More than thirty years since Hannah Arendt's death in 1975 at the age of sixty-nine, her novel theory of the public realm continues to attract attention and debate. In this article, I contribute to this discussion by drawing on Arendt's theory of public life to investigate the space of youth media production in relation to questions of democratic habituation. Arendt is not typically thought of in relation to youth or media, but her concern for the nature of public acts, and for the way such acts expand our lives by producing worldliness, offers a powerful framework for thinking about teenagers' media production work.In what follows, I introduce Arendt's thinking on the public realm and then use her framework to examine the complex experiences of youth video production mentors involved in a summer digital media program located in Vancouver, Canada. I situate my review of the youths' experiences in Summer Stories 1 in relation to the development of what Henry Jenkins (2006a, 2006b) calls a culture of participation in contemporary Western societies. I note that while such a culture would appear to offer youth more opportunities than ever to produce their own cultural expressions, this does not mean such expressions are free of disciplinary practices that regulate and limit youth conduct. In fact, in a culture of participation we are seeing the development of new regimes of visibility that shape youth experience and agency to fit with the demands of The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 31:365-