios sobre las brechas digitales y las juventudes. Parte de una revisión de investigaciones empíricas de escala internacional y latinoamericana, en torno al problema del acceso e incorporación de tecnologías comunicativas, publicadas como artículos científicos en revistas que forman parte de bases de datos indexadas. Se identifican y analizan los ejes y categorías que caracterizan los resultados de los estudios y se proponen elementos para una agenda a futuro que permita avanzar en la comprensión de las inequidades sociales y digitales, que parten del contraste empírico de los conceptos de vanguardia y el descentramiento de las experiencias juveniles escolarizadas. Fecha de recepción: 02/07/2024 Fecha de aceptación: 18/08/2024
... The real prom-ise and pathway to digital equity involve democratizing education and learning practices. For many young people, online spaces have served as outlets for community building, activism, and counterstorytelling [18,19]. Similarly, many promising online platforms and learning strategies leverage the increased ease of technology-based communication to allow a variety of voices to be heard and critical dialogues to occur. ...
We propose a definition for digital equity that includes leveraging fully online and blended learning to dismantle power dynamics and systems in society that perpetuate and legitimize educational inequities. For technology to support that aim, educators must acknowledge the non-neutrality of technology and work to mitigate the negative effects of differential use, algorithmic biases, surveillance, built-in normative assumptions, and online harassment. We start by describing the current state of digital ethics and equity in K-12 blended and online learning before concluding with suggestions for future research and recommendations for policymakers and educators.
... While reviews conclude that evidence showing social media causes mental health harms among adolescents is weak (Arias-de la Torre et al., 2020;Valkenburg et al., 2022), one emerging area of research suggesting harm investigates how adolescents use social media to engage with their residential context (e.g. Mels et al., 2022;Motley et al., 2020;Stevens et al., 2017). By residential context, we refer to the physical and social features that surround one's housing (Hartig & Lawrence, 2003), where examples of features include water contamination (physical), green spaces (physical), crime rate (social) and community organising (social). ...
... Of particular concern is the potential for social media to amplify the detrimental impact of residential risks on the mental health of adolescents from minoritised ethnoracial groups (Mels et al., 2022;Motley et al., 2020;Stevens et al., 2017). For example, Latino adolescents face residential risks like legal violence, which includes immigration policies that threaten deportation and ICE raids, that can lead to missed schooling, under-utilisation of health services and contributes to sleep problems, anxiety levels and high blood pressure for Latino adolescents (Barajas-Gonzalez et al., 2021). ...
... In abductive analysis, theory is developed to accommodate surprising findings. Consistent with previous research (Cano et al., 2021;Motley et al., 2020;Stevens et al., 2017;Tao & Fisher, 2022;Umaña-Taylor et al., 2015), the transcripts indicated social media was a way to aggravate how residential risks can negatively shape mental health, which was coded as amplification. Where the transcripts provided surprising findings were in the ways interviewees described using social media to counter residential risks, suggesting a mitigation process coded as diminution. ...
Despite alarms raised that adolescents’ social media use can aggravate the harmful impact of residential risks (e.g. local violence) to their mental health, the mechanisms are poorly understood. To better understand potential mechanisms, we interviewed Latino adolescents living in a hypersegregated U.S. city, for whom social media may aggravate existing inequalities in residential risks to their mental health. Through an abductive analysis, we identified two processes suggesting how social media can amplify the deleterious impact of residential risks to their mental health. We refer to the first as additive , whereby social media heightens awareness of residential risks. The second is extension , whereby social media lengthens one’s risk awareness, speeds up potential for risk awareness and multiplies who may become aware. We found evidence suggestive of parallel processes yielding diminution, whereby social media can minimise the deleterious effects of residential risks via adding and extending exposure to mental health resources, like collective efficacy. Further, the potential for extension (to both risks and resources) appears limited because social media practices (e.g. reposting, seeking viral attention) can foster indifference. Findings suggest the need to consider how adolescents activate resources via social media to avoid overstating its negative impact on mental health.
... Public discourse, even in the form of user-comments on social media, may influence health disparities among youth (Page, 2005), impact community and identity-construction of youth facing discrimination Hanckel et al., 2019), and directly undermine mental health of youth (Whittaker & Kowalski, 2015). Social media discourse often presents lower barriers of participation for youth (Loader et al., 2014), and can be mobilized to amplify marginalized voices in society (Nartey, 2022;Stevens et al., 2017). With regards to youth-led perspectives on how media is accessed by youth to impact their own mental health, significant public data on the internet exists to consider how youth themselves are shaping discourse on the issue. ...
Research suggests multiple links between popular media and youth mental health, suggesting that beyond media addiction and potential behavioural challenges, therapeutic benefits may likewise emerge. Building upon existing scholarship on bibliotherapy and cinematherapy, this paper posits that potential health benefits can be derived from youth-oriented popular media which elicit considerable self-initiated media consumption behaviours from youth. Specifically, existing literature suggests a research-gap on youth self-accessing transcultural media of anime to intervene against suicide. This study, in response, provides preliminary exploration of youth-led public discourse on this phenomenon via the public platform of Reddit. After a multi-phase selection for data-quality, analysis of 57 publicly-available, long-form text-narratives on social media reveals 49 unique anime-titles self-accessed by youth as suicide-intervention. Of note, youth report accessing anime as self-medication in place of alcohol, drugs, and painkillers—with potential effect to address depression and suicide ideations without substance abuse. Data suggests that anime may be used as an accessible tool for youth who face intersectional barriers in healthcare-access, while others youth explicitly describe mobilizing anime to find courage for (1) diagnosis; to (2) acknowledge one’s diagnosis, and (3) to complement their existing prescribed therapies. Implications for health equity and addressing the social determinants of health may be further explored, as youth-led popular media emerges with significant intersections with mental health of individuals lacking easily-accessible or financially-affordability psychosocial rehabilitation.
... Social media is a widely used communication tool for adolescents and young adults [2][3][4] with upwards of 84% of U.S. young adults reporting use of at least one social media platform [5]. These platforms are one of the primary sources of information for sexual health and HIV prevention [6][7][8][9]. ...
... As mentioned above, social media users are not only exposed to content, but they create and respond to messages online. In addition to publicly sharing perspectives and personal narratives in networked online communities, or what has been termed as "digital neighborhoods" [3], adolescents and young adults co-construct generational culture and navigate meaning making by knowingly or unknowingly deciding the salience of certain discourses over others among their peers. ...
Background
Adolescents and young adults account for over 21% of new HIV infections in the U.S. with most new cases among young men. As an important information source for this group, social media can uniquely reveal the perspectives and communicative patterns of this key population. We identified 6,439 young male Twitter users (ages 13–24) in the U.S. using an NLP pipeline with geolocations. From their Twitter timelines, we collected 24,600 HIV-related tweets, among which the most retweeted and favorited tweets ( n = 472) were analyzed through a content analysis.
Results
Three themes arose in this online viral discourse around HIV among young men: (i) othering , (ii) politics and activism , (iii) risk and wellness . Othering tweets contained stigmatizing jokes and insults alienating individuals who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex, asexual, or being elsewhere on the gender and sexuality spectrum (LGBTQIA +), and people with HIV. Politics and activism tweets discussed awareness, stigma, HIV criminalization, violence, LGBTQIA + , and women’s rights. Risk and wellness tweets discussed risk behaviors for sexually transmitted infections (STIs) (e.g., condomless sex, transactional sex, multiple sexual partners), or safer sex and preventive practices (e.g., pre-exposure prophylaxis [PrEP], condom use, achieving undetectable viral load, medication adherence, and STI testing).
Conclusion
The social acceptability of high-risk sex behaviors is high among young male Twitter users. Given the double-edged nature of social media—health-promoting (e.g., awareness, health activism) as well as risk-promoting (e.g., risky behavior endorsement, identity attacks)— this population may benefit from targeted health communication intervention. Future HIV prevention efforts should counter the stigma, misinformation, and risk-promoting viral messages prevalent on social media.
... Indeed, the category of youth is often used as a homogenizing force, lumping different kinds of young people together by effectively ignoring gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, and socio-political position for the sake of analyzing experiences through the lens of age (Durham, 2017). Adopting such a socio-cultural lens implies not falling into the pitfalls of what some of the scholarship on mobile youth culture has been critiqued of, namely, to infer from predominantly White and middle-class samples how young people's networked practices are mainly a collective expression of developmental trajectories into adulthood (Goggin, 2013;Stevens et al., 2017;Zhang and Leung, 2014). The experience of "being young" is furthermore constituted of a "here-and-now-moment" in which youths navigate their glocalized socio-cultural contexts (De Leyn et al., 2019;Goggin and Crawford, 2011;Sabry and Mansour, 2019). ...
... However, these "youthful publics" have been found to be only limitedly accessible to ethno-religious minority youths (Moris and Loopmans, 2019). Therefore, urban spaces remain the most important sites for ethno-religious youths to socialize, which in turn increasingly subjects them to the discriminatory gaze of White middle-class urban dwellers (Moris and Loopmans, 2019;Stevens et al., 2017). ...
The reciprocal exchanges of messages, likes, and pictures on social media are typical expressions of mobile youth culture. After all, it is well-established that young people’s disclosure practices support their efforts to maintain relationships, gain autonomy, and, by large, consolidate a place in the world. What is often missing, however, is an exploration of how the specific socio-cultural contexts of ethno-religious minority youths shape and are shaped by social media appropriations. Therefore, we conducted a 15-month ethnographic study among ethno-religious minority youths in which we investigated networked gift-giving practices. We stress the notion of “networked” because the results illustrate how these young people appropriate the amplified visibility of their relational maintenance behaviors on social media in order to negotiate status and social ties. We connect these findings to the concept of a “distrustful society” as the participants hold a general distrust in society due to experiences of racism and marginalization.
... Despite this, social media may be a useful tool to increase representation among diverse samples that are traditionally understudied in research. Yet, most U.S.-based studies focused on social media use have examined White or college-based samples (Stevens et al., 2017). Thus, there are still AYAs with diverse identities (including race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, houselessness, and disability) that are not adequately represented in social media research. ...
Engagement on social media among adolescents and young adults (AYAs) is almost universal. AYAs use social media for socialization, connection, and expression, as well as to obtain news and information. Adolescence and young adulthood also represent developmental periods characterized by the emergence of risk behaviors and many forms of psychopathology. Given that risk behaviors and mental health depictions are often displayed and observed online, social media platforms have become an optimal research tool to examine AYA behaviors that may not be visible offline. Social media platforms have the potential to increase recruitment and retention, especially among hard-to-reach, and understudied youth, and to connect AYA with resources for risk behaviors and mental health in a more naturalistic setting. Despite these advantages, the limited consensus on social media ethics across institutions and internal review boards, and the rapidly evolving features on each platform has made it difficult to develop study protocols, navigate and adapt to platform changes, and predict ethical issues that may arise in the context of research. Thus, the purpose of this manuscript is to discuss ethical considerations specific to AYA in social media research. Two research approaches, self-report and observational, are discussed with a focus on informed consent, privacy, and confidentiality. The goal of this manuscript is to highlight the nuances associated with social media research, and the implications for the promotion of ethical practices when adopting social media as a research tool to improve our understanding of AYA behavior.
... Discussions regarding the relationship between local community ties and technology use have explored various perspectives. These include the potential interplay between physical and digital neighbourhoods, where digital tools might sustain or enhance local community experiences (Stevens, Gilliard-Matthews, Dunaev, Woods, & Brawner, 2017). Additional discussions have involved the potential of technology to facilitate the formation and bolster existing social connections (Gibbons, 2020). ...
Technological environments change social interactions within local communities, potentially leading to the erosion of the sense of local community. In this study, we examined the social, psychological, environmental, and technological factors that predict a sense of local community. Employing a longitudinal approach, we analysed predictors of a sense of local community among Finnish adults aged 18–80 years ( N = 1,226) at three time points (spring 2021, spring 2022, and spring 2023). Our results, based on hybrid multilevel regression models, showed that greater neighbourhood engagement and perceived residential environment pleasantness positively predicted a sense of local community over time. Neighbourhood engagement, perceived residential environment pleasantness, use of neighbourhood technology, and positive attitude towards neighbourhood technologies showed positive effects and perceived loneliness and perceived level of urbanization negative between‐person effects, on a sense of local community. The results shed light on the determinants of a sense of local community and carry implications for broader community engagement efforts. Enhancing perceived residential environment pleasantness and promoting more active engagement within neighbourhoods could help increase a sense of local community. Future initiatives may also focus on utilizing neighbourhood technology as a tool to help strengthen a sense of local community. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement .
... Marginalized communities 1 depend on social media and digital technologies to meet their unique information and social needs, such as creating community support systems, exploring their identities, and finding identity-related information for their own well-being [16,23,33,43,53,57,61,65,68,89]. Despite how marginalized communities uniquely rely on social media for their own well-being, they also experience (in general and as specific social groups) disproportionate rates of content moderation and removals on social media platforms, even in instances where their content does not violate platforms' community guidelines [23,47]. ...
Marginalized social media users struggle to navigate inequitable content moderation they experience online. We developed the Online Identity Help Center (OIHC) to confront this challenge by providing information on social media users' rights, summarizing platforms' policies, and providing instructions to appeal moderation decisions. We discuss our findings from interviews (n = 24) and surveys (n = 75) which informed the OIHC's design, along with interviews about and usability tests of the site (n = 12). We found that the OIHC's resources made it easier for participants to understand platforms' policies and access appeal resources. Participants expressed increased willingness to read platforms' policies after reading the OIHC's summarized versions, but expressed mistrust of platforms after reading them. We discuss the study's implications, such as the benefits of providing summarized policies to encourage digital literacy, and how doing so may enable users to express skepticism of platforms' policies after reading them.
