1

2First, it reminds us of the need to account for social factors when studying young people’s relationships with culture, sociability, and communication, thus testifying to the enduring relevance of Bourdieu’s famous avowal: “’Youth’ is just a word” (Bourdieu 1993, 94). Gender, social background, education, and even, in one case explored here, religious cultures, all play a role in our engagement with the media, from its oldest to newest forms. All too often, these situational differences are nowhere to be found in work on new technologies, in which young people are regarded as a homogeneous bloc, as if their age bracket was enough to define them as a category.

3Second, it pays tribute to an element of creativity in the face of socio-technological systems—systems that, incidentally, young people are often far more adept at navigating than their elders. That is the benefit of growing up as a digital native: What they lack in expert knowledge, they more than make up for in sheer inventiveness. Over the course of their short lives, they have encountered umpteen new social networks. Changing fashions—and, very often, an aversion to sharing their territory with adults—have fostered a willingness to experiment and switch platforms en masse, without a second thought. So it was with MSN in the early 2000s (Metton-Gayon 2009), Skyblog just a few years later (Cardon and Delaunay-Téterel 2006; Fluckiger 2006; Delaunay-Téterel 2010; Balleys 2015), then MySpace (boyd 2014), Facebook (Bastard 2018), YouTube (Balleys 2015), and most recently Snapchat (Vaterlaus et al. 2016; Déage 2018). There seems to be an endless procession of new forms of peer-to-peer communication queuing up for sociological attention. Researchers have often picked up on communication tactics used to circumvent parental supervision, a constant of young people’s social media use highlighted by several articles in this special report. They have also observed how users play with the codes and symbols available to them to modulate expressions of social affinity within their peer groups, indicate romantic preferences, and signal their individuality. In short, sociologists of social media use will always be on a back foot as they try to map the diversity of practices devised by the young—something that comes through clearly in the five articles in this special report.

4At the risk of oversimplifying, we might divide them into two groups.

5In the first group, we have Julien Boyadjian and Cédric Barbier, with two very different research propositions. Boyadjian looks at how young people aged between eighteen and twenty-two relate to news content, whereas Barbier explores the response of high-school students and apprentices to a new film studies program. Their conclusions are strikingly consistent: in each case, social background had a strong influence on forms of cultural engagement.

6Julien Boyadjian presents the findings of a mixed-method study (involving a questionnaire, interviews, and online observation) with groups of eighteen- to twenty-two-year-olds of very different sociocultural backgrounds (students on “elite” university programs and those taking remedial or less prestigious courses). He goes on to debunk a number of common misconceptions about how this age group keeps up with current events.

7He begins by asking how these young people relate to “traditional” media outlets. Although social media has effectively become their primary information source and print media consumption has tumbled, television and, to a lesser extent, the radio are still regarded as important sources of news. Many participants, particularly those from working-class backgrounds, still watch television news on a regular basis, often with the whole family gathered around. His fieldwork also illustrates how participants tend to be shepherded to online news sites, “pure players” or otherwise, by “infomediaries” (primarily Google and Facebook, with Twitter some distance behind). In other words, there is no indication that social media platforms hold a monopoly on the news, and the information presented to any given user is heavily dependent on the algorithms deployed by intermediaries, now central actors in the media scene.

8Boyadjian then goes further, exploring how the two groups display significant differences in the very nature of their relationship to news content. What he finds is intriguing and quite unexpected. He demonstrates that young people from working-class or lower-middle-class backgrounds are more susceptible to non-information than to disinformation. Like all information goods deemed overly “political,” fake news is held at arm’s length as part of a politics avoidance strategy: “In most cases, participants on ‘mainstream’ courses (and particularly those with low levels of political engagement) show a tendency toward ‘avoiding politics’ (Eliasoph 1998) in their use of social media. They generally prefer not to comment on or share news content that they deem too ‘divisive.’” This reluctance to expose themselves to politically charged content, favoring “soft,” local, or sporting news instead, is coupled with an equal reluctance to engage with such content online. Very few will even risk a “like,” as shown by an analysis of sixty-four Facebook accounts. Here, we are reminded of Schradie’s proposition that a low incidence of online participation is closely correlated with educational attainment (Schradie 2011). For Boyadjian, then, social media platforms do not appear to have altered the tendency toward a somewhat detached and oblique relationship with news content among working-class groups, as confirmed by decades of research from Richard Hoggart in 1957 to Vincent Goulet in the 2000s.

9Young people from more privileged backgrounds are a different case entirely. They tend to have a much broader and more diverse exposure to news content, and a greater propensity to share and comment on posts. Engagement and interest tend to move in step, allowing us to distinguish between “enthusiasts”—who dip into every available source (traditional or new media, mainstream or alternative, well-known or amateur journalists, and so on)—and “utilitarians,” who follow current events to the minimum degree required by their courses, doing little more than scanning the headlines. Boyadjian demonstrates that Pariser’s “filter bubble” theory fails to stand up to real-life scrutiny, and that young people from privileged backgrounds are less selective in the content they consume on social media compared with other formats.

10Cédric Barbier’s article explores how a program designed for teaching film studies in high schools, LAC (Lycéens et Apprentis au Cinéma), has been used in practice, revealing the tensions that arose between teachers of a certain age and students of a certain social background over a legitimist approach to cinema—part of young people’s everyday cultural experience. Through an inquiry based on interviews and classroom observation, he demonstrates that LAC’s construction of cinema as art conflicted with young people’s own experience. For them, cinema was an easily accessible source of pleasure, and so the program was interpreted as a flagrant attempt to domesticate their own practice as teenagers at the local multiplex. The tensions around LAC will be instantly recognizable to readers of earlier studies by Levine (1988) and Ravel (2002) in the context of pre-twentieth-century theater audiences. This work explores the transition between a participatory practice, where the social element was of greater consequence than the work being staged, to a kind of corporeal asceticism that lent itself to an analytical response.

11At the same time, Barbier shows that the team behind LAC endeavored to reflect adolescent tastes by including mass-market films, while guidance and training for teachers encouraged them to consider how their own students derived enjoyment from cinema. Similar findings emerge from earlier studies, such as those by Florence Eloy on music education in schools (Eloy 2015) and Tomas Legon on the Collège au Cinéma program (Legon 2019). However, Barbier’s field observations introduce a fresh dimension. He points out that younger teachers are more skilled than their older colleagues at recognizing the value of mainstream films, since they feel closer to their students’ cultural experience and tend to favor a more eclectic range of audiovisual practices, particularly when using mobile devices. That said, Barbier notes that this sense of intergenerational cultural proximity is more helpful when working with middle and upper-middle-class students than those from working-class backgrounds, whose audiovisual cultural references remain narrow and fairly unadventurous. Practices around TV series provide a good illustration of this cascading process of educational and social selection.

12Our second set of articles also delve into the influence of social background, but here the focus is firmly on gender constructs. They offer a more direct look at young people’s tactics for overriding the designs of socio-technological systems and at how they use communication tools to project their own identities, emotions, and social bonds. We present three articles, each covering very different terrain. Barbara Fontar and Mickaël Le Mentec discuss the ambiguities surrounding female participation in the world of adolescent video gaming, while Francis Fogue investigates cellphone habits among young people in Cameroon and Yann Bruna explores French teenagers’ use of Snapchat.

13Fontar and Le Mentec present a very comprehensive study of video gaming practices among thirteen- to fifteen-year-olds, based on a questionnaire, focus groups, and individual interviews. Their robust sample allows them to look at a number of factors independently, including social origins, place of residence, and gender.

14Their quantitative analysis reveals a very evident gender effect. Some of these patterns are already well known, such as the fact that video games play a more significant role in boys’ play than girls’, who tend to favor more communicative activities. In fact, although more and more girls have taken up video gaming over the last fifteen years, certain lines of demarcation persist. Boys and girls do not play in the same settings, nor on the same types of console—and they certainly do not reach for the same games. There remains a rigid antagonism between action games and simulation games that contributes to the symbolic construction of feminine and masculine spaces.

15Their qualitative study, which focuses on gender transgressions and the contexts in which they occur, is especially insightful. In mixed focus groups, boys are distinctly scathing on the topic of girls’ gaming practices. While girls openly recognize or even boast that they enjoy playing “boys’ games” (multiplayer action games, for instance), as in the case of those used to playing these games with their brothers, the reverse is much more unusual. Here we have yet another illustration of the “differential valence of the sexes” principle elaborated by Françoise Héritier (1996). “So-called girls’ games are denigrated or even dismissed, being regarded as a ‘lower’ form of video gaming practice,” they write. While the “tomboy” label can be borne, “sissy” carries much more stigma (on this point, see also Paberz 2019; Chaulet and Soler-Benonie 2019).

16The final section of the article reflects on a particularly original question: “Under what conditions do girls acknowledge and broadcast their interest in video gaming?” The focus group evidence reveals disparities between geographical settings and social milieux. In urban settings, when interacting with others from privileged backgrounds, teenage girls seem much more inclined to declare and openly value their gaming practice than when their peer group is more rural and working class.

17Our fourth article is by Francis Fogue. Over several years, he carried out a study based on participant observation, interviews, and questionnaires with around a hundred young people aged between fifteen and twenty-five in Cameroon. All were enrolled in education, but their social backgrounds were very diverse, with the sample split between two cities and two cultures: a Fula group from Nguaoundéré and a Christian group from Buea. Cameroon suffers from high rates of poverty and insecure employment, and many young people end up living with their parents well into adulthood. A cellphone is a valuable emancipatory tool that allows them to maintain social and—especially—romantic relationships without a constant audience of family members. In this context, it is hardly surprising that younger generations are the most likely to have their own phones, both in urban and rural areas.

18Initially, Fogue was interested in learning how they had acquired their devices. It transpires that in most cases, particularly among younger participants, the phones were purchased by their parents—no small irony, when the very purpose of the device is to escape familial observation. Yet, we find the exact same pattern in Western countries, when children are on the cusp of adolescence (Havard Duclos and Pasquier 2018). Saving up pocket money or earnings from casual work is another strategy. More surprisingly, one very specific subgroup—Christian girls in Buea from very poor families—often reported that the phone had been a gift from a boyfriend. Any readers who have seen the 2019 film Atlantics by Mati Diop will no doubt recall the scenes where the joy of a romantic reunion was all the sweeter for the new cellphone changing hands.

19Fogue goes on to identify a whole series of gender-based differences in the role ascribed to these devices. Young men are expected to pay for their own phones out of their earnings, and are less likely to carry the latest technology. Young women, on the other hand, tend to be given theirs by parents or boyfriends, often the most recent models. However, the latter have to put up with much closer parental surveillance, forcing them to develop a very specific set of practices—for example, keeping their phones on vibrate mode, rather than letting them ring, and communicating by text messages instead of voice calls. For them, the phone is an instrument of emancipation, and so they are fiercely resistant to the idea that their romantic partner might have any right to peruse its contents. Granting a partner access to one’s phone is thus a declaration of fidelity. Meanwhile, the popularity of selfies also seems to be a highly feminized trend; only young women in the sample had downloaded apps designed specifically for this purpose.

20Finally, Fogue turns to an analysis of differences linked to religio-cultural context, by comparing young women’s cellphone use in the Ngaoundéré (Muslim) and Buea (Christian) subsamples. In Ngaoundéré, where young women must defer to masculine and parental authority in accordance with the pulaaku code, they tend to exchange messages with friends (male friends, in particular) at night, between midnight and 5 a.m. This strategy allows them to conduct a romantic life without their parents’ knowledge. It is a way of reclaiming a certain autonomy in social relationships that their cultural context forbids. In Buea, where parents are more accepting of romantic relationships and rates of teenage pregnancy and nonmarital births are fairly high, cellphones are associated less with secret intimacies and more with “economico-sexual” exchanges, to use Fogue’s term. Young women receive phones as gifts from male romantic partners whose connection with the family brings benefits to all, including the parents. Having a bushfaller (a boyfriend with money to spare, often someone who works overseas) is regarded as a piece of good fortune. The smartphones they gift to their partners are of higher quality than those available on the local market, and are compatible with low-cost messaging and social media services, typically WhatsApp or Viber. The cellphone has become “both a thermometer and a compass for the relationship.”

21The gendered nature of engagement with socio-technological systems also lies at the heart of Yann Bruna’s work on the use of Snapchat among adolescents aged between twelve and eighteen. His study, however, is centered on dynamics of acceptance/resistance, as he examines the findings of a small qualitative study based on interviews (N = 17). Snapchat is unique among social media platforms for its promise of impermanence: all content, text or image, vanishes after it is viewed. It upholds a gamified model of social relationships where users are rewarded for the longevity and frequency of their exchanges with icons including flames and emojis. Much of the existing work on Snapchat theorizes that the reason it is so popular among younger users is precisely that all exchanges are fleeting, allowing them to share sexual or otherwise inappropriate content in relative safety. Bruna’s study, on the other hand, begins by exploring the perspectives of young users themselves, discovering that the situation is rather more complex. Participants were found to be very aware of how the app uses icons to rate the intensity of their relationships. They can recite their own data by heart, easily recalling how many flames they have and how long they have managed to keep them going. In this respect, they seem entirely comfortable with how it quantifies and stratifies their relationships. Yet, at the same time, they adopt various tactics to undermine its fundamental premise: impermanence. Snapchat allows users to take a screenshot to keep a record of a message or photo, but doing so automatically sends a notification to the sender. This practice, known as “screening,” may provoke either gratification (indicating a desire to preserve an exchange for posterity) or unease (since the reason for doing it is unknown), and may be met, at the very least, with a request for an explanation. It is common for Snapchat users (especially teenagers) to get around this by covert means, by photographing the content with another smartphone. The young people in Bruna’s study “adopt a range of strategies in order to preserve certain content without placing themselves in unduly awkward situations, perhaps with unintended consequences.” Navigating these shifting, localized norms for expressing social affinity requires both significant reflexive skill and intensive practice. Bruna’s work also demonstrates that adolescent girls seem more invested than boys “in respect for the coestablished rules (set both by the app and by the young people themselves), but also more likely to evade them by finding ways to preserve content.” He reflects that this could signify a more well-developed desire to control their own image.

22Together, these five articles lead us down untrammeled paths in the sociology of social media use, not only in terms of the social and gender divides that structure fluency with socio-technological devices in youth cultures, but also of young people’s capacity for resistance, for thwarting the designs of companies with ever-more sophisticated ways of tracking and manipulating their social practices.

23In the Varia section, we find an article by Valentin Berthou and Gérald Gaglio on an entirely different subject: initiation into two Living Labs dedicated to health and autonomy. Drawing on both the sociology of innovation and the sociology of use, the two authors look at how these experimental ecosystems attempt to rally members to graduate from standard users, passive and inert, to the new status of cocreator. It helps to offer them an identity, recruiting and mobilizing them in accordance with the specific model adopted by each lab. Nonetheless, while open innovation theorists preach the virtues of user engagement, it tends to make only a very modest impact on how emerging technologies are defined and redefined. On the other hand, it adds lucidity to the designer’s work, facilitating the development of a concept that responds more closely to real user needs. It seems, however, that user participation in innovation design does not necessarily encourage wider engagement. Finally, the article presents a detailed and well-balanced analysis of efforts to promote more active involvement among Living Labs members.