Researching subjectivity as a critical approach to digital youth

Researching subjectivity as a critical approach to digital youth

Having undergone big changes in the last decade society and humans are in the middle of a shift towards more digital ways of life and being. The new technological opportunities and constraints fostered by the last twenty years of development bring about new questions and focus. As youth and children spend more and more time in front of screens, it is important to look at fundamental issues related to the ways in which the interplay of objects and subjects are cast anew.
In my research I’m focusing on subjectivity and how the investigation of this concept can open up to ways of understanding issues of both epistemological and ontological significance. Inquiry and research of subjectivity offers a possibility of critical analysis of notions such as identity, agency, and the role digital media plays in the contemporary understanding of youth. As Donald Hall pinpoints in his book “subjectivity” “Thus in exploring subjectivity, we are in effect exploring the “self” as a text, as a topic for critical analysis, both in and beyond its relationship to the traditional texts of literature and culture”(Hall 2004:5)
Ideas of phantasms, interfacing, and virtuality play important roles in my research and my approach to digital media and youth is mostly grounded in lacanian psychoanalytic theory. The approach offers a theoretical foundation for doing research on both individuals and socio symbolic structures.
In my opinion looking at the ways digital youth use social media in the construction of for example identity and approaching this through the lens of subjectivity offers a possibility of both analyzing particular individuals but also how individuals are subjected to certain structures and symbolic constructs. Furthermore the lacanian theory of communication opens up for a different approach to the relationship between sender and reciever(Lundberg 2012) and thereby a critical theoretical development of how synchronous and asynchronous communication affects the individual and identity construction.
Giving an example of the approach I have outlined, we can look at the daily social engagement through screens on various devices. When an individual engages with for example social media the screen can be said to also have the function of a mirror. Communicating with others through digital media we supplement the other’s speech by correlating the messages we receive with our own phantasmal or imaginary co-construction of reality.(Lacan 1997, Nusselder 2009, Harrell 2013). In this way we are also subjected to the working of our unconscious phantasmal functions.
When we start looking at communication this way the point of interest is shifted. Here it is not as much the message that is conveyed that is of interest, but how the message and the interface that conveys the message affects and interrelates to the imaginary co-construction of subjectivity. Thereby the focus shifts from the content of communication to the form and also to possible positions of the subject in identity construction and social engagement.