Attending to others: how digital technologies direct young people's nightlife

Abstract

Abstract. It is a growing phenomenon that young people use mobile information and communication technologies during their nightlife. This article offers an empirical examination of how young people's nightlife is shaped by engagement with the mobile phone application WhatsApp. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's phenomenological concept of orientation, I examine how WhatsApp extends young people's nightlife and how young people become orientated therein. On the one hand, I show that nightlife acquires new boundaries and fixities that encourage young people to direct their attention towards missing social relations and absent nightlife places. On the other hand, I find that young people create new perceptions of how to inhabit and spend leisure time and space. I argue that digital technologies reorientate young people, which I suggest offers novel means of addressing young people's contemporary nightlife practices, places, spaces, and social relations.

My Own Private Nightlife

“…Furthermore, given that the concept of nightlife is broad and encompasses both the private and public spheres, a second promising line of future work could investigate the interplay between private and public spaces in urban nightlife, and how this is expressed digitally both in crowdsourced campaigns and social media. For instance, recent qualitative work showed that several participants in the Youth@Night campaign coordinated nightlife activities via Whatsapp [85]. This research could benefit from previous CSCW literature on coordination of action and social participation.…”

“…After the app-based data collection fieldwork, 40 qualitative interviews were conducted with study participants and focused on their experiences with the smartphone application, their experiences of nights out, and the ways in which mobile technologies shape contemporary nightlife [85], [86].…”

Applying Social Media Research Methods in Geography Teaching: Benefits and Emerging Challenges?

“…Twitter is a highly engaging medium through which fans network with others and access to these software communication tools stimulates them to manipulate and rework their identities, providing multiple lenses through which gender and sexuality can be expressed (Cockayne and Richardson 2017). Both these social media platforms offer innovative ways of engaging students within undergraduate teaching, as their lives are increasingly coded in time and space and often organize their social and cultural worlds through social media (Schwanen and Kwan 2008;Truong 2018bTruong , 2018a. Where WhatsApp and Twitter offer exciting opportunities in conducting qualitative research in geography, I will now turn to how they could be implemented in undergraduate teaching contexts, such as seminars and fieldwork and address their respective challenges and ethical issues.…”

“…As Haraway (2006) famously noted, cyborgs (and digital interfaces) have encouraged us to think about how our bodies go 'beyond the skin'. Haraway's 'cyborg politics' suggests how the digital influences subversion of the structures of language, desire, identity and social relations and how they can be recrafted by humans within digital platforms (Maliepaard 2015;Rose 2016;Jenzen 2017;Truong 2018aTruong , 2018b.…”

The emotional entanglements of smartphones in the field: On emotional discomfort, power relations, and research ethics

“…For most participants in this study, using their personal smartphone to take and share photographs and videos on weekend nights is also a familiar practice. They describe it as about “showing with whom you go out” (Jules) or “surprising” an absent friend with a video‐recording of a concert (Reese), or experiencing parts of the evening “even though I am not there” (Jamie) (see also Truong, ). Deploying participants’ personal smartphones in this specific research context seemed to fit into young people's normalities of going out.…”