Abstract
In this chapter, we lay out the key concepts through which we conceive and make sense of the diverse sites and themes that are explored in the remainder of this book. We firstly outline in detail what we mean by the ‘control paradigm’. Next, we take up the question of the import of the digital for adult framings of the social world, interrogating the ways both young people and the digital are constructed as exceptional. We then define the digital and elaborate our concept of the (digital) everyday, before turning to two other key concepts that underpin this study, namely, risk and resilience. Here, we are concerned with how we might reframe the idea of risk in order to better account for the role it plays in young people’s (digital) everyday. We argue that we need to move beyond framings of risk that connect young people’s digital practices with potential harms, and open up towards the ways that risk might also be a condition for opportunities for young people navigating the digital world. We argue that those with an investment in supporting young people’s digital practices must work towards forms of (digital) resilience that enable young people to grapple effectively with the risks—and thereby leverage the benefits—of the digital. We suggest that David Chandler’s (2014b) idea of ‘resilience thinking’ might help adults to achieve this. Lastly, we draw on the work of Hannah Arendt to conceptualize an ethical orientation to the idea of young people.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Today, the average PC’s processing power is 4000 MHz, and users connect via broadband of varying quality in different locations.
- 3.
We should note here that, for Lefebvre (2000), the routine of time supplements and sustains the ordering of space.
- 4.
Here we use technology, as Michel Foucault (1988) does, to describe a collection of techniques.
- 5.
Risk also refracts on notions of the past, primarily constructed in terms of potential loss—of tradition, of material assets, of harmony and balance, both spiritual and natural.
- 6.
We note here that the same does not apply to adults’ engagement with the digital. The risky dimensions of adults’ technology practices are both highly celebrated—for example, in popular narratives about the potential for digital disruption to remake cultural and economic order—and demonized—for example, it is claimed that digital disruption is disembowelling conventional economies and structures of labour (Gershon 2017).
- 7.
D. E. Alexander goes on to note that ‘at about the same time, further applications of the term were being made in coronary surgery, anatomy and watch-making… [The term’s] broad use in mechanics, and in particular [with regard] to the resistance properties of steel, parallels [its] application to analogous properties of yarn and woven fabrics’ (2013, 2710).
- 8.
See Resilient Youth (2019).
- 9.
For Nassim Taleb, a Black Swan is an ‘event’ that has three qualities. Firstly, it is an outlier in the sense that histories of thinking and empirical observation have not anticipated its possibility. Secondly, it has deep impacts on the ways we conceptualize and act on phenomena. Finally, thirdly, we retrospectively concoct explanations in order to integrate the Black Swan into a schema of predictability (2007, xvii–xviii). Taleb argues that the Black Swan teaches us that what we don’t know is far more relevant than what we do know. In light of this argument, we suggest that the young person who routinely meets extreme adversity with resilience may be far more consequential for our understandings of resilience—digital or otherwise—than we have acknowledged to date.
- 10.
To note this lack of understanding is not to underestimate the efforts that are underway to address this aporia. See, for example, the ‘Connected and Creative’ Research Program of the Young and Well Cooperative Research Centre (2011–2016) (Western Sydney University 2017).
- 11.
See 100 Resilient Cities (2019).
- 12.
Given the emphasis such initiatives place on ‘strategic planning’, they also represent the extension of a modernist account of the world insofar as they purport to be able to know and control the effects of complexity (if not complexity itself). Our review of the strategies of 100 Resilient Cities (2019) shows that children and young people are largely configured as the targets of actions, rather than as partners in the creation of strategies. Actions most often aim to improve access to parks and play-spaces, boost educational attainment, reduce youth crime and support employment, all of which frame childhood and youth as a state of ‘becoming’ (a normative, adult citizen), and locate children and young people firmly within the binary of at-risk/as-risk.
- 13.
At a press conference in Brussels in June 2002, Donald Rumsfeld, then the United States Secretary of Defense, famously said, in relation to the ‘War on Terror’: ‘There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know’ (cited in NATO HQ 2002). Known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns relate to knowledge formations under the liberal, neoliberal and general complexity paradigms, respectively.
- 14.
Taleb notes that most significant developments of our times—including, for example, the rise of Google—are shaped by this ‘highly improbable’ (2007).
- 15.
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Third, A., Collin, P., Walsh, L., Black, R. (2019). Contesting Control: Key Concepts. In: Young People in Digital Society. Studies in Childhood and Youth. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57369-8_2
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