Rosanvallon (2008), a historian and political philosopher, talks about the need to reinvent democracy: elections are not enough to ensure the system’s legitimacy and it is urgent to develop a democracy of “interaction”. His position, close to a form of deliberative democracy, also implies the reform of the current functioning of the representative system. This theoretical framework is different from one that opposes a liberal and individualist conception of citizenship to a communitarian conception. Nevertheless, it can be associated with Haste’s argument (2004) that one becomes a citizen through praxis. Haste and Hogan (2006) linked the moral to the political dimension, in relation to young people and citizenship. They argue that the distinction of private and public spheres in Western thought is not useful for addressing the motivational dimensions of political behaviour.

For the purpose of this paper the author adopts the normative and Western view that democracy, as a way to become autonomous, can only exist through constant re-invention, and a citizen can only “be” when she is empowered to participate in the creation of common rules. This is a way to say that meaning and central symbolic meanings are constructed, and only when we accept our responsibility as meaning-makers, can we exist as persons and not subjects. In this way, a human being is seen as a social animal, as communitarian arguments would suggest, but not every community or participation meets the criterion of autonomy that in Castoriadis’s thought has a Marxist and psychoanalytic dimension and is not linked to liberal perspectives as Taylor (1991) implies.

The concept of the “self” is used as dialogical, as a product and producer of a changing social and cultural context, for the purpose of this paper. This position derives from the socio-psychological tradition of social representations (Moscovici, 1984), but also from recent developments in the perspective of the dialogical self. The other is thus conceptualized as a constitutive part of the self in terms of a multiplicity of voices emerging from global-local dialectics. Hermans and Dimaggio (2007) alternate the concept of “self” with that of “identity” as in the title of their article “Self, Identity, and Globalization in Times of Uncertainty: A Dialogical Analysis”. In this review paper this author also alternates the term “self-efficacy and citizenship” as a dimension of a social identity. In an era of increased globalisation, the number and nature of voices of the self have expanded and increasingly involve mediated forms of dialogue. From the perspective of critical psychology, Papadopoulos (2008) provides a non-essentialist definition, of “identity”, inspired from the work of Vygotsky (1934). The main idea is that “identity” is never “identical” to what it used to be. The sense of self is on the move in a way, more than something stable.

Although self or identity as concepts can be highly ambiguous and imply tensions and contradictions, at the level of lay thinking, the self needs to be represented as a narrative with a certain continuity, in order to have a sense of well being, at least in western cultures (Hermans and Dimaggio, 2007). What is more, the possibility of projecting oneself to the future is essential not only for an individual sense of well-being, but is also an important dimension for a society or community (Mead, 1934; Butterworth, 1992).

Other conceptualizations of self that can be useful are those of Lahlou and Slevin. Lahlou (2008) proposes a conception of the representation of the self for lay thinking that enables us to make a link with technology and citizenship. He claims that the issue of identity is complex because it refers both to how we define ourselves from a subjective point of view and how we define ourselves to others. He distinguishes three dimensions: a physical (subject as body), a social (subject as a social position), and a biographical (subject as the product of past experiences and desires). Slevin (2000) draws from Giddens (1991) and views self as a symbolic project in late modernity. He refers to the distinctive tensions and difficulties which people have to resolve in order to preserve a coherent narrative of self-identity, what Giddens calls “dilemmas of the self” that can also be related to the “dialogical self” perspective.

This review paper is particularly interested in citizenship as the social dimension of the self and the way a sense of self-inefficacy, or a lack of recognition as an actor, can be constructive or destructive in re-establishing a sense of power for young people. This feeling has to do, on the one hand, with the dissolution of traditional ways to structure symbolic meanings after the end of the Cold War such as the left-right spectrum in Western society (Haste, 2004). On the other hand, it is linked to the intensification of globalization with the feeling of uncertainty that it brings (Hermans and Dimaggio, 2007). The understanding of what is positive or constructive is related to everything that enhances life and diversity that allows a construction of the “self” which is both a creation and creator of society. This derives from the political philosophy of Castoriadis, who links the notion of individual and collective autonomy and liberation, to democracy (1987).

The notion of citizenship cannot be limited to the nation-state. Citizenship implies a community, a group where someone can be a member, a citizen, but this paper focuses more on the socio-psychological dimension of the concept, especially since globalization and technology allow different representations of the communities we create and belong to. Local, national, global, but also virtual and imaginary communities can be taken into consideration.

Where things stand: Do young adults have a feeling of inefficacy in the public sphere?

If autonomy is a normative objective, this review starts from the premise that the feeling of inefficacy at the public sphere (Bandura, 1997) alienates youth from more conventional forms of participation in the representative democratic system. In that way, the social dimension of the self, “citizenship”, becomes problematic. The feeling of inefficacy is based in a number of “realities” that young people face in different European countries:

1. The formal education system is still inspired by a mentality of authority and hierarchy that is not accepted not only by the more disadvantaged youth but also from those who are materially and culturally more fortunate (at least in Greece) (Fragoudaki; Dragonas, 1997). Although it provides knowledge about the functioning of the political system through a range of different classes, it does not empower young people (Condor and Gibson, 2007). Since citizenship is conceptualized as dialogical (Hermans and Dimaggio, 2007) and action oriented (Haste, 2004), it is through the possibility of changing their everyday realities that young people could be empowered and this could lead to their being recognized by significant others as existing, acting citizens.

This dimension is not always present for a number of reasons. Resistance to authority as it was conceived in the past and materialized by institutions is one of the characteristics of younger generations according to authors such as Sanford (2007). The use of computers among high school students, according to Wighting (2006), contributes to the development of a sense of community that can be linked to academic success. However it does not change the structure of an education system that could be defined as “monological” in the sense that accurate information and knowledge is “top down”. On the other hand, education can lead young adults to higher and more sophisticated expectations of the political system than older generations (Bennett, 2008).

2. The material condition of young people and the less young that is characterized by mobility, the sense of the ephemeral and insecurity.

Youth as a social construction

Youth, as a sociological category, seems to extend at least to 30 year-olds, according to the way researchers in the social sciences set up their categories in Europe. Although there are researches that still refer to 12 to 21 year-olds as the young people (Haste and Hogan, 2006), there are many others in different European countries that define young adults as the 18 to 30 year olds: for example, the research report of Laaksonen (2000) on young people in Finland, Sweden and Germany refers to young people as “18-29 years-old”. In other cases, there is reference to the “generation of 20-40 years-old”, as Generation X (Sanford, 2007).

Concerning questions of life style, the 20-40 years-old could have a lot in common: this has to do with their precarious life-style that is extended more and more not only in Europe (ie Laaksonen, 2000), but also in the United States (Heiman, 2001). A stable relationship, job and independence from parents that used to be the criteria for entering the world of adults, seem to be postponed indefinitely, since youth is not only a biological but also a cultural value and social construction (Galland, 1993; Cicchelli, 2001). In that way, an ageing European population extends youth further and further, so there is no clear limit since certain “youth” lifestyles are adopted by older populations. Jobs are less and less stable, in different levels of the social hierarchy, as is income.

Changing jobs is also related to mobility, within the same country or abroad, or between different professions. Sanford’s report (2007) concerning the USA concludes that mobility is only going to increase with higher levels of education. The decline of fixed benefit pensions and increasing globalisation imply that social capital definitions that rely on more stable residency patterns put them at variance with individual realities and engines of economic growth. Even for more fortunate, well paid young adults, there is an alienating effect of the question “which is the community I belong to?” and a work affiliation that alternates with unemployment is not enough to offer an alternative to the weakening of more “traditional” social identities, national or local. Relationships can be less stable due to this fact. For the more disadvantaged, this feeling of the ephemeral, and the inability to project oneself to the future, gives a feeling of marginalization. Why vote for tax laws if one doesn’t pay taxes? Bennett (2008) and Heiman (2001) imply that this position could be a sign of sophistication.

Class differences exist, of course, and so does gender, but the author’s hypothesis is that there is no category excluded from this trend or from the feeling that they don’t matter. Apart from income, other characteristics differentiate the social dimension of the young generation’s representation of the self: there are many differences related to their culture, gender, religion, and their interaction, to give a few examples. Minorities, for example, or young Muslims could face different challenges from the majority of young people. Hopkins and Hopkins (2006), mention the lack of studies on how minorities conceptualize stigmatized identities, for example, British Muslims’ conceptualization of “Islamophobia”. This tension is related not only to the traditional public space of the nation-state but also to the local and to the global or cosmopolitan space.

3. A sense of inefficacy and “empowerment” through violent communities, or a subversive way to practice democratic values.

Could the “Local” dimension be the solution to autonomy and empowerment? Sauvadet (2006), in a series of interviews and participant observation with “dangerous” youth (that for him extends at least to the age of 35) of the French banlieus, the suburbs, insists on the link between the material conditions that lead to a lack of a space of their own and to them being on the streets, the prolonged periods of unemployment and especially the fact that they cannot become materially independent from their parents, for which they are criticized. But most problematically they lack the facility to project themselves into the future (Wakslak et al, 2008). The community they belong to, their “gang”, could represent a community where they matter, but in a destructive way since they are stigmatized by the larger society.

This sociological research is relevant to social psychological findings (eg. Klandermans, 1997; Stümer and Simon, 2004) that individuals for whom group identity is more relevant are more likely to participate in collective action than individuals for whom group identity is less relevant. However, there are different types of “collective action”. Van Zomeren, Spears and Leach (2008) who study two psychological mechanisms of collective action, differentiate two ways to deal with collective disadvantage: one, problem-focused coping and two, emotion-focused coping that seems relevant for the angry youth of the “banlieus”. Studies on the affective component of relative deprivation show that it is linked to collective action (Smith and Ortiz, 2002). What is more, the power of collective identification to mobilize people for collective action has been proved to derive partly from processes of identity affirmation (Simon, Trötschel, Dähne, 2008). So, the young disadvantaged and migrant youth who organize either in drug dealing enterprises, or in violence, practice collective action and certain values of a democratic community.

A study that involved participant observation with a crack gang, done in Chicago by Venkatesh (2000), a social anthropologist, comes to similar conclusions concerning the life of the community: the gang was one of approximately 100 branches or franchises, of an organisation. The college educated leader of the franchise reported to a central leadership that was called the board of directors. Three officers reported directly to the franchise leader. Beneath them were 20 foot soldiers, dreaming of becoming officers, and 200 members who paid dues to the gang for protection, or for the chance to become a foot soldier. Although certain aspects of this organisation are similar to that of a business, the way the leader took care of his people and their families is similar to that of a community where each member counts: the gang invested in “community events” which would include paying for a dead member’s funeral and giving a stipend of up to three year’s wages to the victim’s family: “Their families are our families, we been knowing these folks our whole lives, so we grieve when they grieve”.

In that sense communities can be of utmost importance, and “helping with the community” a sign of civic involvement, but the type of community could also differentiate the outcome. The particular character of a community could have different effects on their members and enhance (or not) democratic values and autonomy. The way in which the local community relates to the national or global level could also be an important variable of the configuration.

4. At the level of the nation-state, disaffection from conventional political parties whose role is traditionally to be a channel of participation and legitimate expression of contest in the public sphere, means disaffection from traditional forms of contest. It seems that dissatisfied youth do not use them to mediate their anger. The public sphere becomes the “macrocosm” where they are not important (Magioglou, 2008). Feelings of belonging to a national community such as the British, the Greeks, the Japanese, do not always signify confidence in the state and the importance of participating in elections that do not change their everyday life. Single issue politics are the result; (for example French youth demonstrating against a law of the Right Wing government in 2006 that proposed a special “youth” job contract of limited duration, or Greek youth demonstrating against changes to the education system, or the anti-war movement).

Several studies in the last ten years have demonstrated political apathy, cynicism and the lack of political participation by young people in the political system. Their results refer to “conventional” forms of political participation that include voting and party affiliation. The MORI Omnibus survey in 1996, for example, demonstrates that age is a key determinant of involvement in formal politics. 40% of 18-25 year-olds did not vote in the 1997 election in Britain; until 1997 the average age of party members was 48 for the Labour Party and 62 for the Conservative (Fahmy, 1999). This research has drawn attention to the consequences of growing economic marginalization of youth in terms of their access to social rights of citizenship (Haste, 2004).

Political apathy is related to the impact of economic and social hardship, according to Pacheco and Plutzer (2008), using data from the National Education Longitudinal Survey, 1988-2000 for the United States. A random set of 80% of respondents was selected for follow-up interviews and 50% of those students completed the entire panel. Their results show that disadvantage in the family of origin is correlated with later markers of disadvantage and all have negative impact on turnout for voting. Bontempi and Pocaterra (2007) found that youth voter turnout in most European countries has declined significantly, despite rises in education and income, particularly in long-established democracies like the United Kingdom.

In a more recent study concerning the forms of political participation in England, such as the MORI polls for the Nestlé Family Monitor (2003), the figures for expected “conventional” political activity were similar to the international average but for “unconventional” activity including legal and illegal protest they were well below (28% for England, compared to 44%, the international average to participation in non violent protest). Haste (2004) argues that this data prove the change of the notion of citizenship and democracy for young people, together with the way they co-construct narratives that make sense of experience. This interpretation can be applied to the way other European young adults, such as the young Greeks, represent democracy (Magioglou, 2008).

However, if the notion of “political” is extended in order to include a “moral” dimension, there are results that claim that the young people are politically active. Haste and Hogan (2006) have argued that alienation, or a feeling of inefficacy, could be associated for the case of the British youth with the “conventional” forms of political participation, such as voting. On the contrary, there are other forms of civic engagement, such as helping with the community and making one’s voice heard, in which the British youth engage. The findings are based on research carried out in 2005 using on-line questionnaires and interviews in schools. Participants were from 11 to 21 year’s old. Only a quarter of the population was inactive in the civic domain as defined by the study. Although these findings are very optimistic, certain items were linked to a normative action and the attributes of the “good citizen” questionable: for example, a vast majority of the participants thinks that obeying the law is very important (90%) but only 48% would protest against a law they believe unjust. Obeying the law could be a way to respect common rules, or a way to respect a reified “power” one has nothing to do with. More qualitative analysis could illustrate the meanings related to that. At the same time, helping the community could be extremely important unless the young person is taking up predetermined, “monological” roles. In this case it is far from being an act of citizenship the way it is usually understood.

A study that focuses on the representation of political participation with a qualitative approach is that of Condor and Gibson (2007). After a conversation analysis on interviews with young white adults from 18 to 24 years old, and following Billig’s perspective on ideological dilemmas, (Billig, 1988), Condor and Gibson argue that everyday understanding of political participation showed dilemmatic tensions. These tensions were situated between values of active citizenship, on the one hand, and norms of liberal individualism on the other. More specifically, Marquand (1991) argues that the British liberal individualist ethos is associated with a “passive” model of citizenship: one in which the public sphere is understood to be populated by autonomous individuals who, far from having a duty to participate in public affairs, are accorded rights to protect them from interference by the community. Concerning political efficacy, the respondents expressed the view that their vote would not make any difference or it made no difference which party was in power. Although they justified political disengagement as usual or appropriate for people of their age or stage of life, these same individuals also tended to orient to a normative assumption that political engagement was a marker of maturity and civic responsibility. In conclusion, the authors questioned whether everyday understandings of responsible citizenship entail injunctions to political action.

These findings are similar to results on the meaning of democracy for young adults in Greece (Magioglou, 2008). Part of the participants, a group that was defined as using a “consensual” way of thinking, saw themselves as citizens “to be”. They considered that for now, they would apply democratic values in their “microcosmos”, waiting to be fully integrated socially, to be effective in the public sphere. They had a strong feeling of political inefficacy, but that didn’t matter for the time being because they belonged to a group with justified optimistic aspirations of upper social mobility. Either their family was well off, or they were in a sector with job opportunities, and they focused on becoming more independent financially and socially from their family. This group was considered to be in a state of a “waiting room”, postponing their life as citizens. However, for the bigger part of the sample, this situation was associated with anger and feelings of alienation.

Trends: the role of new technologies and self efficacy construction

The public appeal of films of popular culture such as ‘The Matrix’, is an example of the link between a feeling of inefficacy and the fears of the digitalised world to come. Philosophers such as Zizek (2004) have analysed its importance using a Lacanian method of reading the reaction of the public: the role of ‘The Matrix’ is seen as the reduction of the subject to a total passivity, of its use as an instrument. Is liberation possible? Can the digitalized world, on the contrary, provide the means to a form of liberation from the state of subjection and inefficacy, and contribute to the creation of autonomous citizens? It is interesting that the scenario of the film is so close to a case of paranoia reported in 1919 by the psychoanalyst Victor Tausk: a group of schizophrenics believed that their problems were caused by an “influencing machine” operated by alien forces. The patients saw the machine as feeding on the emotions and “souls” of human beings unconscious of their true state. Indeed for these patients, knowing about the machine that is “seeing” the real, could be fatal because … it revealed the givens of everyday reality to be fabrications. Sanal (2008), who mentions this case, concludes that to this day, the use of machine metaphors marks persistent fears of invasion, possession and authoritarian control.

Lahlou (2008), a social psychologist, considers that there is a process of digitalization in society where three levels, the physical, the mental and the institutional guide subjects into their activity track. The physical level refers to material reality and artifacts, it provides affordances (Gibson, 1982). Representations and practices provide possible interpretations of the situation and enable subjects to elaborate and plan behaviours. At a social level, institutions set the rules to be applied to maintain order and foster cooperation and communities of interest. He points that ten years ago Google did not exist and that now, children’s sociability is made up of SMS, blogs, chats and instant messaging. Although these systems are designed tec-down, teenage sociability is one of the outcomes of these techniques. At the cognitive level, Alexandrov’s findings (2008), based on experiments conducted on animals in neuroscience, concern learning processes. They show that by training our children with digital-learning techniques, using them on an everyday basis, we are modifying at the neural level, the very way we perceive the world. The brain for him is a system in which every new learning is built on existing structures and modifies the previous organization. Therefore, previously formed behaviour is modified by forming a new behaviour. Even “classic” objects take on a new meaning in this new context of practice.

Lahlou (2008) adds the notion of “face” and “persona” as dimensions of a person’s notion of “identity” in the digital world. If a person’s physical “identity”, the body, is of limited value in the digital world, according to Lahlou, the social, psychological and subjective dimensions become the useful cues for transactions and interactions in the digital world. “Face” is more than the mere presentation of self as considered in Western psychology, following Goffman (1963). He includes in this notion the Eastern Asian sense of moral integrity, intention, position, propriety and outward behaviour.

The notion of “Persona” has also been used in the ICT literature, especially for interaction in media spaces. It is either considered as a partial individual construct, a sub-self or alias, created as an agent or proxy by the subject, or as a passive identity created by gathering activity traces of a subject (Clarke, 1994). The “Second Life” game is a virtual space where Personas are used. However, it is considered that in both cases of “face” and of “Persona”, there is an active role of the person who is creating and using them in the digital world, giving a sense of power and efficacy. Negative experiences are also possible (Helsper, 2008), but that does not limit the possibilities for a new sense of efficacy.

Possible directions with the help of digital media towards a feeling of efficacy and empowerment in new “spaces”

Magioglou’s data in Greece (2005; 2008) show that the reaction of young adults to the sense of inefficacy is taking two directions that could be expressed in a constructive or destructive way:

a) the exercise of democracy in the private sphere of the “microcosm” which means one’s physical self, the family, circle of friends, communities one belongs to (face to face or virtual, connecting through the internet). The microcosm can become extended through the possibilities technology can offer in the digital world, and the “personal becomes political” as Giddens has argued. In this way, the delimitation of what counts as moral and political change, together with the meaning of the political itself (Haste and Hogan, 2006).

b) Refusal of the actual national or international political system and adoption of a mystical, spiritual and virtual conception of democracy, associated to the meaning of life, to love and beauty. Violence is not excluded as a means to an end, but no participants could find an alternative that was worth or plausible to fight for.

In both cases, Maglioglou considers that technology is used either as a means to escape from the feeling of inefficacy, even in destructive ways, or as a means to create new realities, and it is closer to the notion of citizenship as a form of autonomy. An example is the participation in alternative groups and communities that organise altermondialist manifestations.

The sense of inefficacy and the physical dimension of the self

Contrary to Lahlou (2008) who underplays the role of the physical dimension of the self in the digitalized world, several studies show its importance. The body, as part of the self and a means of interaction with otherness, could be a dimension where one could feel important, using different ways to dress and express oneself (Riley, 2008); having eating disorders, using drugs or stabbing, having sex. There is a sense of immediacy and a sense of control that is a possible way out of the feeling of inefficacy. The facility of younger generations with new technologies offers another option where one could “matter” by creating or participating in already existing communities, based on new forms of subjectivity. The case of the “pro-ana” (pro-anorexia) websites is a combination of both dimensions for a creative, but destructive form of “citizenship” and empowerment that combines one’s physical and virtual reality. Giles (2006) describes how people who share experiences of eating disorders create a cyberspace community where they can meet virtually in a positive and supportive environment. The community creates specific rules of inclusion-exclusion and the result is, as the author says, a “rich tapestry of identity work”. Different subgroups are created and the boundaries between them are contested. This example is a way of creating a community where one “matters” but in a very self- and group-destructive way. Hermans and Dimaggio (2007) mention a big increase in cases such as eating disorders, which are associated with identity problems.

In the case of disadvantaged young people, there may be a lack of access to technology (Bennett, 2007) because of the absence of material (computers, space to work on the computer); and the family TV is not very accessible since they share it. Violence could take more or less digitalized forms. In the case of violent youth (stabbing for adolescents, drug users) there is a possibility of feeling that one “matters’ and a sense of negative efficacy through the destructive use of one’s or other people’s bodies. Terrorist groups networking through the internet could be a digitalized way to express anger and construct a positive self identity, by relinquishing one’s autonomy.

In contrast are the examples of globalized altermondialist social movements which organize through the internet and bring together many people from different geographical areas which share cultural, ideological and political characteristics. They show how virtual communities are also real and participate in the public sphere, proposing a point of view in a constructive way. The work of Della Porta (Della Porta et al, 2006) on “globalization from below”, shows in a series of studies how altermondialist demonstrations were organized in Italy against the G8 in Genoa and the ESF in Florence, protesting against a certain form of globalization. The demonstrations expressed a strong demand for political participation that political parties no longer seemed able to respond to. Protest developed outside the parties and presented strong criticism of representative democracy. Although exhibiting a slow start, some concerns start to be debated by left wing parties.

What is the percentage of young adults in this movement? Taking into consideration the importance of communication through the internet, and the facility of younger populations with it, we assume that they form an important part of it. At the end of the book the authors affirm that citizens’ trust and interest in conventional forms of democratic participation seem to be reduced and that “the new cycle of protest is witness to a growing demand for politics, albeit of a new, unexpected type, in particular from the new generations”. Held’s notion of cosmopolitan democracy could be close to this kind of civic engagement at the global level (Held, 2008).

New forms of efficacy in a new kind of public space: digital mobs and dialogic publicness

Self efficacy could be strengthened through the use of control and the expression of one’s opinion that the internet allows. However, if the formation of a digital public opinion becomes the “Panopticon” of Bentham, this could be another negative way to practice self-efficacy. Dennis (2008) mentions the case of the “dog-shit girl”, name given to a girl by South Korean bloggers who refused to clean her dog’s shit on the subway,. A passenger took a picture of the girl and posted it on a popular Korean website. Soon after, people started searching for her identity until they found her, in order to “punish” her for her behaviour. Within days, her pictures and parodies where everywhere, and were soon transferred to Western sites. The girl in question had to quit university because of the humiliation and even contemplated suicide. Dennis, using also other examples, raises the question: are we facing the constitution of “digital mobs” with a mass psychology, which find new techniques to exercise their power? This kind of “public opinion” amplified through the use of new technologies such as mobile phones with digital cameras and the internet could have destructive or constructive aspects, depending on the way they are used. The result also depends on whether the social dimension of the selves, this tec-citizenship, does or does not involve a notion of responsibility (Haste, 2004).

In a more positive framework, Slevin (2000) speaks of the dialogical mediated publicness, the possibility to create “dialogical spaces” through the internet, which was not the case with the television and the radio. Sanford (2007) found through written surveys and oral interviews with young people in Austin, from 2000 to 2003, that the respondents thought quite deeply about public life and civic involvement when given the opportunity. Her research objective was to test Putnam’s assumption regarding the typical characterizations of Generation X actors (which includes for her 20 to 40 year-olds). She claims that the respondents are actively involved in a new form of civic life. In the contemporary economy, increased mobility is a fact of life. Increasing educational levels have long been associated with higher levels of social involvement but also with higher levels of mobility. A “just in time” social capital activities will become the norm.

However, the population she refers to, and the categories of “tech elites”, “cyber-democrats”, “wireheads” and “trailing Xers”, is composed of young people who belong to social and cultural elite. They lead technology companies, work in the intersection of politics and technology, are cubicle dwelling functionaries or students. Instead of privileging the vote, they place greater value on the work ethic and on being politically informed and active. They reject formality and structure in favour of greater responsiveness. They see technology as a powerful tool and they are creators rather than joiners. They place personal choice over transcendent obligation and they embrace a more personal sort of reciprocity where one asks for help to animate a personal cycle rather than do something nice and animate an abstract social cycle. They look for low social barriers of entry and exit and they enjoy creative work, easily blurring the lines between work time, social time, personal time and community time. The author has an “individualistic” conception of this generation that is quite different to the young public who participated in the humiliation of the “dog-shit girl”.

Conclusion and future prospects

The question that should be raised is in what ways education could empower young people so that they become “autonomous” citizens, confident that they matter, and creators of meanings and narratives instead of meaning-consumers and subjects. The question is also how the feeling of inefficacy could be overcome in a way that respects “democratic values” and doesn’t result in the physical or symbolic destruction of self and others in order to feel empowered. The more mobility becomes the norm and youth becomes extended as an in-between unstable category, the more education could become dialogical and reach young and less young populations on the move.

The young people who watched ‘Matrix‘, and adhered to the conception of a reality of alienation and relinquishment of one’s autonomy by a digitalized world, those who were seen in the US as “slackers” (Heiman, 2001), were, with the dot.com generation, or the “digital natives” those who also massively voted for Barak Obama. In ‘Matrix‘, resistance starts from an awakening from the false consciousness to a “new” reality, that has a common point with the old one, it is exclusive and it is the “truth”, a way to see things that extinguish ambiguity. However, uncertainty seems to increase as people become more mobile and communities can both threaten and sustain autonomy. A youth gang of drug dealers can be an example: young people learn their respect for a sense of hierarchy, courage, solidarity, even a notion of business and deliberation. The community enhances their self-esteem and also makes them feel empowered, that they matter. Fundamentalist communities could also function as a haven where certain values of participation can be learned and practiced. The pro-ana virtual communities are another example of a creative form of identity construction that combines a physical with a symbolic dimension. In the past, fascist and Nazi regimes took pains to integrate the youth into some forms of organisation and participation was often obligatory.

However, there is a problem with this kind of communities. They do not work towards a form of autonomy or some kind of “liberation” both of the self and of the group or society one belongs to. That is why it is alarming that the category “obey the law” is deemed important for a good citizen for 90% of the British youth. If the law is something that is imposed from outside, a kind of reified power, this is the way a subject of an authoritarian rule would also answer.

The results of the USA elections in November 2008, show a different direction and could be considered a “surprise”, or what Haste (2008) has characterized as a “knight’s move”, with the proof of massive mobilisation of the younger generations for Barak Obama. The internet seems to have played an important role for this mobilisation. Is this a proof of the “return” of the American youth to the traditional ways of political participation? Is it something exceptional or will it create a phenomenon that will also influence young people in other parts of the world? It is already significant that young people outside of the US have manifested their support, so it could be an event that will change the way younger generations have related to politics in the last two decades.

Bennett (2008) finishes his chapter on changing citizenship in the digital age with a question: “are politicians, parents, educators, policymakers, and curriculum developers willing to allow young citizens to more fully explore, experience, and expand democracy, or will they continue to force them to just read all about it?” The question for this review is: are we supposing that we have a perfect political system and our only preoccupation as societies is how to replicate it and indoctrinate young generations? But even if the answer is yes, maybe democracy is about re-invention, creation and re-creation of the self and our communities in a way that we take responsibility for our meaning and policy making in our every day lives. Digital media offer new possibilities by being “dialogical” and groups with less power that can use them such as young people could enlarge their political “power”.

Education, which used to be related to school and university, could become also more dialogical and flexible. Formal education could turn to a “laboratory of a polis” instead of restricting civic education to the transmission of knowledge for a world that seems to be out of reach, or that does not concern young people’s everyday life (Coleman, 2006). Concerning the future, the way the different actors will interact, the role of specific events and their symbolic power, could show if we take the direction of greater autonomy for self and society. However, the risk of higher degrees of flexibility could be overwhelming for persons or groups who seek ready-made ideological and heteronomous ways to relate to one another.

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

The remit of this paper is to provide key information about either the current state or developing trends in the interaction of identity and disability, and where possible to make links with these and the future of education.

The paper addresses a number of issues judged to be current and important, including:

• The problems inherent in a medical model of disability, and the successes and problems inherent in the social model of disability
• The struggles of the disability movement to counter social barriers to disabled people within society, and to position disabled people as active and vocal – this trend is also seen within education
• Though technological advances may hold promise of some level of ‘cure’ to disabled people, research suggests that half of disabled people would not want to be cured for reasons of identity
• The importance of seeking out the viewpoint of disabled people themselves
• Constraints imposed by the use of dichotomous concepts in a range of fields
• The issue of multiple identity
• The question of disclosure of disability

These issues are linked to the future of education by signposting:

• The need for change in the structure of education, toward one that addresses disability inclusively as a matter of relevance to all students/pupils, teachers and leaders in education
• The need to direct focus onto the ways that education disables children and young people, and away from a primarily ‘within-person’ view of disability
• The importance of listening to the voice of disabled children and young people, and a need for increased amounts of educational research that does this
• The need for developing conceptual models in education that encompass complexity, diversity and fluidity with respect to both identity and disability

I will now provide some background information as a foundation for discussion of the papers.

The disability movement

The disability movement has been fundamental in identity formation for disabled people. The disability movement initiated a new way in which people with disabilities can represent themselves, live their lives, and campaign for their rights in Western countries, particularly the US and UK. It can be seen to follow on from other liberation movements, for example, class, race and gender, and many writers draw parallels between the disability movement and racial, women and gay/lesbian movements.

Before the disability movement, and still, currently, disability is primarily thought of as a problem within the disabled person, a perspective derived from a medical model where powerful professionals make choices for passive, needy patients. This kind of conceptualisation justifies the segregation and marginalisation of disabled people, because it asserts a biological cause that prevents disabled people from functioning normally within society. The purpose of the disability movement was, and is, to shift perceptions away from the medical model, where the problems of disability are perceived as being due to problems within the disabled person, to the idea that disability is a socially constructed barrier to a person with impairment.

The origin of this latter concept lies with The Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) who wrote the manifesto Fundamental Principles of Disability which stated ‘it is society which disables physically impaired people’ (quoted from Dowse 2001, UPIAS 1976, p14). Academics in the new area of Disability Studies developed this idea into ‘the social model of disability’ (Finkelstein 1980; Oliver 1990; Barnes 1991).

The social model of disability, because it was developed to challenge the medical model, emphasises a distinction between impairment, which is within-person, and disability, which results from barriers within society. This directs focus onto social change, away from rehabilitation. This distinction between impairment and disability forms the foundation for both the beneficial impact and shortcomings of the social model of disability (Shakespeare and Watson 2001), which will be discussed in more detail later.

Problems with inadequate representation of identity and disability

The very act of searching for research related to identity and disability, fore-fronted another issue of tension and difficulty within the field of disability and identity. To find relevant research meant using categories that simplify issues of identity and disability almost beyond recognition, and can serve to perpetuate marginalisation by reifying disability and representing aspects of disability and identity as concrete and discrete. The experience of disability is better represented as a continuum that changes over time and place, and includes dynamic interplay of issues of multiple identities both within and outside categories of disability. There is a need to develop concepts that fully encompass this complexity. Had I searched looking only at identity, feminism or perhaps issues of normalisation and dichotomy, where these problems of representation are at the fore, I would have been able to present more up-to-date conceptualisations. However, the field of identity and disability is only beginning to incorporate these.

The dominant perspective from which research is carried out in disability is from a professional perspective, with the medical model’s approach to disability as being ‘within person’. As an example of this dominance, a recent search on EBSCO for research on dyslexia in 2007 and 2008 found 80% of research to be from the perspectives of cognitive psychologists, neuro-psychologists and geneticists, who primarily focus on dyslexia as a problem within the person, and 12% was on developing intervention within schools to enable dyslexic children to attain within ‘normal’ levels, which views disability from a professional’s perspective. Only 8% researched the experience and perspectives of dyslexic people.

What is the significance of different impairment in relation to identity?

It would be impossible to characterise current or emerging trends in the interaction of identity and disability as a homogeneous whole. Issues of identity relate to the type of impairment experienced, and the range of impairment covered by ‘disability’ is huge. Though categorising disabilities is problematic, this paper will focus on three types of disability in order to demonstrate how different impairments can relate to issues of identity: intellectual disabilities, dyslexia and D/deafness.

Intellectual disabilities

A primary issue regarding identity for people with intellectual disabilities (ID) is that they are assumed to have conceptual barriers to understanding the social model of disability, and what it means to have an ID.

Intellectual disabilities are an important disability in relation to education and the future; the number of intellectually disabled children is increasing due to advances in science that mean premature infants are able to survive at a younger and younger age (Marlow, Wolke et al 2005).

At the same time, genetic counselling now results in the termination before birth of many intellectually disabled people, for example those with spina bifida or Down’s Syndrome. This raises moral questions relating to identity: is it ethical for a woman to decide to terminate on the basis of a characteristic of a foetus? Stainton (2003) argues that termination is unethical if the characterisation changes the foetus into a subject. Stainton also argues that the life of an intellectually disabled person is deemed less valuable on the basis of dominant identity politics, and not ’some essential truth of science’ (p537) which further questions the morality of termination due to ID. A recent article on the BBC news website, ‘Many keeping babies with Down’s’ (2008) reported that Down’s births are higher now than in 1989 when pre-natal testing began, suggesting that cultural views of Down’s Syndrome by non-disabled people is becoming more positive.

Tom Shakespeare (1998) and Patricia Rock (1996) discuss the complexities of pre-natal testing. Shakespeare documents professional pressure to abort in response to positive tests for disability, and Rock insists that such advice is given by those that carry prejudice about disabled life and know nothing of the quality of life many disabled people live.

To look at the specific place of ID within wider disabilities I will be reviewing Beart et al (2005), who carried out a literature review on how people with ID view their social identity. Their main points are:

Heavy stigma in relation to other disabilities

People who are intellectually disabled are the target of stigma that is heavy in relation to other disabilities, and this stigma includes the perception, at least by others, that this is the person’s dominant identity.

• For professionals a diagnosis of ID may overshadow other potential diagnoses
• This identity is likely to stay with the person over the span of their lifetime
• Families do not seek out this diagnosis for their children, in contrast to many other disabilities
• People with ID are often segregated, have few employment opportunities, are economically less well off, are less likely to marry or have satisfying social relationships, and experience fewer community leisure opportunities

Difficulty conceptualising their disability

Many people with ID may be unaware of their identity as intellectually disabled, at least on a discursive level.

• People with ID may have problems understanding the terms that are used to categorise themselves
• Parents and carers often do not talk to people with ID about their disability, but this does not necessarily prevent them from becoming aware of the stigma attached to this identity – they experience the stigma of their social identity through their interactions with others, and this experience is often an emotionally painful one
• It is likely that intellectually disabled people experience their identity at the level of experience rather than discourse, and this should be taken into account in further research

This paper addresses the issue of personal identity in terms of systematic empirical studies, and might be criticised for placing non-disabled ideas of ID ‘on’ the intellectually disabled person. Other research demonstrates the development of understanding about intellectual disabilities by people with ID in the context of Self Advocacy groups, including changes toward both positive personal and group identity (Goodley 2000; Beart, Hardy et al 2004). Thus, intellectually disabled people can have a voice and a positive identity as intellectually disabled, but it is one that is vulnerable and needs facilitation.

Dyslexia

A primary issue for dyslexic people is the history of cultural scepticism with which dyslexia and other ‘hidden disabilities’ are viewed. Dismissive or negative cultural attitudes challenge or undermine attempts to develop a positive sense of identity. Dyslexia is an important disability in relation to education because the structure of western educational systems particularly disables dyslexic people, and dyslexic adults often have negative emotional associations with school years. The following study is an unusual study, as noted above, because it recounts the experiences of dyslexic adults rather than approaching dyslexia from a professional standpoint.

Dale & Taylor (2001) carried out qualitative research with seven dyslexic attendees to an adult studies skills course ‘Learning for Life and Work’ that had been adapted so that it had a multi-sensory and experiential focus to support dyslexic learners. Using grounded theory the authors analysed transcripts from three focus groups, the students’ learning journals, statements from the wider group, and classroom observation.

Dyslexia had not been recognised in most of the students while at school, and they had a history of educational failure, which they internalised as personal failure. Within the focus group, but not the wider classroom, they explored negative school experience, which was common to all the students, and included humiliation and physical punishment, and the understanding that they were ‘thick’ or ’stupid’.

Through life experience the adults developed a self-belief that they were able. For many it related to greater success at work in relation to other colleagues who had educational qualifications. Personal recognition of dyslexia involved re-developing a self-identity of ‘able’ to replace the one developed at school of ’stupid’.

The authors conclude that their purposeful role as ‘peers’ to the students, that as tutors they were learning also, and that one of the tutors was dyslexic, were important factors in breaking established negative educational patterns. The group functioned similarly to Self Advocacy, in that the group gave the students space to make sense of their social identity and gave a sense of control over their lives (Beart, Hardy et al 2004).

Within academic endeavours, unless dyslexia is recognised and understood, the person can experience stigma similar to ID. However, possibly because dyslexia on its own is problematic primarily in the context of academic endeavours, it is quite possible to form a positive dyslexic self- and group-identity. A positive dyslexic identity is also possible in schools; Robert Burden, in research within a special school for dyslexic boys, found overall a positive dyslexic identity, where the boys felt they were in control of their success and/or failure in school (Burden 2005).

Whether dyslexic adults disclose their disability or not is a common conundrum; the choice seems to be dependent on whether or not the context is perceived to be receptive and supportive, and on practical considerations (Olney and Kim 2001; Valle, Solis et al 2004).

Currently work is being carried out by schools, charities and the UK government to develop better support systems for dyslexic children. Theoretically, if schools support such children well, it is possible that in future there will be no such disability.

D/deafness

Tracey Skelton and Gill Valentine (2003) carried out qualitative research interviewing 15 D/deaf youth and five D/deaf lesbian and gay young people within a larger study to explore social exclusion and inclusion within varying spaces eg home, college/university, and community. This study is unusual in that it asks young D/deaf people about their experiences of different identities within D/deafness. Most D/deaf research carries out quantitative comparisons between D/deaf people and hearing people.

D/deaf refers simultaneously to ‘Deaf’ people – those that consider themselves a minority language, and ‘deaf’ people – those considering themselves ‘hearing impaired’, and/or those that orient themselves in an oral tradition. ‘Deaf’ or ‘deaf’ refers to these groups separately.

Deafness as minority language vs deafness as disability

Within the Deaf community there is a discourse that being Deaf is not to be disabled, but to belong to a minority language community. Within the group of young people interviewed, a number emphatically replied ‘no’ when asked if they were disabled; instead they saw Deafness as being about a difference between hearing and Deaf worlds. Another sub-group of young people identified with being deaf, and said they wanted to be able to hear and to speak, and be understood easily by the hearing community. The authors note that these two identities are not fixed, that they can change according to context and time.

The authors discuss the dilemma faced by young D/deaf people in choosing identity. The Deaf world tries to be independent of hearing culture, and provides huge support and positive identity for Deaf people. They do not align themselves with the disability movement, but campaign separately as a minority language. Learning British Sign Language (BSL) is often the starting point of belonging to the community.

A number of the young people that grew up in hearing families, and were discouraged to sign within oral education, commented on the power they felt when they learned BSL, that they could communicate easily and in depth, and with other people like themselves. They are part of BSL rather on the outside as they are when involved with oral language. In this way the Deaf community offers them a better quality of life.

However Deaf culture is simultaneously exclusionary and limited – for young people with other identity concerns (eg sexual, ethnic, religious) it has little to offer that is unrelated to Deafness. The Deaf world can also reject people that have links to a hearing practice, and exclude those with visual impairment due to the visual nature of BSL.

The authors point out that many students professing Deaf identities also receive Disabled Student Allowance, without noting this as a contradiction. This is understood as practicality rather than identity; their education is constructed so that to get round language barriers they need additional support. This is only one example of the fluidity of identity demonstrated in this study. Many participants worked with hearing people, where oral communication was the only option, so at work, others credited them with the identity ‘deaf’.

The authors conclude by stressing the complexities of D/deaf identity. They recommend researchers attend to the limitations imposed by binary constructions of D/deafness and deafness vs hearing.

Links to the future of education

These papers have highlighted a number of issues relating to disability and identity that can be present depending on type of impairment. The following are all issues that could be impacted more positively by the educational system in future:

• heavy stigma and/or discrimination by non-disabled people
• possibility for internalisation of negative views of non-disabled people
• difficulty conceptualising a disabled identity because of impairment
• issues of whether or not to disclose a disabled identity
• the possibility of a positive personal and group disabled identity
• the need for more research that consults disabled people
• the need for conceptualisations that encompass complexity
• the presence of disability according to context
• the presence of disability because of the structure of cultural systems.

A number of the papers suggest Self Advocacy groups are beneficial to support the development of positive personal and social identity for disabled people. Such groups adapted for disabled children and young people could be beneficial within schools. However, this would not address the core systemic problems of stigma and discrimination. The groups would single out those with a disability and bring attention to their difference, despite potential for developing positive self- and group- disabled identity.

In 2007, Sir Keith Ajegbo headed up a curriculum review entitled ‘Diversity & Citizenship’. The remit was to:

• ‘review the teaching specifically of ethnic, religious and cultural diversity across the curriculum to age 19
• in relation to Citizenship, explore particularly whether or not ‘modern British social and cultural history’ should be a fourth pillar of the Citizenship curriculum’ (p14).

Recommendations by the review included the need for whole-school exploration of identity, diversity and citizenship, to be brought about through pupil voice, leadership in inclusion, training for teachers and changes in the educational systems infrastructure including development of a fourth strand in the Citizenship curriculum to be called ‘Identity and Diversity: Living Together in the UK’.

The review echoes a number of areas of concern stated in this paper and in my opinion provides a possible way forward. Despite the close ties of disability with issues of cultural, religious and ethnic diversity and identity, questions of disability were not a specific part of the remit of the review, perhaps because of the common perception of disability as a medical issue, and/or under-recognised issues of discrimination.

Were issues of disability included as part of this fourth strand of Citizenship, it would provide an inclusive forum for discussion of disability along the lines of universalism (to be discussed later), where disability is viewed as something that all of us can expect to experience at one time or another; a normal aspect of diversity. It would provide a place in which stigma and discrimination could be discussed in historical terms, a place for the voice of disabled people to be disseminated, and would have the potential to impact a number of the issues relating to disability and identity summarised at the beginning of this section.

How has identity with respect to disability changed over time with political/social changes?

Jenny Corbett and Brahm Norwich (1997) provide a reflexive account of changes since the 1980s in Special Educational Needs (SEN) due to a general social shift from passive to active. In education focus shifted from an explanation of disability in sociology and psychology to a focus on policy-making and provision. Parents changed from relying on professional expertise in educational choices to demanding the right to make choices about their children according to their individual situation. Corbett and Norwich argue against the use of simplistic dichotomies in response to these changes, eg psychological vs sociological, inclusive vs market choice, as this oversimplifies complex relationships.

Trend from passive to active

Corbett & Norwich cite an increase in legislation and policy-making within education as signposts of political/social change. For example the Warnock report, followed by the 1981 Education Act, recognised the reciprocal causal nature of special educational needs, the rights of parents to be involved in decisions about their child’s education, and the right for children to be included in mainstream education. The 1993 Education Act further clarified that Local Education Authorities (LEAs) are responsible for funding SEN according to the limitations of their budgets.

The result of this legislation was a politicisation of special educational needs. Formerly disabled children were educated within specialist schools, which provided a non-political caring service similar to a medical practice. The schools changed with the above legislation to become more in line with other educational establishments, and the addition of parents in decision making introduced a ‘market economy’, where schools became competitors. This trend is true generally for schools, outside SEN, due to Ofsted inspections, government testing and league tables.

As LEAs became responsible for allocating funds for SEN, this process also became politicised. Fund allocation was based on a ’statement of education need’ derived from diagnostic information and recommendations from professional reports, resulting in an increase in the importance of ‘labelling’, as the diagnostic label became a necessary route to funding. The involvement of parents in the allocation of limited funds can mean that more funding goes to the children whose parents are most able to fight for it, adding to already-present class inequalities.

The disabled movement began at much the same time as this legislation, making public individual disabled peoples’ experiences of disadvantage within and resulting from attendance at special schools, which challenged professional hegemony. The idea of a positive disabled identity, that the problem was not in the disabled child but in the segregation and discrimination of disabled children within schools, contested the medical model’s view of ‘treatment rather than acceptance’ (p382).

Dichotomous ideology

The authors argue in their paper that it is counter-productive to approach current issues of SEN from extremes such as psychology vs. sociology, or inclusive vs market-driven values. They make a case for an increase in complexity within SEN because of political, social and economic developments, which require input from a variety of perspectives to give ‘richness of analysis’ (p384).

The social model of disability – successes and failures

The social model of disability has been the disability movement’s ‘battle cry’ because it provided a freeing framework for action by focusing political strategy away from rehabilitation toward removing social barriers and anti-discrimination legislation. Dowse (2001) describes the social model of disability as the disability movement’s ‘collective action frame’, according to social movement theory.

In terms of identity, the shift away from the medical model, which places the problem of disability within the person, to the social model, which places the problem of disability within society, was emancipating. It enabled a viewpoint from which a positive self-identity of a disabled person could be constructed, and still does. The new meanings of this perspective also involve a shift from ‘feeling sorry for oneself’ and being passive, to feeling angry and being active. It stimulated the formation of numerous disability groups, many that developed ‘identity politics’, where the aspect of group identity that formerly was stigmatising is turned round to become a mark of pride (Bickenbach, Chatterji et al 1999). Thus, the social model of disability has contributed a great deal toward improving issues of identity within disability. However, the social model has also been criticised in a number of ways, both by those outside the disability movement and those within (Bickenbach, Chatterji et al 1999; Shakespeare and Watson 2001).

Conceptual limitations/inconsistencies

The social model is based on a distinction between ‘impairment’, a feature of a person’s body or mind, and ‘disability’, the barriers of oppression society constructs that marginalise the person. The problem is with society, not with impairment, and the disability movement discourages gaze on impairment and encourages focus on society.

This is vital in the argument of the disability movement, because as soon as the issue of impairment becomes a focus, issues around equality also arise. If disabled people possess a biological impairment, they are in fact not equal with non-disabled people. Bickenbach et al (1999) likens this to the argument against feminism that patriarchy is biologically inevitable.

Multiple identity

The social model is narrow in that it only conceptualises issues of oppression linked with disability. Other marginalising factors (class, race, gender, sexuality, age), and how they interact with disability, are ignored. The changing and contextual nature of disability itself is also not addressed. Instead, in the social model, disability is represented as dichotomous – you either are or you aren’t. The social model also does not adequately conceptualise differences between disabled people, for example, differences between social responses to physical vs mental disabilities.

Suffering

The separation of ‘impairment’ from ‘disability’ discussed above relegates issues of the body and mind, and therefore issues of pain and/or suffering, invisible in discussion of disability under the social model. This excludes essential aspects of the experience of many disabled people, for whom physical pain and/or emotional suffering following from their ‘impairment’ may be an everyday occurrence (Morris 1991).

Inadequate representation

In the ways detailed above, the social model fails to adequately represent the experiences of many disabled people. Bickenbach et al (1999) points out major proponents of the disability movement tend to be ‘highly educated, white middle-class males with late onset physical disabilities and minimal needs’ (p1181), who fall short of representing the wider issues of disability. The disability movement also fails to represent the group of people who wish to refuse the ‘disability’ badge, who would prefer to be non-disabled. Shakespeare & Watson (2001) cite their ongoing research with disabled school-age children, the majority of whom disliked being identified as disabled (see also Priestley, Corker et al 1999)

Possible future ‘battle cries’ for the disability movement

Universalism

Bickenbach et al (1999) review and critique models of disability. They put forward a model of ‘universalism’ to replace the social model of disability, because ‘universalism as a model for theory development, research and advocacy serves disabled persons more effectively than a civil rights or ‘minority group’ approach’ (p1173).

The authors discuss the social model of disability and the disability movement in depth before introducing universalism. They point out that regardless of the success of the disability movement over the past 20 years, eventually use of the social model of disability will have to give way for the reasons stated above, but also because the problems of disability are not only about discrimination – they are also about ‘failures to provide the resources and opportunities needed to make participation feasible’ (p1181), which the authors call ‘positive freedom’. Problems of positive freedom revolve around distributive injustice – the unfair distribution of resources and services resulting in limited access to society. Unfair distribution is systemic; it is part of the structures of institutions and economies.

Universalism, based on the work of Zola (1989), addresses the problems of the social model of disability because it approaches disability as a contextual, ever-changing continuum that respects diversity and widens normalisation to include human variation. Disability is a universal feature of humanity, and we all can expect to experience disability in one form or another, or perhaps in many ways, over our lifetimes.

The details of universalism have not been worked out – but in terms of logical consistency and the scope to encompass the complexity of disability, universalism seems promising. One of the reasons for the extremity of the social model, though, as Shakespeare & Watson (2001) write, is the simplicity and power of its message: ‘disabled by society not by our bodies’ (p11). Universalism’s solution to issues of logical inconsistency and its theoretical ability to represent the complexities of disability are not likely to be quickly or easily grasped, and reasons to adopt universalism may be equally slippery to the non-specialist.

Sociology of impairment

Hughes & Paterson (1997) provide a discussion of the problems with the impairment/disability divide in the social model of disability. They propose that a combination of post-structuralism and phenomenology provide an approach with which to reframe it.

The authors discuss recent developments in the sociology of the body, which, with post-modernism, see the body and biology as social issues. The body is linked to advertising, consumerism and political struggle, and is the site of identity construction. On the other hand, the academic realms of biology, psychology and medicine, and indeed, disability studies, view the body as an object without history, without meaning, without agency, separate from the self; an object not socially produced.

The authors describe the work during the 1990s of feminists, particularly Judith Butler (1993) to rework the concept of sex-gender, from a biological-social bipolarisation to the construction of the body by social discourse.

Hughes & Paterson argue that by viewing the body as a social site, the issue of impairment can be included in the disability movement. The conceptualisations of the social model by disabled academic Mike Oliver (quoted in Hughes and Paterson 1997, p330) of impairment and disability as bipolar opposites can be dissolved by exploring disability as present at the junction between the mind, the body and society; an experience discursively produced.

Despite the advantages of a post-structuralist approach to the body in dissolving dichotomies, it also has the effect of actually dissolving the body – any sense of a real body is lost as it becomes the site of ‘multiple significations that give it meaning’ (p333). Hughes & Paterson therefore argue that phenomenology is needed to focus on the body as a site of lived experience. Phenomenological studies could add consciousness of sensation to issues of oppression and marginalisation in the body.

Post-structural analysis is relevant to the breadth of disability. Foucault’s work has links to social production and examination of power relations, cultures, discourse and difference (Armstrong 2007), so that course seems promising, though also presents problems of its own, as detailed above. Though post-structural analysis solves many problems of the social model, it does not address the problem of physical inequality. Phenomenology seems to be particularly relevant to researching people who experience physical pain as a result of disability.

Losing disabled identity: does technological and medical advancement enhance or detract?

Technological advancement offers the disabled person the possibility of ‘cure’ of their disability. Cochlear implants for deaf people is one example; another slightly different example, in that it does not offer ‘cure’ but an external way of getting round difficulties, is computers that read and spell for dyslexic people.

Is the assumption that a disabled person would want to be cured a ‘given’, or is this the negative perceptions of a non-disabled society? For the disabled person who is proud of who they are, for whom their identity as disabled has been an important part of making meaning about themselves and the people and the world they have known, the refusal of ‘cure’ can be the response.

Cure survey

Harlan Hahn and Todd Belt (2004) surveyed 156 disabled activists using a 7-point Likert scale exploring their responses to the question ‘even if I could take a magic pill, I would not want my disability to be cured’.

Results were approximately even, with 47% not wanting to be cured, 8% ambivalent, and 45% wanting to be cured. This is supported by two prior surveys that found a majority did not want ‘cure’ (Weinberg and Williams 1978; Weinberg 1988).

There were two significant predictors of which disabled adults would not want to be cured. Those who had a positive sense of personal identity as disabled were significantly more likely to not want cure (p<.001), and those with onset of disability before age 18 were significantly more likely to not want cure (p<.05).

The authors speculate that disabled adults with a positive disabled self-identity do not seek cure because this would take away their source of self-affirmation. They reason that disabled adults who become disabled before they are 18 have a stronger personal sense of identity, and this prevents them from desiring a cure for the same reason stated above.

The authors conclude that these results challenge current medical practice where focus is on ‘no harm’ to the public, with the expectation that people will be receptive to treatment that has been shown safe and effective.

The study would have been improved if it had been possible to carry out a selection of interviews to discuss why the disabled people chose the responses they did. It is also unfortunate that the authors did not find out the nature of the disabilities of each person, as it would have been valuable to discover if the type of disability influenced whether or not the adults wanted to be cured.

The research quoted above that found that schoolchildren did not want to be disabled because they did not want to be different than their peers (Priestley, Corker et al 1999; Shakespeare and Watson 2001), is in opposition to the above research, and needs to be researched further to understand any differences in the perception of disability between children and adults. For example, is it a difference of generation or maturation? Such research is important in informing future support of disabled children in schools.

Choosing deaf children

Hallvard Lillehammer (2005) develops an ethical argument supporting the choice by a real couple, Candace and Sharon, to obtain sperm from a deaf donor in order to increase their chance of having deaf children (they indeed now have 2 deaf children). David Shaw (2008) responds to Lillehammer, arguing the couple made an unethical choice.

The table below displays one of the contrasts in their views.

Lillehammer (2005) writes against the ‘conventional view’, meaning he assumes most people would agree that anyone who could choose would choose that their child not be disabled. He argues that the concept of ‘impartial perspective’ put forward by those of a conventional view is really ‘little more than the generalisation of one set of partial values to every conceivable case of a given type’ (p40).

Shaw (2008) writes from the ‘conventional viewpoint’. Aside from the logical arguments he makes, in his writing there is the sense that he conceptualises disability in quite negative terms. He calls deafness a disease, ‘the deaf case involves the intentional creation of children who have a disease’ (p408) and does not relate to the deaf couple’s viewpoint: ‘In fact, there is immediate prospect of resolving these disputes, because such philosophers are using social justice to adopt the impartial perspective of what is best for the future child, while the parents are choosing what they want without any regard for fairness’ (p413). This provides an example of a stereotypical ‘non-disabled’ viewpoint.

These papers show the central role both personal and group identity can play in the lives of disabled people in relation to medicine, and the social and political complexities that may arise in the future in response to medical advances.

Disability, identity and the internet

Natilene Bowker and Keith Tuffin (2002) carried out interviews with 15 physically disabled participants aged 30 to 59 years who regularly used the internet, including chat rooms. The authors’ aim was to explore whether or not participants disclosed their disability while online. Paterson & Hughes (1999) argue that failure to disclose works against the disability movement, as it prevents non-disabled people from being faced with contradictions to their false beliefs about disability. Bowker and Tuffin therefore were also interested, if the participants chose not to disclose, in seeking the reasons why.

The authors explored three themes in regard to disclosure: relevance, anonymity and normality. In relevance, participants chose not to disclose when the context meant this was inappropriate, however there were times they did disclose, for example if disability were misrepresented, disclosing disability gave added weight to the participant’s views. In anonymity, the participants chose to withhold, disclose or invent information to present an identity, including other information besides disability. The participants enjoyed their ability to be anonymous, and felt they had a right to choose to respond privately. In normality, the participants approached the internet as a place they could be ‘normal’. They choose not to disclose because they wanted to be a part of able-bodied culture, or wanted a ‘break’ from disability.

The authors conclude that disabled people valued their ability to choose to disclose or not on the internet very highly. Their comments about face-to-face interactions with others suggested they did not experience non-disabled identity except online. Being online allowed them a new space to interact and form ideas about themselves; ‘For those restricted to a self-description based on physical deviation from the norm, having access to other descriptions may lead to empowering outcomes’ (p342).

This study offers an interesting slant on identity and the possibilities offered by the internet to people with prominent physical disability.

Conclusion

Because of the history of medical hegemony in disability and the marginalisation of disabled people, the needs and desires of disabled people are most often approached from the perspective of the caregiver and institution. Stereotypes of disabled people have been of passive, helpless people to be pitied, to be repelled by, or idealised as ‘heroic’ for getting round their disability. However, with the disability movement the ‘voice’ of disabled people has begun to be heard. A common thread appearing within research that listens to disabled people is that they can live valuable, happy lives and many do not see themselves as disabled (Watson 2002) while some (at least hypothetically) would not want to be cured. Others, when freed from the necessity of disclosing their disability, for example by being online, choose not to. This is not only because ‘they have something to hide’, as some have suggested but because they enjoy the control they are otherwise denied when their disabilities are visible to others.

Research that engages with disabled people themselves and tries to represent their voice, instead of theorising disability from a medical model or from conventional viewpoints, is rare, and the papers here that explore the viewpoints of disabled people were sometimes the only ones available. In respect to future education, it would be advantageous to take the viewpoints of disabled children into account in order to avoid policy and practice designed to support them that may in fact be irrelevant and/or harmful to them. Many of the problematic, systemic issues need to be addressed through structural change within education, not only for disabled children and young people, but for all pupils and students, teachers, and educational leaders. One way forward is to take a similar approach to that recommended in the Ajegbo Report, in respect to disability.

Another common thread in the research papers is related to complexity. ‘Disabled’ represents a huge array of impairment, and social barriers differ accordingly (Deal 2003). It cannot be viewed as representing people who share a clear characteristic, in the way race and gender do. The variation in identity between and within disabilities means that groups and individuals respond differently within the disability movement, from refusing to advocate as ‘disabled’ as in the case of the Deaf community, to supporting the disability movement simply by being present at meetings, as may be the case for someone with severe ID.

This complexity means that in forecasting future trends, whatever happens is likely to affect different disabled young people in different ways. For example, if, in 25 years, education is structured through home computer use, visually impaired and/or children who have difficulty with fine motor control may be marginalised, while those with a visible physical disability may be freer in their choices of identity.

Complexity is also present in the multiple identities expressed by people, in terms of sexuality, race, class, role etc in addition to disability, and indeed, as Skelton & Valentine (2003) demonstrate, there are multiple identities within a particular disability. There is also complexity in that people combine and shift identity differently in different space and time according to context and choice. Though such complexity is commented on frequently, there is very little research done on more than one identity at a time.

Finally, the theme of bipolar concepts and the problems they cause was repeated in the research reviewed. The problem was discussed in many contexts, from opposing tensions between individual pupil rights and inclusion within schools, to the dichotomy of impairment and disability threatening the foundations of the disability movement, to the inability of a perspective from the ‘conventional view’ of disability to imagine it as anything other than disease, abnormality and misery.

We need to develop models that represent complexity, which can make sense of our postmodern, pluralistic culture. At the moment we are swamped by conflicting information that needs to be re-theorised in holistic, dynamic ways.

References

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

Leisure and consumption

Traditional anchors for identity, such as occupation or region, now compete with, or are replaced by, identities based upon consumption, lifestyle and leisure (Giddens, 1991). Leisure-based activities have increasingly become important indicators of who we are and our place in society, including how we understand civic and political participation. A series of shifts have occurred which have further strengthened the relationships between consumption and identity for young people. These include delaying responsibilities associated with adulthood and independent living, an increase in communication media, and developments in advertising and marketing.

The cost of living and of higher education are two factors that have led to British youth delaying their participation in responsibilities associated with adulthood, such as independent living, home ownership or parenthood. Depending on their socio-economic status, on average, young people remain either financially dependent on their parents, or contribute financially to the parental home, until their late twenties (Parker, Aldridge & Measham, 1998). Without the need to pay for mortgages or children this delayed access to adult responsibilities means that young people often have more time and money for leisure than had previous generations.

The ability to consume has been further enhanced through developments in technology that have given young people unprecedented access to information on a multitude of consumption and leisure practices and to the people and communities who participate in them. Such technologies include the internet, increases in the number of television channels, and changes in publishing that have reduced production costs, making specialist smaller readership magazines commercially viable.

Young people are also targeted by those interested in commercially exploiting youth markets, including, for example, regional governments who have seen young adults’ consumption in bars and clubs as the solution to city centre regeneration (Chatterton & Hollands, 2003). A range of aggressive and insidious marketing techniques have been developed and used to target young people, including, for example, giving popular children free products to promote to their peer group. So while there has always been a complex interaction between the media, consumer interests and ‘authentic’ youth culture (Riley & Cahill, 2005) young people today experience unprecedented exposure to commercial pressures (see, for example, discussions of ‘ethnographic marketing’, ‘viral advertising’ and ‘KGOY’ (Kids growing older younger).

Branding and other marketing practices have intimately linked identity with consumption. For example, young men may identify as a ‘rebel’ by buying particular clothes rather than having participated in any act considered rebellious (Gill, Henwood & McClean, 2005). There is considerable debate over the agency young people have regarding consumption and identity. Young people are not necessarily passive consumers and while they may be attracted to particular identities associated with branded materials they may take these items and rework them in various ways, including parody. Others argue however, that the notion of agency is itself an illusion of discourses of consumption, or at the very least, subversion through consumption has limitations. (For an example of the debates on agency and consumption in relation to young women and sexualised clothing see Duit & van Zoonen (2006, 2007) and Gill (2007)).

The relationships between traditional anchors of identity and those produced through consumption and leisure are also disputed. Indeed, analyses of ‘changing times’ tend to be anecdotal, with limited empirical work available (www.identities.org.uk). It is likely, however, that young people’s subjectivities are constructed through a variety of identities shaped by ‘traditional’ orientations to class, region, family and gender, and more ‘liquid’, flexible ones orienting around leisure-based activities, such as sports or shopping. Thus, leisure and consumption-based identities may not have replaced traditional anchors for identity, rather, when young people had access to them these identities may sit alongside each other, being drawn upon when contextually relevant (Riley, Griffin & Morey, 2008). Having access to, and being able to participate in, both traditional and liquid identities is subject to a complex interaction of personal and social variables, but is linked to social inequality. For example, working class children are more likely to have a TV in their bedroom, increasing the amount of advertising to which they are subjected (Mayo, 2005).

Multiplicity

As well as opening up opportunities for leisure and consumption increases in communication media have offered a plethora of ways of understanding ourselves. In having access to, for example, history programmes about life in ancient Egypt, soap operas with evil twins, or channels dedicated to extreme sports, young people grow up in a world in which they have literally seen it all before. Thus, the proliferation and globalisation of near instant forms of technological communication make available a dynamically-shifting range of stories and forms of knowledge that can inform young people’s identity management. Subjectivity, then, is not considered to be constructed from pre-formed essences which exist independently outside of time, talk or other social activity, but are constantly (re)produced in interaction, constructed from the range of subject positions available to the individual, which may be contradictory or only partially formed.

Developments in communication technologies have intensified relationships between subjectivity and technology. There has always been a link between subjectivity and technology, for example using a hammer allows a person to experience their arm as a lever (Burkitt, 1999). However, distinctions between bodies, selves and technology have increasingly blurred, leading analysts to talk of cyborg as a metaphor for understanding contemporary subjectivity in which the boundaries between organism and machine are transgressed and from which new senses of self emerge (Gergen, 1991). For example, mobile phones can give us the sense of never being alone, of carrying with us the potential of always being able to connect to others.

For contemporary young people, exposed to and consuming a range of communication media, consumption and leisure practices, the traditional move from identifying with one’s family to one’s peer group is now one that is likely to involve multiple peer groups. It is therefore more appropriate to think of youth cultures in the plural in order to foreground the multiplicity of identities that orient around the notion of youth and to think of young people moving dynamically between these communities. In previous eras, subcultures, such as hippies or punks, bestowed meaningfulness on those who clearly identified with one group, locating authenticity in those who most closely approximated the permanent alternative lifestyle that reflected the norms associated with this group (McKay, 1998). Now such an understanding of authenticity may be less valued and meaningfulness may be as easily located in temporary, fluid and multiple identities, identities facilitated through technology and consumption practices. So while some people may still strongly identify with one group, others adopt a more playful pick-and-mix approach, moving through a kaleidoscope of fractured scenes and taste cultures (Muggleton & Weinzierl, 2004).

While youth cultures have multiplied and fractured, other, homogenising forces have come into play, including the globalisation of youth cultures and the blurring of adult and youth activities. Communication technologies have aided the globalisation and commercialisation of youth cultures, working as homogenising forces that enable youth cultures to be formed and communicated almost instantly in more or less similar ways across the world (see, for example, Studdert’s (2006) discussion on African Chelsea football club supporters). There has also been a blurring of adult and youth interests and activities. Just as young people delay taking on adult responsibilities and so extend their adolescence into adulthood, older generations too have been less inclined to relinquish youthful activities. The music video game ‘Guitar Hero’, for example, recently advertised itself as cross-generational entertainment for parents and their teenage children to use while queuing together for a festival. Successful movement across these boundaries is not, however, a given. Instead, scenes usually fracture and multiply to accommodate niche markets, for example ‘Baby Raves’ – electronic dance music daytime events held for parents with small children.

Having a range of identities has traditionally been understood as psychologically healthy, since a person can maintain positive self esteem by drawing on other aspects of self if one aspect experiences failure (see, for example, work on Social Identity Theory by Tajfel & Turner, 1986). The increase in opportunities to experience multiple identities may therefore be considered to have positive potential. Creating different identities, such as online avatars or Bluetooth monikers, allow people to construct different senses of selves that represent or allow them to engage in different behaviours and activities. For example, different DJ names can represent different types of music played by that person, freeing the DJ from being pigeon-holed while also allowing him/herself to communicate to his/her potential audience what kind of music to expect on a particular night. However, concern has been raised that the number of identities a person may be expected to dynamically and, in a 24 hour culture, perpetually, move through, can create over-demanding situations, causing stress. Furthermore, some understandings will inevitably clash with others, so that multiplicity is associated with contradiction. For example, young women are expected to both have ‘girl power’ and to be heterosexually attractive, thereby reproducing traditional expectations of femininity (for examples, see Gill 2006, or http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/newFemininities/).

Problems associated with consumption are also implicated in the management of multiple identities, since these different aspects of self are often facilitated through the ability to consume. Participation requires, for example, entrance to clubs, appropriate clothes, or technological equipment. School children regularly use social networking sites after school to communicate with each other, creating social exclusion for those without access to the internet at home. Thus, there are significant structural inequalities in the ability to adopt a playful ‘pick-and-mix’ stance. Indeed significant inequalities may be produced at the most basic level of self-storying, since the most excluded in society may struggle even to tell one, let alone, multiple narratives about themselves.

Neo-liberalism

The need to story oneself with multiple narratives, whether drawn from traditional- or consumption-based identity markers, is particularly relevant because of the dominance of neo-liberalism. Identity has always been an important marker for young people, and engaging in leisure and consumption, such as in choices around appearance and clothes, has played a significant role in this. What is different for today’s youth is the tightening of meaning around identity and consumption that has been facilitated through neo-liberal rhetoric of risk, responsibility and individualism.

Neo-liberalism describes the idea that people are encouraged to see themselves as if they are autonomous, rational, risk-managing subjects, responsible for their own destinies and called “to render one’s life knowable and meaningful through a narrative of free choice and autonomy – however constrained one might actually be” (Gill, 2006, p.260; see also Kelly, 2006). From this position, the social context in which a person lives is reduced to their immediate interpersonal relations, and any personal, social or health problems, and their attendant solutions, are located within the individual. Neo-liberalism allows people to make sense of themselves in individualistic and psychological terms, understanding their consumption practices as freely chosen markers of their identity (Cronin, 2003). Neo-liberal rhetoric of individual choice and responsibility now dominates much of post-industrial sense making about what it means to be a good person. Such changes have been identified as powerful new forms of governance (Rose, 1989). For example, being asked to work excessive and low paid hours may not be considered exploitation but accounted for in terms of a worker’s psychological characteristic of being a helpful person (Walkerdine, 2002). Thus, young people are developing their sense of self in a context in which wider discourses in society encourage them to understand themselves through psychological and individual discourses, rather than those that are communal or sociological.

Neo-liberal subjectivity has been associated with an increased focus on the body as an important site for identity management. For example, there has been a coupling between neo-liberal values of rationality and responsibility and the cultural valuing of slenderness, so that a slender and toned body has come to represent a person who has rational control over their appetites and who acts responsibly in relation to maintaining a healthy body. These associations mean that body size has come not just to signify physical health, but also mental health and morality (Riley, et al, 2008).

The relationship between the body and identity may be particularly important for young people, given that in comparison to adults, young people tend to have less control over other aspects of their lives. Young people may employ a range of body modification techniques, from dieting and weight training to cosmetic surgery or body art. As an example, body art, an umbrella term for a variety of practices including tattoos and piercings, has become increasingly popular as a way of articulating personal and social identities (Riley & Cahill, 2005) and with continued developments in technology and cosmetic surgery may produce ever more creative forms of body modification (for example, the use of implants to create horns).

Youth cultures are often associated with pleasure and hedonism, and the body is central to these issues. For example, electronic music dance culture (also known as ‘rave’) employs technologies such as sound systems, lasers, electronically manufactured music and ‘designer’ drugs to produce hyper real communal and embodied experiences (Wilson, 2006). These experiences allow participants to develop identities and experiences of self that may be incorporated into neo-liberal narratives of self. Neo-liberal rhetoric can also be employed to justify such pleasures, as it can be argued that the individual has the right and freedom to engage in escapism through extreme but pleasurable intoxication (Riley, Morey & Griffin, 2008). Given the excessive weekend drinking seen across Britain’s city centres such a ‘culture of intoxication’, in which people collectively seek and celebrate a loss of control, may be considered normalised for many young people (Measham & Brain, 2005). Paradoxically then, neo-liberal rights and responsibilities discourses may be employed to justify embodied, communal, intoxicated and even ‘mad’ selves, selves that are the antithesis of the rational neo-liberal subject.

Neo-tribalism

Neo-liberalism has arguably come to dominate much of contemporary western thinking about subjectivity, however, it is not without competing discourses. For example, sociologist Michel Maffesoli, while also emphasising the informal and local, argues that contemporary social organisation is highly social. Maffesoli’s theory of neo-tribalism challenges notions of society as increasingly alienated and individualistic and instead characterises daily life as a continuous movement through a range of small and potentially temporary groups that are distinguished by shared lifestyles, values and understandings of what is appropriate behaviour (Maffesoli, 1996). These groups give a sense of belonging and identity, examples of which include gathering to watch football in a bar, participants on service user websites or regular commuters sharing public transport. What distinguishes neo-tribal social formation from traditional social groupings is that people belong to a variety of groups, many of them by choice, so that neo-tribal memberships are plural, temporary, fluid and often elective (Riley, Griffin & Morey, in submission).

Within neo-tribal theory people are understood as moving dynamically through a series of groups, some more partially formed than others, which are in the person’s locality. However, technologies such as the internet make the notion of being ‘local’ relative, since people may share physical or virtual proximity. That neo-tribes are distinguished by the grouping, however temporary in time or space, of people who share lifestyles, values and understandings of what is appropriate behaviour leads Maffesoli to analyse such groups as engaged in moments of ’sovereignty over one’s own existence’. Neo-tribal gatherings provide sovereignty because they create temporary pockets of freedom to engage in behaviours and values associated with that group, which may be different from the values and expected behaviours of other groups (that participants may or may not also be members of). For example, a person may shout aggressively when watching football in a bar, but would not raise their voice at a family meal.

Creating spaces in which to practice one’s group values requires a turning away from other groups in order to ‘do your own thing’. The resultant lack of engagement with other groups, in particular more dominant groups, often leads to youth cultures being constructed as problematic. First, because it is read as a sign of young people failing to engage with adult groups or adult led activities deemed good for the young people. Second, these groups are often understood as challenging the dominant culture or celebrating values at odds with the dominant culture, creating moral panics that construct young people as ‘folk devils’. However, analyses of these groups often show a complex blending of values that both reflect and challenge dominant values. For example, pro-ana websites, which are created by young women to promote the concept of anorexia as a lifestyle choice, are an example of young women engaging in valued practices of being pro-active and employing technological skills. However, they are applying themselves to the promotion of a cause that can lead to serious illness or death. Similarly, setting up an illegal rave requires the bringing together of a diverse set of resources that include entrepreneurial, organisational, musical and electrical engineering skills, skills used to facilitate parties that are unlicensed, held on other people’s property and involve high levels of illicit drug use.

Dominant values themselves are, of course, constantly being negotiated and Maffesoli (1996) argues that there is currently a general move by the ‘masses’ away from the institutional power and rational organisations that defined the modern age to a zeitgeist that celebrates sociality, proximity, emotional attachments and hedonistic values. Thus, when groups create opportunities to practice sovereignty over their existence they are creating spaces in which to engage in values that orient around sociality, emotionality and hedonism. In relating neo-tribalism to young people, it may be useful to recognise the similarities between Maffesoli’s concept of sovereignty and Hakim Bey’s ‘Temporary Autonomous Zones’ (TAZ), a term he uses to describe transitory unsanctioned self-governing sites (Bey, 1991). In coming together to participate in acts of sociality and hedonism, TAZs or neo-tribal gatherings can be understood as providing sites of resistance to a neo-liberal sensibility based on rationality, rights, responsibility and individualism.

The creation of temporary and fluid spaces in which to participate in one’s own values, can be understood as an emerging form of political engagement, an ‘everyday politics’ that focuses on the local, informal or personal, rather than engaging with official organisations and institutional power. Personal lives have been used previously as the basis for political activism (examples being the ‘identity politics’ of feminism, gay/lesbian liberation and black power). However, such forms of political activism, like traditional political activities, often focus on a social change agenda. What distinguishes the new personalised form of politics is that the focus is on creating temporary spaces in which to participate in ones’ own values and associated behaviours – to be able to ‘do your own thing’ – thus participants do not necessarily need to engage with other groups or organisations of governance. Everyday politics is thus about creating spaces in which to live out alternative values, shifting political participation to the ‘everyday’ individual or informal group level.

An ‘everyday politics’ may be particularly relevant for young people because of a perceived lack of attention from those involved in traditional politics to issues of concern for young people (eg the environment). Furthermore, as Harris argues, when young people engage with state institutions to effect social change, their action problematically works to both endorse these systems and to locate themselves in a subordinate position within them: “young people may well have their own ideas about how states and citizenry should operate, and to ask to be included or to participate in the current order is to endorse a system that may be fundamentally at odds with these other visions. Further, it is to accept one’s subordinate position as a fringe dweller who can only ever hope to be invited or asked to participate, but who can never do the inviting themselves” (2001, p.187). Like Maffesoli, Harris argues that one solution is not to engage with institutions associated with governance and power, but to create one’s own spaces of autonomy. Harris’s (2001) work on girlzines is such an example. Harris (ibid.) argued that the young women involved used internet magazines to create their own space from which to negotiate, redefine and reclaim politics, citizenship and novel gender subjectivities. Harris’s work suggests that leisure and entertainment based activities can provide sites for young people to engage in practices that relate to participation and citizenship, providing the opportunity to produce ‘counter stories’ that act as “forms of politics, often misrecognised as entertainment” (Harris, Carney & Fine, 2001, p.12). Neo-liberalism is implicated in ‘everyday politics’ since neo-liberal rhetoric of focusing on the personal through discourses of individual choice and personal responsibility provides the ideological context in which locating political participation at the individual or informal group level makes sense. However, arguments for these forms of political engagement are controversial and empirical work is scattered and underdeveloped (a special issue of ‘Youth’ on everyday politics edited by Anita Harris is currently underway; also see Riley et al, in submission).

Implications

Adolescence and early adulthood are traditionally conceptualised as making up an important time in identity development. Today’s youth experience this time in a context in which the culturally dominant model of the self is of an autonomous, rational, psychological subject who bears ultimate responsibility for the self and who must manage multiple identities, many of which are made available through consumption and technology.

This context provides a range of opportunities for pleasurable and playful engagement with identity, allowing the young people who can take these opportunities to construct a sense of place in the world. However, this construction of self also creates certain stressors. First, locating every success or failure at the personal or psychological level absents other ways of making sense of oneself and masks the impact of structural inequalities on life ‘choices’. Second, the constant pressure to (re)make yourself and manage multiplicity is both demanding and requires the management of contradictory identities. Third, structural inequalities mean that some people do not have the resources to do this kind of identity management.

In masking the impact of structural inequalities neo-liberalism sets the scene for a shift towards a personalising of politics. Locating oneself at the personal and psychological level, coupled with a general move away from engaging with traditional institutional power, creates the context in which it may make sense for young people to focus their political energies on informal acts, such as recycling or benefit gigs for small charities. This shift can be read as reflecting an alienation from traditional politics that is a part of the contemporary British political landscape (Colman & Gøtze, 2001; Harris, 2001), or more positively, as a sign of a zeitgeist swing away from one form of political engagement to another (Maffesoli, 1996).

Although neo-liberalism has come to dominate our understanding of the subject it is one concept amongst many. One alternative to neo-liberalism that also has political potential is neo-tribalism (Maffesoli, 1996). Neo-tribalism argues that our identities are made from moving through a variety of local groups to which we have an emotional attachment, these groups are conceptualised as creating temporary pockets of sovereignty in which to celebrate values of hedonism and sociality. Youth cultures can be conceptualised as neo-tribes, in which young people carve out temporal spaces in which to practice particular sets of values and behaviours. In creating these spaces neo-tribes can be considered as new forms of political participation, since they allow alternative values systems to survive. Young people may therefore create their own neo-tribes in which to celebrate identities that offer an alternative to the rational risk managing neo-liberal subject, the ‘culture of intoxication’ being one such example.

The moral panic that ensued from today’s culture of intoxication is part of a long history of representing ‘youth as problem’ and can be seen to inform tensions around how contemporary young people appropriate space and technology. While being youthful is a valued commodity, young people themselves are often represented as deviant, representations that are classed and gendered – sexually active females, criminally active males, for example (Griffin, 1993). (For a contemporary example, see the very particular and narrow reading of youth in the World Bank’s World Development Report, which locates solutions to problematic youth in formal institutions, absenting the possibilities that youth cultures themselves provide positive spaces for identity development (Luttrell-Rowland, 2007)).

Hedonistic youth cultures can, however, be analysed as attempts to use pleasure as a vehicle for creating positive social alternatives. Rave culture, for example, exhorts the values of PLUR – peace, love, unity and respect (Wilson, 2006). Similarly, excessive weekend drinking in city centres has been analysed as a sign that working class youth have the confidence to use these public spaces in a way that previous generations did not (Chatterton & Hollands, 2003).

However, such forms of resistance may reinforce the overall dominance of neo-liberalism. For example, engaging in intoxicated excesses at the weekend may release tension created by the stress of being a neo-liberal subject, facilitating participants to return to work on Monday. Participants of hedonistic resistance to neo-liberalism often account for their behaviour with neo-liberal rhetoric of rights and risk, arguing that if one is ultimately responsible for oneself then one also has a right to do what one wants with that self (Riley, Morey & Griffin, 2008). There is therefore a complex interaction between alternative and dominant discourses of self since one may be enabled by the other. Young people may be snatching spaces to be ‘free’ but they are using the masters’ tools to do so. Thus, while neo-tribal memberships provide participants with a sense of belonging they may not challenge the neo-liberal construction of self as a project. Furthermore, neo-tribalism still requires the subject to manage multiplicity (in this case of group/tribal based identities) with the attendant stressors of multiplicity described above. Neo-liberal constructions of the self and multiple subjectivities are thus likely to continue into the future as significant ways of understanding oneself and place in the world.

There are examples of young people participating in collective action, a recent example being the anti-Iraq war ‘Not in My Name’ campaign. However, it has been argued that the impact of locating responsibility at the personal level has reduced young people’s ability to make collective challenges since they are less likely to be exposed to discourses of collective experience and struggle, including, for example, those of feminism (McRobbie, 2008). Neo-liberalism may also foster a culture in which the social contract between citizen and government is weakened – if successes or failures are reduced to the interpersonal, then the citizen owes the state nothing.

The proliferation and globalisation of near instant forms of technological communication combined with the multiple and fragmented nature of social lives means that we have available to us an ever shifting kaleidoscope of understandings from which we can draw on in the (re)production of neo-liberal subjectivities. These subjectivities are reduced to their immediate interpersonal relations, to the realm of the personal and psychological, but not necessarily to the private. Communication technologies allow the self to be (re)produced in the public sphere, for example though entries in social network sites such as Facebook, blogs or personal and work websites. Just as every aspect of life can already be seen on TV, so we replay it back using technology to make partial and fractured narratives of ourselves that span space and time. See, for example, ‘FutureMe.org’, an online resource for sending emails to yourself in the future. The ‘best’ of these messages are made public in an anonymous form for entertainment. Indeed it may be that communication technologies are creating a situation where people understand aspects of themselves as only truly meaningful when offered up for the consumption of others. It is possible therefore that communication technologies, such as Web 2.0, are creating a new shift in which the private may only be meaningfully experienced when in the public.

Developments in technology are likely to enhance this process. For example, the ability to store a lifetime of video on an iPod will allow an individual to consume their own life experiences (Cliff, O’Malley & Taylor, 2008). Fear of social exclusion if one doesn’t participate in these technologies, plus surveillance technology, such as CCTV and the use of finger print scanners to ID children in schools, means that there is only limited opt out from these forms of technology. Furthermore, communication technologies do not provide unlimited ways of self-storying. Rather the technologies themselves and the cultural valuing of particular traits create powerful scaffolding around which people build their self-narratives. For example, there are international internet dating websites that require participants to describe the colour of their hair and eyes, despite these being primarily defining features for Caucasian people. Similarly, research on online gaming shows that participants regularly create avatars that fulfil conventional definitions of heterosexually attractive gendered attributes (for example, women create female avatars that have slender, toned bodies) (Waskul & Edgley, 2000).

In the future young people will therefore have to negotiate a self that is splintered off into a series of surfaces that reflect both the technologies that enable them and the cultural mores in which they are located. Sociologist Norbert Elias argued that changes in social structures during the Middle Ages led to a shift in human subjectivity in which the public and private became compartmentalised. Responses to actions such as public defecation changed, so that people moved these behaviours to the private sphere. These changes led to a shift in consciousness in which thoughts could also become private, making, for example, the experience of ‘repressed anger’ a possibility, since previously anger was a public act and not a private experience (that one may or may not express). Changes in contemporary social organisation, enabled through communication technologies, have the potential to create similar radical changes in subjectivity. Notably, a fractured and multiple self experienced in the public sphere and reflected through technology across a range of temporal physical and virtual locations.

Already the internet has produced a situation in which aspects of our selves are created through technology and distributed across time and space. Some of these selves have connections to each other, as in the past selves communicating with future selves as via FutureMe.org. With other selves the connections to the original source(s) are broken or new connections are made, such as forgotten photographs uploaded onto public domains and re-appropriated by friends, colleagues or people unknown. An example of re-appropriation I found was a young girl’s homepage that had a photograph of another (attractive) child on it, with the explanation that ’she looks a bit like me’. It may be that young people will experience fractured and multiple subjectivity in the same way that they are encouraged to consider high street clothing – as tools of identity to be temporarily appropriated, experienced and then cast off in favour of some new look or experience. Future subjectivity may therefore be conceptualised as a collection of multiple, diffuse selves existing across time and space, that have differing degrees of relationships with each other and perhaps no longer needing to be held together by the concept of a ‘core self’.

It is likely, therefore, that in the future young people will need to find ways to exist in the plural. In a preferable future they will be able to develop a sense of being valued and of having opportunities to participate positively in the many social worlds that will be potentially available to them. Schools and other educational institutions will have a duty to help facilitate this.

One way to increase young people’s access to traditional and liquid identities from which to story themselves would be through the creation of more personalised education. In the same way that technologies are enabling increasingly more individually tailored medical interventions, a personalised educational system could be developed in which each student would in effect be their own portfolio manager, managing themselves as a project. The aim for educationalists would be to help young people identify their values, interests and talents and to find ways of using these to develop the various skills they need to become critical and engaged citizens who feel valuated and located in their world.

By drawing on young people’s own interests educators may use leisure and consumption as a way to excite them about education, creating holistic ways to develop young people’s understanding and engagement with their world. Pop music, for example, is often a key site for young people’s interest and identity. Music technologies now allow people to compose music without needing knowledge of musical theory. Creating music with this technology can be used as a starting point for students to gain a sense of self-efficacy, from which they might develop their education holistically, exploring a range of associated subjects including musical theory, socio-political history and practical learning through organising and performing in a concert. It may therefore be an advantage to blur education with entertainment, particularly given the expectation, at least in some sections of society, that work should be enjoyable (Tapscott, 2008).

Future education may require different relations of authority between educational institutions and their students. Already communication technologies have reduced teachers’ control over pupils. For example, school pupils have created a mobile phone ring tone that their teachers cannot hear by recording the ‘mosquito’, a high pitched noise used to keep teenagers away from public amenities like late night shops. Technologies are likely to increase young people’s autonomy, like some contemporary adults they may work (or study) from home, or in the future, they may use biologically embedded technologies only viewable to themselves (Cliff, O’Malley & Taylor, 2008). A personalised education system that incorporates the values and interests of the student is likely to enhance self-motivated study and create more egalitarian relationships with educational institutions. However, respecting the values and interests of students may bring challenges, given that youth cultures are often a complex blend of dominant and counter cultural values. After all, one can confidently predict that young people will sometimes do things not expected or approved of by their elders.

Communication technologies mean that educators and students can draw from a huge range of resources of expertise. For example, lectures from world renowned academics are available on ‘YouTube’. The role of future educators in a personalised educational setting would then be to help young people identify which sites may help them develop the skills they most need to meet their educational interests, values and needs. Educators would also have the role of helping students make links between their personal portfolios and the wider world. For example, identifying transferable skills, connections to the job market and developing critical analytical skills that would help them negotiate their way through their virtual and physical worlds. One way to do this is for students to be encouraged to explore the power of language in structuring the way people understand their world, so that students can critically evaluate the texts that they use through the analytics of argument, reflection and doubt (Gergen with Wortham, 2001; Postman, 1995). Postman (1995), for example, argues for a curriculum that constructs knowledge as historically multiple, borrowed and intermingled. Such a curriculum would introduce plurality and set a framework for understanding one’s own multiplicity, contradictions and socio-historic context.

Drawing on Postman would allow future educators to help young people develop a critical framework to negotiate and manage both their personal and social identities, while challenging some of the individualism of neo-liberalism and allowing young people to explore the impact of taking up particular identities in particular ways. This approach would prepare young people to both positively engage with the requirements of neo-liberal subjectivity, while also having the critical skills to explore alternative discourses, such as those associated with collective identities or spirituality.

In helping young people locate themselves as persons in relationships, embedded in a range of local and global communities educators would act as ‘community enablers’. An example of using communication technologies to develop positive social identity based narratives comes from California, where young Hispanic pupils, living in a context in which their families have lower socio-economic status in comparison to their white counterparts, worked with Web 2.0 technology to produce positive narratives of their ethnic identity, which were then shared between themselves and with their wider community (Rodriguez, 2007). A similar project could, for example, be used with young people in the UK who struggle to find positive self-narratives in their communities (for example, young unemployed working class men in post-industrial Britain (Winlow, 2001)).

Helping young people form positive relationships with their community could be enabled through setting assessments that connect individuals together to demonstrate the values and necessity of group cohesion. Efficacy of group work would be further enhanced if assessments were directly linked to involvement in community action, either in the school or wider community, so that young people were encouraged to consider themselves has having meaningful connections to their communities (see action research and social constructionist approaches in education, eg Gergen with Wortham, 2001; Reason and Bradbury, 2008). Such projects would explicitly or implicitly teach students about social citizenship, and have the potential to tap into neo-tribal values of sociality, emotionality and the pleasures associated with creating pockets of sovereignty over one’s own existence.

Neo-tribal theory argues that as people move in and out of the various groups to which they are affiliated their understanding of what is right and acceptable behaviour becomes relative, since it shifts for each group (Maffesoli, 1996). This form of relativist morality replaces the universal distinction between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ on which modernist notions of morality are based. Maffesoli’s argument is that such a relativist perspective facilitates tolerance, since it allows for, and indeed normalises, a diversity of values and practices across different communities and social groups. If this hypothesis is correct it would be possible for educators to help young people identify their various memberships and to facilitate pride and positive identities in these memberships, without the need to negatively construct out-groups. An ideal outcome of neo-tribalism, then, is to enjoy confidence in one’s own memberships while maintaining an interest in others, a standpoint that may protect young people from being attracted to more fundamentalist orientated identities that provide a sense of security through the creation of a negative ‘Other’.

Future educators could therefore value and work with what students bring to their classes, facilitate successful management of the self as a project and act as community enablers. In a preferable future they would also take on the role of protector. Young people will need protection and guidance in terms of managing their public selves, including the implications of how they present themselves online, as well as managing the stresses of multiple identities (which may include class related expectations of over- or under- achievement). Students will need support in how to engage with technology without getting lost or consumed by it. Young people will also need to be protected against bullying facilitated by technology (eg mass ‘hate’ texts), privacy invasions (by both individuals and government institutions) and virulent advertising.

A preferable future then, is one where schools are fun, interesting, relevant and safe. Places where it is recognised that young people bring a range of interests and values to their educational setting, which are engaged with in order to facilitate the development of positive personal and social identities. A personalised portfolio model of education in which the educator acts as a facilitator may help students gain the skills for successful management of the self as a project, so that they may enjoy the rights and responsibilities attached to neo-liberal subjectivity. However, educators would also need to provide alternative discourses to neo-liberalism, helping young people develop critical faculties and to explore other ways of understanding themselves, in particular as persons in relationships embedded in communities. Educators will also need to act as protective stewards, shielding young people from some of the more aggressive and insidious aspects of technology, surveillance and commercialisation, helping young people develop skills to safely negotiate their identities across the various mediums they will inhabit.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

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This is being used for example at a City Academy in Bristol to replace taking the register and for ordering lunch.

See Gergen with Wortham (2001) for a discussion of social constructionist approach to education, which includes the principles of making education relevant to student’s lives, taking a holistic approach, encouraging reflexivity and making links to activities and actions outside the classroom.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

Young people in Britain today are faced with multiple challenges, experiencing the effects of constantly changing political regimes and economic systems of a wider society characterised by information society, knowledge economy, globalisation and internationalisation (Olssen 2004). These locally and globally experienced effects have a positive impact on the way young people learn in schools and enjoy life with family and friends both in proximity and in distant places, in particular through the use of ICT in school and at home. However, there are some alarming consequences, which are manifested as youth disaffection, lack of civic participation (Younis 2005) and social exclusion (Newburn, Shiner et al, 2005) and decline of community. In recent years young people in Britain have been seen as a problematic subject. The youth is attributed to anti-social behaviour, drugs and alcoholism, teenage pregnancy and is often demonised. There is a sense of crisis invoked in public discourse such as media and political debate about young people and their role and place in the society.

However, sceptics have called the crisis into question as to what extent we should believe stories about the crisis. Although many would be in favour of initiatives, they would argue that occasionally crises are used to justify initiatives, thus a composed approach to thinking and planning the initiatives is necessary. Sears and Hyslop-Margison (2007) have argued that “much of the discourse and reform in the area of citizenship education presently reflects a cult mentality that fails to consider the nuances of reasoned educational reform” (p43). Of approaches widely known to tackle youth disaffection and disengagement are the setting up of the Social Exclusion Unit and government policy such as “Every Child Matters” concerning social inclusion and wellbeing of young people (Hayton and Hodgson 1999). These policy and task forces are targeted to a group of disaffected young people who were, or were at risk of becoming, socially excluded (Hallam, Rogers et al 2006). Disaffection and disengagement is not a problem confined to those at-risk young people. There is a general tendency that young people and children in Western countries do not seem to be engaged in the learning experiences that the school offers (Hayton and Hodgson 1999; Riley, Ellis et al 2006).

Young people’s disaffection has been widely researched (eg Craig and Coles 2002). It is argued that the debate on social exclusion has paid little attention as to how schools and teachers might rethink and devise more inclusive policies and practices for teaching and learning (Riley and Docking 2004), although guidelines on creating ‘inclusive’ schools have been published (eg Ofsted 2002). Mentoring is one of the most talked about forms of intervention aimed at reducing youth disaffection (Piper and Piper 2000; Newburn, Shiner et al 2005; O’Donnell, Bielby et al 2007; Rose and Jones 2007). Research suggests that in mentoring disaffected young people many relationships did not progress beyond basic ‘mundane’ social interaction (Newburn, Shiner et al 2005). Furthermore, regarding the risk of NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training), research addresses that projects should give them a sense of ownership and offer an alternative learning environment from school, and looking at individuals in a holistic way (Spielhofer, White et al2005) and developing what Cote (1996, in Bynner and Parsons 2002) describes as “identity capital” comprising educational, social and psychological resources.

Findings and conclusions of the research seem to suggest the importance of offering opportunities of recognising young people’s achievements, interagency collaboration and support of young people in their transitions into other education, training or employment options (Britten et al 2005). Especially research into the nature of engagement and how relationships are built in learning environments (in schools, homes and other spaces of socialisation) is imperative. Beside mentoring and promoting interagency collaboration for supporting young people, the understanding of pupils voice (learner voice) is crucial in supporting disaffected and disadvantaged pupils (Riley, Ellis et al 2006). Riley and Docking argue that although recent government initiatives have drawn attention to the importance of listening to young people, there are scarce attempts to pay attention to their views about their education experience (2004). Drawing on two studies (see Riley and Rustique-Forrester, 2002) of disaffected and disadvantaged pupils they analysed what can be learned when taking their views into account (Riley and Docking, 2004).

All these initiatives and projects mentioned may have offered a short-term solution and indeed may have made an impact, but the challenge lies in ensuring the sustainable support and special provision and taking a holistic approach to working with young people. Provided that the rapidly changing society has constantly changing demands on individuals, groups and their environment, it is important that educators, carers, and those who work with young people evaluate continuously and consider as to what would be the appropriate and best provision and support for young people.

Constructing identities

The core of the problem of youth disaffection and disengagement seems to reside in the way that young people are perceived and therefore perceive themselves in positive terms, or rather lack of it. Several decades ago, our conceputalisation of identity drew on the psychological concept of identity (Erikson 1963). Other sibling psychological terms such as self-concept, self-efficacy (Bandura 1997), or self-esteem have constituted orthodoxy and are largely focused on the individual as a centre of investigation. Within the last few decades, this view has been challenged as it tends to view identity as socially constructed, fluid, multiple, relational, and dialogic and open for re-description (Brubaker and Cooper 2000). Against an essentialist view, Hall insists that identities are never unified and, in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured; they are never singular but multiply constructed across different discourses, practices and positions (1996).

History in person: identity from a sociocultural perspective

If we were to understand how young people build relations with social others and make connections with community and the wider world, the concept of identity should incorporate a historical, developmental and sociocultural view. Holland and Lachicote present a review on the new sociocultual studies of identity” (2007, p101) in association with the legacy of Vygotsky and Mead. They argue that “Vygotskian developmental concepts help us to understand how people come to be able to organize themselves in the name of an identity” (2007, p134). This view is highly relevant to understand the way in which young people not only re-author their personal narrative, but also transform the context. It would help us understand the way in which young people develop different and alternative trajectories and envision life chances through reflecting on the individual history together with peers, teachers, and parents and how they themselves see their worth and significance in the collective history in relation to the school and its wider community.

In studies of youth culture (eg Epstein 1998), identity development involves an exploration of alternative futures (eg Grotevant 1997). Hundeide (2004) draws on Giddens’ notion of late modernity’s sense-making as “personal meaninglessness – the life that has nothing worthwhile to offer” (Giddens 1991, p9). She coins a term “identity alternative” in examining new counterculture of youth movements (2004). Perhaps it may be fair to say that the youth’s disengagement and disaffection from education and learning can be viewed in the way in which young people turn to alternative identity and lifestyle to cope with late modernity’s personal meaninglessness. Countercultural groups are said to offer a feeling of belonging to a community, strong identification and emotional attachment to a charismatic leader, a new identity with which young people commit themselves to new goals and activities and a place that has new order and new reality. If these are to be the key to keeping young people involved in learning for skills and development of personality, would there be a role of education and learning in and out of schools? How can teachers and carers work with them?

The role of education – how to approach the issue of “identity crisis”

Our orthodox, conventional and commonsense certainly tells us that we teachers and other carers including family members have got to work together to support and nurture a positive learning environment. In the testing and exam culture, young people know from an early age whether they will be successes or failures in the education system. Many of those disaffected youth have broken families and working parents who do not get the kind of support needed outside work. An additional factor is overcrowded schools with teachers overloaded by work who cannot simply cope with those personal and pastoral needs of the youth to nurture their potential and provide the context and support for unlocking their talent and creativity. Furthermore, in addressing the role of education, I ask how it is possible to make the classroom activities and lessons meaningful and relevant to young people as sustained engagement with young people in education (and training). This should be applied to not only the disaffected youth but also to all young people and children

How do we capture young people’s imagination and interests? One possible way forward is to help them develop new identities and afford them to author/narrate possible selves (Markus and Nurius 1986) for finding a trajectory and connections with their own family, community and a wider world. Hassan’s point about history is relevant here: “any learning a child encounters in school has a previous history. It seems… that this history favours children differently in today’s industrialized pluralistic societies” (2002, p124). A task for educators and those around young people might be to provide opportunities to explore and gain awareness of history and the sense of connectedness to the community and the world beyond as well as a sense of historical change in terms of the past, present and future. In other words, the focus of the learning should be geared toward creating learning activities where young people can author (and re-author) narratives of self that recognise individual uniqueness, whilst maintaining a sense of historical continuity and cultural cohesion to the community in which they are based. It is this reflection that is essential for forming, developing and transforming to a positive, forward-looking identity.

Technological, information society and its impact on the formation of identity (or identities)

Beyond the quick fix of making policy, acting with initiatives and projects, it is important to step back and look at this issue as a question of identity and ask how the changes in society impact on individuals, groups and communities. The crisis about young people mentioned earlier seems to address the question of identity formation. It is possible to analyse the breakdown of community and understand socialisation of young people in terms of the use of technology and its impact on identity formation. Acharya (2007) questions “how the wide-ranging uses young people are now making of new information and communication technologies and global media may possess the potential to transform their cultural identity and how educational institutions should understand and respond to this evolving cultural reality” (p340). She seems to suggest that there is a sense in which we are undergoing an identity crisis (2007). With the rapid innovations in information and communication technology (ICT) we go through in the global, postmodern and information era, it is important to examine how identity construction has become increasingly complicated. Appadurai (1996) and Castells (1996) propose that we look at the modern network society dynamically, in terms of disjunctive, networks of flow of things, people, ideas and finance that get transformed and organized. These features of the society seem to have bearing on the late-modern meaninglessness with which young people find difficult in coping when it comes to identity formation.

It is in this sense that the question of how ICT is involved in the transformation of cultural identities, or any notion of identity markings inscribed in individuals in the era of changing patterns of global and local image, and information spaces, has implications for learning in the 21^st century (Wells and Claxton 2002). Wells and Claxton, in their edited book titled Learning for Life in the 21^st century, present a forum in which social scientists and educational researchers have sought to gain inspiration from sociocultural perspectives. Among the new ideas, approaches and potentials to the future of education, the role of technology (ICT in education) and narratives are most important issues as they have transformative capacities of human mind, society and the environment. The radical and rapid changes have made a profound impact in the way we understand early childhood education, human development, the nature of participation and language as mediational means.

Problem of social participation

Other review papers in the project have focused on the issue of citizenship and democracy and discussed the implications of technology for identity construction. Also the Ajegbo report (DFES 2007) has documented challenges and implications for diversity and citizenship education. Therefore, I shall not replicate the discussions of new forms of participation in the society. Beyond the notorious labelling of youth as the ill of the society, the problem of youth disaffection and disengagement in education and training has far-reaching consequences. Research has shown that disaffection and disengagement with learning is closely related to the problem of social participation, disintegration of the traditional sense of community bound by place, nation, race, ethnicity and other social categories. Lamenting over a demise of close-knit community, some scholars seek an alternative to characterise the current condition. Termed as ‘thin communitarianism’, Olssen (2004) argues for a version of cosmopolitan democracy. If survival and security are to be possible, then strategies that “preserve the openness of power structures, based on dialogical communication are necessary as a way of keeping the conversation going” (Olssen 2004, p231). Is it possible such conversations have been taking place? Nick Couldry (2008) argues that digital storytelling is one way of keeping the conversation going.

In extending the notion of identity argued in this paper, I turn to a specific practice called digital storytelling, which has become increasingly popular in empowering youth and engaging those marginalised and disaffected from the mainstream.

Digital storytelling

Storytelling is primary and fundamental to human society. It can function as a cornerstone of the society passing on wisdom and can share enduring values and expectations for the youth to deal with the life that is not yet imagined (Farmer 2004). In recent years, a storytelling (or narrative) approach has been popular in the tackling of problems in development of literacy and other cognitive skills and children’s librarianship (Farmer, 2004). In the digital age, when adding audio and visual features to this ancient human practice, digital storytelling has been practiced in solving problems of education in various settings. One of the pioneers in the practice of digital storytelling is James Lambert (2002), who established the Center for Digital Storytelling in the U.S. The center evolved out of the community arts practices, helping people make art for civic engagement, and the media explosion of the late 1980s and 1990s. It assists people in making short media pieces that combine a spoken narrative, still images, and design elements using digital photo manipulation and digital video editing tools. The visual culture is being used to bring people back into language and the written word. In the last few years, digital storytelling has emerged as a powerful teaching and learning tool that engages both teachers and their students (Robin 2008). It allows computer users to become creative storytellers through the traditional processes of selecting a topic, conducting some research, writing a script, and developing an interesting story (Robin, 2008). The claim with digital storytelling is that it can be used to engage and motivate both teachers and students, but the current ICT lesson remains mainly to enhance technical (computer operational) skills without much consideration to wider issues such as enhancing the knowledge in the subject matter and the real world needs of today’s classrooms (Robin, 2008). Hicks suggests that the current use demands a challenging task for developing the ability to think about and use technology in critical, creative, and responsible ways (2006). I would like to show here that technology in the classroom, in particular in digital storytelling plays an important role apart from enhancing the student’s motivation for learning. In other words, it would help create a space for collaborative thinking and opportunity to reflect critically the student’s sense of self in relation to others.

Some recent research suggests that education can help bridge in-school and out-of school literacy practices by encouraging students to engage in hybrid texts that draw on multiple modes of representation. Research in the US by Ware and Warshcauer (2005) concerns ‘the digital disconnect’ between the diverse ways that students use the internet at home and the narrower ways that they use it at school to discuss the concept of hybridity as a way to bridge it. The analysis is focused on the students’ hybrid texts and practices in a digital storytelling project.

Apart from the visible features of collaborative capturing, interpreting and sharing of experiences both in and out of classroom settings, digital storytelling possibly offers an innovative way of dealing with the problem of young people’s disengagement and disaffection. I consider three principal characteristics of digital storytelling which contribute to the nurturing and fostering of identities. Firstly, digital storytelling employs multimodal representation. It tends to appeal to those students who have poor literacy skills or under-achieve academically and those who have learning difficulties. Unlike a traditional sense of storytelling taught in the formal subject lesson, which emphasises a particular, often one-directional, sequential, rigid structure and content of stories, what is powerful about digital storytelling are digital multimodal texts (Hull and Nelson 2005), in particular, the powerful roles that digital multimodal texts play in real-world contexts, revealing semiotic relationships between and among different, co-present modes. It is in these relationships, as Hull and Nelson argue, that the expressive power of multimodality resides. It is possible that through digital storytelling young people with less academic confidence and cognitive skills can overcome difficulties in telling experiences and make sense of them.

New social space – a new form of engagement

Secondly, digital storytelling offers new performative social space for young people. Advancement of technology has made us rethink the notion of space when it comes to social space (Lefebvre 1991 (1974)). For Lefebvre, understanding the importance of space is linked to the reproduction of social relations. With virtual space made possible by internet technology, new forms of social relations and practice of communication such as social networking have emerged. Drawing on new social space and social relations, a new form of engagement with non-traditional students was explored beyond the traditional notion of literacy in a space called “the Third Space” (Gutiérrez 2008). In her case study of the Migrant Student Leadership Institute, a collective Third Space is interactionally constituted, in which traditional concepts of academic literacy and instruction for students from non-dominant communities are contested and replaced with forms of literacy that privilege and are contingent upon students’ socio-historical lives, both proximally and distally. What is reported in her study includes hybrid language practices; the conscious use of social theory, play, and imagination; and historicising literacy practices linking the past, the present, and an imagined future (Gutiérrez, 2008). They are akin to the benefits and advantages, which the proponent of digital storytelling claim. Clearly, “the Third Space” is an alternative learning space where young people can explore their identities and imagine alternative futures. With the open-endedness of storytelling, digital storytelling makes it possible for dialectical transformations of young people in relation to others as well as possible selves which they envision. Digital storytelling is open-ended, transformative and critically reflective and dialogic. Therefore, the digital disconnect (between school and outside school) would provide young people liminal space (ie in between), offering a site for them to explore a new sense of creativity.

Furthermore, the alternative space that digital storytelling offers for learning and exploring their creativity can be used as a resource for critical reflection. Through the creative process of digital storytelling, it produces aesthetically appealing, multimodal expression of selves in relation to social others. It then creates a dialogic opportunity and space, beyond physical space in which students’ collaborations with peers and teachers and active engagement in making sense of their own experiences and the world around them can be facilitated and encouraged.

Mediation

Couldry argues that digital storytelling makes possible the open-ended dialectical social transformations (Couldry 2008, p374). Digital storytelling represents a novel distribution of a scarce resource. A key concept underlying digital storytelling is the concept of “mediation” in a complementary, partner (and dialectic) concept ‘mediatization’. Of relevance to the current discussion of the social consequence of digital storytelling is a transformation of societies. According to Couldry, we approach digital storytelling as mediation. Beyond the term used in the media research, which is the act of transmitting something through media, mediation is referred to as “the intervening role that the process of communication plays in the making of meaning” (p379). Drawing on Silverstone’s definition, Couldry emphasises a non-linear aspect of mediation, describing it as the dialectical process and suggests that understanding how processes of communication change the social and cultural environments that support them as well as the relationships that individuals and institutions have to that environment and to each other (Couldry, p380). In line with the Vygostkian concept of mediation (Vygotsky 1982), digital storytelling can be viewed as a meaning-making process and it can be used as this paper’s main focus for the way in which technology-mediated storytelling contributes to transformation of the individual (or identity) as well as transformation of the social and cultural environment.

With respect to a claim to re-engage community and a potential contribution to democracy, Bennett examined the way in which young people participate in online communities and the relationship between online action and civic and political engagement (2007). Observing a social anxiety arising from youth disaffection with politics, Loader and other scholars explore alternative approaches for engaging and understanding young people’s political activity with a particular focus on the adoption of information and ICT. They consider ICT as a means to facilitate the active engagement of young people in democratic societies (Loader 2007). Likewise, Couldry suggests that the digital storytelling “represents a correction of those latter hidden injuries since it provides the means to distribute more widely the capacity to tell important stories about oneself… as potentially political agent… in the public domain” (2008, p386).

Digital storytelling as a social practice of remembering

Lastly, as in any storytelling and narrative, digital storytelling and its outputs can be a resource for making inter-generational links between the youth and their parents and older generations. Researchers involved in the large international have reported that the experience of making of digital stories has a profound effect on human collective and personal memory. “Recorded experience becomes a life memory, and, as a communication medium, is sharable with others to enhance our sense of community” (Mase, Sumi et al2007, p213).

A group of Finnish researchers present an analysis of the organization of experience-related activities in the mass event focuses on the active role of technology-mediated memories in constructing experiences. Continuity, reflexivity with regard to the self and the group, maintaining and re-creating group identity, protagonism and active spectatorship were important social aspects of the experience and were directly reflected in how multimedia was used. Particularly, they witnessed multimedia-mediated forms of expression, such as staging, competition, storytelling, joking, communicating presence, and portraying others; and the motivation for these stemmed from the engaging and shared nature of experience. Moreover, they observed how temporality and spatiality provided a platform for constructing experiences. The analysis advocates applications that not only store or capture human experience for sharing or later use but also actively participates in the very construction of experience and support a view that digital storytelling helps nurture, constructing identities in interaction with others by being involved in activities (Jacucci, Oulasvirta et al, 2007).

Caveat for use of technology in education

My argument on technology so far may imply that technology provides solutions to problems. However, it is rather contrary. There is a danger of over-reliance on technology, MacKenzie and Wajcman (1999) remind us of the danger of technology as a blanket solution to education and any other social problems. MacKenzie and Wajcman (1999)They emphasise that the popular way of thinking about technology is still technological determinism that acknowledges a one-way relationship between technology and society in which technology causes social change and impacts on people.

In line with MacKenzie and Waicman, Acharya highlights a dynamic relation between technology and people and society. Technology does not just bring about change and transformation of the individual, institution and society, but “[it] is also a driving force behind the process of internationalization and globalization of the economy, science and culture; indeed, they have mutually reinforced each other” (2007, p344). The decentralizing and liberating nature of information and computer technologies encourages individuals to participate in a ‘global village’ (McLuhan 1967) or ‘network society’ (Castells, 1996), a condition characterized by the interconnectedness of economic, social, political and cultural activities as well as regions, cities and individuals. Such a condition is profound because it fundamentally challenges the diverse locality and traditional values, reduces the sense of social and cultural distance between communities, and affects our relationship to time and space, the fundamental coordinates of experiential reality” (Giddens 1994 cited in Archrya, p344).

Furthermore, what is relevant here in conceptualising identity in the technological age is identity that is placeless and non-linear. As Morley and Robins (1995) suggest, referring to simulation, virtuality and hyper-reality:

“What is being created is a new electronic cultural space, a ‘placeless’ geography of image and simulation… a world in which space and time horizons have become collapsed… a world of instantaneous and depthless communication… that is profoundly transforming our apprehension of the world: it is provoking a new sense of placed and placeless identity and a challenge of elaborating a new self-interpretation.” (cited in Acharya, 2007, p345)

Therefore, it is possible to utilise this concept of identity in digital storytelling and explore how it would help young people re-imagine the future.

Re-imaging the future

Another important feature of digital storytelling is its possible use for making inter-generational links overcoming hierarchical and age differences. It would help create a space where the teachers and students and friends and family participate in joint remembering in and across the horizontal (peer) relation as well as in the vertical (teacher-student, parent-children) relation. It is a site of communication where new meanings of friendship, family relations and other issues of socialisation and personality development are explored together with others (in the learning environment). This would nurture a strong sense of belongingness (a lay hallmark of identity inscription) and historical continuity. Every practice of learning involves history (of practices, such as schooling and subject lessons, but not in the sense of history lessons as subject taught in school) (Hassan 2002). It is a larger sense of history, in Vygotskian terms, phylogenic and ontogenetic development observed in the practice of digital storytelling.

Implications for identity formation in technology-mediated education mediated by technology

In the 21^st century it is clear and almost inevitable that we will have to learn to live with constantly changing and advancing technologies in the educational settings. Learning and education are inseparable from technology, making use of and inventing a new technology that would facilitate and bypass the complicated mechanism and concept behind our everyday ideas and practices. Digital storytelling is technology-based and mediated, but the heart of the storytelling, as in any storytelling practice, is dedicated to emotional and moral engagement, critical reflection and inward gaze to oneself and others and the world around. The activities and experience of digital storytelling is a tool (technology)-mediated meaning-making practice that affords personal and social transformations.

First of all, instead of a positivistic and optimistic approach to technology use in education, which looks for a technological fix to educational problems, the emphasis should be on solving educational problems by not advocating computers or other technological tools for the sake of technology, but by questioning their proper role in educational settings and reflecting on how technology may cause both positive and unintended negative results in social environments.

With properly guided teaching and scaffolding tasks, digital storytelling would help create a new space where the teachers and students (and friends and family) participate in jointly remembering. It is a site of open communication where new meaning of friendship, family relations and other issues of socialisation and personality development are explored together with others (in the learning environment). This would nurture a strong sense of belongingness (a lay hallmark of identity inscription).

It is important that educators, especially classroom teachers, ensure a “fair use of other people’s material without infringing on their protections under copyright” (Ohler 2008, p192). Teachers and adult others involved in the digital storytelling project should be aware of the legal and ethical issues such as copyright protection, child protection, confidentiality and anonymity if the stories will be made available in the public domain. The teacher could teach the rule of respecting other people’s work and make the student aware how they want their work to be used and credited. This is not just to commodify the stories created and limit the ownership of the stories, but to acknowledge and respect the joint effort put into the work of digital storytelling.

This paper highlighted the importance and challenge of dealing with a new form of socialisation and a new concept of performative space for young people. Taking an account of individual and personal history and centrality of meaningful learning activity, a new form of engagement with the concept of identity from a sociocultural perspective is deemed relevant and offers a theoretical framework for the empirical work to continue. Young people will be given and exposed to a means to explore and re-imagine the future and the sense of self that they feel they can aspire to gain. A caveat for over-reliance of technology is indeed an imminent danger of technology as a blanket solution to education and any other social problems (MacKenzie and Wajcman 1999). For this reason, the role of the teacher who can plan, set and organise learning tasks in the practice of digital storytelling is key to successful implementation of digital storytelling.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation. References

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

Over the last 70 years, the English education system has been twice remade – first in 1944, and then in 1988. These episodes introduced important institutional change, but they went further than this. In each case, they configured new relationships between education and other kinds of social arrangement, both economic and cultural. The 1944 Education Act established education as key to economic growth, and made school for the first time central to the experience of working-class teenagers; the changes brought about by the Education Reform Act (1988) connected education to an emerging knowledge economy, and laid the basis for a culture of attainment and competition, in school and beyond. In each case, educational reform was driven by powerful forces of social and political change: broadly social democratic in the first instance, Conservative – that is to say, market-orientated – in the second. In each case, too, a political revolution was involved, in which some social actors came to the fore, while others faded from the scene. Thus 1944 promoted local education authorities and teachers’ organisations to a position of power, while 1988 saw these actors largely replaced by the rising influence of school managements, and, later, private providers.

The educational energies set in motion by ‘1988′ carried through into the New Labour years, and in many ways were strengthened and systematised then (Ball, 2008). This review seeks to take the measure of their impact. But it also addresses wider issues. ‘1988′ was part of a larger programme of transformation, often called ‘neo-liberal’ (Harvey, 2005) and to make sense of issues of knowledge, identity, culture and community, means that the interaction of education with the other elements of this programme needs to be addressed. It is by taking the measure of these combined transformations that the review tries to think its way into the future. Will the period 2010-2025 see such a profound re-shaping of the education system as those of 1944 and 1988? Will it accelerate, or divert, the cultural and social energies set in motion in the 1980s? Will the social and occupational arrangements associated with the famously uneven patterns of wealth distribution created through neo-liberalism harden into permanent structures? We can start to answer such questions by looking at what social research is telling us about the present.

Grounded, differentiated cultures

Social theory, Majima and Savage (2006) point out, is prone to make the claim that some time in the late 20th century, a transformation of the human personality occurred, that can be described in terms of ‘individualisation’ (Beck and Beck-Gersheim, 2001), detraditionalisation (Giddens, 1994) or an accommodation of ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman, 2000). These accounts depict a world in which people have become increasingly ‘reflexive’ about their lifestyle choices and their values; they rely less on traditional modes of thinking, and are, compared with earlier generations, less influenced by the cultures to which they belong. Majima and Savage are sceptical; they regard these claims as being ‘empirically ungrounded’. For them, values and meanings are in a strong sense culturally located. They grow out of mundane experience, and are more susceptible to immediate material pressures than to long waves of cultural change. Specifically, ‘attitudes and values’ arise from the processes through which people seek to differentiate themselves from some social groups and claim affinity with others. (2007, p297). These processes occur in a ‘politically charged environment’; they are products of ‘wars of manoeuvres’ between social groups and positions (2007, p312). If we want to understand culture, therefore, we need to understand it in terms of social location, of difference and of contestation.

These arguments direct us towards two kinds of understanding. The first prioritises the material position of young people, in terms of the influence upon them of the job market, of education, and of their communities. The second emphasises cultural difference. In both cases, the intention is not to construct ‘youth’ or ‘young people’ as unified categories, but to look at patterns of change from a perspective concerned with their varied impacts on the young. French researchers, reflecting on the youth uprisings against police violence and economic insecurity in 2005-6, have written of the need to think in terms of ‘deux jeunesses’, those of the banlieues and those outside, whose conditions and prospects differ widely, though over both there hangs the shadow of ‘precarity’ (Mauger, 2006). A similar emphasis runs through this paper.

Knowledge

Knowledge is increasingly understood in terms of its economic value. One of the main tenets underlying education policy is that ‘information and knowledge are replacing capital and energy as the primary wealth-creating assets’. (Ball, 2008, p19) This claim is sometimes linked to an expectation that the workforce of the future will be increasingly knowledgeable and more highly skilled. From this stems the ‘promise’ that underlies policy exhortations to young people, that they should seek higher levels of qualification, and longer periods in education, in return for rewarding jobs. However, the nature and extent of the knowledge economy have been called into question by many researchers in ways that suggest a very different configuration of knowledge from that sketched by policy. At stake in this questioning are issues of qualification, skill, quality of experience and reward. These issues, of course, are played out among the adult workforce, but their backwash effect in education, training and the social positioning of young people is considerable.

According to Castells (1998), knowledge economies are, in terms of their social relations, divided economies, with the categories of ’symbolic analyst’ and ‘generic labour’ standing on opposite sides of a social divide. Other writers elaborate this point. Nolan (2004) writes of an ‘hour-glass economy’, in which the occupational structure is polarised between relatively secure high-skilled work, and a mass of lower-skilled, lower-paid and insecure employment. Brown (2003) and Brown and Hesketh (2004) tell a similar story, in which, while management, professional and technical jobs are expanding, so too are routine service jobs. Ewart Keep points out that these projections of polarisation are of crucial importance for education ‘because the assumption is that a knowledge-driven economy and an associated labour market demand for ever higher skills is just around the corner is implicitly seen as one of the main means by which expansion of all phases and forms of post-compulsory learning can be justified and learners motivated’ (Keep, 2005, p548). If this assumption is incorrect, then the motivating promise of ‘good jobs for all’ is unlikely to be believed. Lebaron (2006) writes in this context about the ‘devalorisation’ of educational qualifications: levels of educational attainment have risen, and expectations have been heightened, yet access to secure jobs, to housing and to an ‘autonomous’ adult life is harder to come by. In such a situation, education, for a sizeable section of the youth population, loses legitimacy (Bendit 2006).

So far, we have discussed knowledge in terms of training and qualifications – issues which cover only part of the field. Another set of arguments, running much wider than the ’skills’ debate, concerns the relationship to the economy of the whole body of knowledge generated by populations – some of it certified and explicit, some of it ‘tacit’ and informal. This is the context in which some theorists have developed the idea of ‘mass intelligence’ or the ‘general intellect’ (Dyer-Witheford, 1999; Virno, 2004; Dowling, 2006). Knowledge is now the ‘principal productive force’ (Virno, 2004, p100); and ‘immaterial labour’ the defining form of work. Immaterial labour is an elastic concept that includes both the kind of knowledge work associated with ‘mental’ labour, and what Michael Hardt’s calls’the affective labour of human contact and interaction’ which through ‘the creation and manipulation of effects’ can bring into being ‘a feeling of ease, well being, satisfaction, excitement, passion – even a sense of connectedness or community’ (Hardt, n.d.). Whatever type of immaterial labour is emphasized, the tendency is to argue that it is produced in the course of the ‘ordinary’ exchanges of daily life, as well as through more specialized training. To understand the contemporary workforce and its capacities, one thus needs to think outside the workplace, and outside the educational institutions which have traditionally served it. Dowling explains that the ability to manage affect that was the basis of her waitressing work depended on social skills acquired outside the restaurant. Dyer-Witheford claims that the new communicational capacities and technological competencies developed through young people’s media practices are both ‘the premises of everyday life’ and an economic resource that employers can exploit. Constantly on-line, immersed in a continuous, electronically mediated communicability, young people acquire the know-how required to perform immaterial labour. But this ‘know-how’ has a complicated relationship with business requirements. It may well be the case that management seeks to make ‘the worker’s personality and subjectivity susceptible to organisation and command’ (Lazzarato, 1996, quoted in Dowling, 2006), but in practice, subjectivity also contains a surplus of ‘excessive’ human capacity, underemployed in the contemporary workplace.

These understandings complement, in a different theoretical idiom, the recent findings of sociologists of work, who identify a gap between the capacities of worker and the requirements of the enterprise in which they work. Pursuing this argument, Warhurst and Thompson (2006) develop a number of themes. They are sceptical about claims for upskilling, suggesting that firms’ investment in ICT tends more to routinise than to make complex the demands of work; and following the Canadian research of Livingstone and Schottz (2006), they suggest that ‘current labour processes’ are not effective in ‘utilising the existing skills of workers’. Higher education may have created a ‘mass of potential knowledge workers’ (2006, p788) but for an important section of the workforce, what is required of them by the work process is much less than their education and experience have rendered them capable of. Moreover, any upskilling that may be required ‘appears to be complemented by deteriorations in other work aspects, namely autonomy and discretion’ (2006, p790). The ‘knowledge gap’, in this case, has less to do with the deficiencies of school-leavers, than with the unfulfilling aspects of work. It is for reasons connected to the cultural surveillance and control that are exercised in the workplace, argues Willis (2003), that working-class energies have directed themselves away from production, and towards consumption, as a source of fulfilment and a resource for the construction of identity.

This is not the whole picture, though. More innovative enterprises, write Warhurst and Thompson, are keen to ‘identify and utilise’ the knowledgeability of their workforces, wanting to ‘introduce organisational structures and practices that facilitate initiative and innovation in the form of creativity and continuous improvement’ on the part of workers, whether routine or expert (2006, p794). Hartley, in a review of contemporary educational discourse, adds that it is not just at the top end of the labour market that such capacities capacities are thought to be required. There are sections of the economy – personal services, for instance – which are ‘high touch’ more than they are high tech and in which emotional intelligence is an asset which management needs to tap (Hartley, 2003). (Here Hartley echoes some of the argument of Hardt, above.) This reading of economic need validates new educational approaches, to which issues of ‘creativity’ are central. In Anna Craft’s words, the ‘economic imperative to foster creativity in business has helped to raise the profile and credentials of creativity in education more generally’ (1999, p11). This, in terms of educational history, is creativity of a new type, going well beyond the traditional arts-based model – an approach exemplified in some of the work sponsored between 2002 and 2009 by Creative Partnerships. The key point that educationalists must absorb is that adapting to new social and economic complexities is not something that can be learned systematically, as a set of rules but rather requires attentiveness to what James Scott (1998) terms ‘metis’, practical knowledge, that stems from the subject’s ability to draw from the entire range of their experience, to articulate that which in other circumstances would remain tacit, and in doing so to respond productively – creatively – to new challenges. Creativity is not only a set of skills, but a modality of life.

The pattern of argument here is a complex one, in which the possibilities of a fuller development of the personality, of the sort at which educationalists have traditionally aimed, is mixed up with more instrumental ideas of what it means to be creative. As the French sociologists Boltanski and Chiapello put it, work has become ’simultaneously more autonomous and more constrained’ (2005, p430), and a similar tension is likely to run through schooling, so that ‘creativity’ comes to mean both the promise of a new and more liberated way of ‘doing education’, and a preparation for a working life in which to be ‘creative’ is to be an economic asset as much as a free individual.

Social influences on the cultural

Michael Rustin (2008) makes a distinction between policy norms and what, following Lockwood (1964), he calls systemic conflict. Since the late nineties, he suggests, English society may well have experienced consensus at the level of policy, with few disagreeing with ‘Third Way’ approaches to problems of economic and social change; but this should not cause us to overlook the continued existence of deep-rooted systemic tensions. He specifies two kinds of tension in particular. The first is ‘current levels of social inequality’, which mean among other things that ‘educational outcomes and therefore employment prospects for the lowest third of the population remain obstinately poor’ (2008, p278). Rustin is doing no more here than confirming a wealth of research data, which attests not only to continuing inequality but to rates of social mobility that were lower at the end of the 20th century than during the post-war decades of educational reform and occupational change (Sutton Trust, 2005). Cultural patterns and senses of individual and collective identity are, and will be, profoundly affected by the closure and exclusion involved in this impasse. Indeed, Gayo-Cal, Savage and Warde (2006), in their attempt to draw ‘a cultural map of the United Kingdom’, refer to ‘entrenched cultural divisions within the social body’, identifying patterns not just of cultural diversity, but of antagonism, ‘Young, poorly educated males’ are deeply at odds with the cultural attachments of wealthier groups, without, according to the researchers, having alternative, positive preferences of their own (2006, p219, p226). Thus here too the concept of ‘deux jeunesses’- two stratified kinds of youth experience – is salient.

The second tension identified by Rustin has to do with social solidarity, with the norms and collective practices which, for classical sociology, contribute to social cohesion. Again what are at issue are enduring tendencies, rather than episodic quirks. Referring to work by Layard (2005) and Offer (2006), and adopting arguments similar to those of Wilkinson (1997) and Oliver James (2007), Rustin suggests that ‘improvements in living standards seem to be accompanied by no increases in self-reported happiness’ (2008, p278). On the contrary, inequalities and ’social epidemics’ of family breakdown, of depression and addiction produce effects of ‘ill-being’. As others (for instance, Buckingham, 2000) have pointed out, young people and children are strongly affected by such tensions. Economically and culturally, they have benefited from the growth of the youth market for consumer goods: as Willis (1990) showed, commercialised, ‘commodified’ products provide vital symbolic resources for the creation of youth identities. But such commercialised engagement is also seen to put children in moral and sometimes physical danger (Buckingham. 2000). Socially, children and young people are the focus of considerable anxiety, both as victims (’stranger danger’) and as threats (‘feral youth’). Educationally, the pressures of a performance culture seem to contribute to low levels of happiness (UNESCO. 2007). It seems right to understand these various tensions as long-lasting, as inter-connected, and as powerful shapers of culture and identity.

However, this is not the only way in which the social and cultural positioning of young people is described. Majima and Savage (2007) in their longitudinal study of cultural attitudes in the period 1981-1999 claim to detect a shift towards ‘more rebellious and conscientious’ attitudes. Cunningham and Lavalette, in a study of school-student participation in the anti-war movement of 2003, identified similar attitudes (2004). It seems reasonable to predict that, among a section of children and young people, the environmental and social crises that one can envisage for 2025 will provoke similar responses. Solidarity, lost in one area, may be regained in another.

Ethnicity

The growing demographic importance of ethnic communities, and of mixed heritage populations, is generally recognised (Finney and Simpson, 2008). The kinds of inter-community relations which are connected to these trends are much more disputed, as are the associated issues of identity.

Broadly, there are three positions in the identity debate. None of them is simply a commentary on cultural trends; each seeks to shape the reality they describe in a desired direction. The character of ‘identity’, both individual and collective, will be strongly affected by which model(s) emerge from the contest as dominant.

The first model is based on a theory of communities divided primarily on lines of ethnicity and leading ‘parallel lives’. (Cantle, 2005). Meaningful interaction is here ‘virtually non-existent’ (Burnett, 2007), and communities develop their own separate identities and belief systems. This diagnosis has been politically influential and has supported a drive to consolidate a general sense of Britishness, ‘a political identity (created) through active membership of the nation state, which regulates individual behaviour and provides for collective action’ (Cantle, quoted in Burnett, 2007, p117.) A second, alternative model, supported by recent social research (Wetherell, 2008), emphasises less the separateness of communities than the interaction between them. In the process of interaction, ‘new, complex, hybrid forms of identity are emerging among second and subsequent generations of migrants as part of the normal process of identity change over time’ (Wetherell, 2008, p780). These identities, it is argued, in the great majority of cases, include a strong British component. Not all identities are hybridised, of course: some groups, including white British working-class people, ‘try to hang on to older cultural forms and senses of belonging’. And, in all cases, ethnically-based identities are articulated, in different ways, with social class.

A third model accepts much of what is said about hybridisation, but is much less certain that it necessarily creates what Gilroy celebrates as ‘a convivial mode of interaction where differences have to be negotiated’ (Gilroy, 2005, p438, cited in Wetherell, 2008). Yousuf notes that ‘growing numbers’ of people have ‘dual or multiple loyalties’ that cross national boundaries: ‘globalisation of communications allows people to align themselves with any social, cultural or political group anywhere in the world’ (2007, p362). Her account is different from that of others who write about hybridity, however, because she accentuates the element of potential conflict between such loyalties. In globalised times, to separate the ‘inside’ of the national state from the ‘outside’ is not possible. At particular moments, where the relationship between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ is one of tension, then potential conflicts are activated, and the attachment of some groups of citizens to what they customarily see as ‘their’ state becomes strained: ‘loyalties can be recalcitrant and unpredictable’ (2007, p363). Evidence collected by Liz Fekete (2008) develops the point further. In a world where there is no ‘over there’ – no international space entirely separate from that of the national state – the response of states to perceived threats to their security adds to internal tensions, with particular consequences for some minority groups. In the wake of the London bombings of 2005, and what Muslim communities experienced as a backlash, Fekete described a process of cultural and social withdrawal, ‘a kind of counter-culture, a refusal to participate, on the basis of “I don’t want what I can’t get.”

Thus, while the salience of ethnicity to culture and identity is beyond question, the modes through which it will be experienced – convivial, defensive – are harder to predict.

Education: differentiated expansion

Education is, of course, shaped by forces that have their origins elsewhere, in the economy, or in wider patterns of social change. But it is also a force in its own right, constructing knowledge, allocating social positions, shaping identities. Making sense of trends in education is therefore vital to understanding the future patterning of knowledge, culture, communities and identities.

We can begin this work of making sense by noting two long-term, interlinked tendencies, summed up in the phrase ‘differentiated expansion’. Education has vastly expanded, in ways that affect all social groups. Expansion has occurred along several axes: ‘vertically’, one can speak of the development of under-5 and post-16 education; further steps towards the massification of higher education; the demands of lifelong learning. ‘Horizontally’, the formal curricular work of the school is increasingly accompanied by pre-school and after-school provision. As the summer rituals surrounding examination results show, the majority of the school population has been drawn into processes of certification and has a strong emotional investment in them. As we shall see, whether one looks at the span of a day or the course of a lifetime, education occupies an ever-larger and personally important part of it, so that Bernstein’s diagnosis of a ‘pedagogisation’ of society (2001) looks more and more accurate. Yet this rich landscape of education is highly differentiated: access, attainment, quality, resources and occupational destination are all strongly conditioned by gender, ethnicity and social class. Understandings of ‘knowledge’, ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ have therefore to grasp both general patterns of experience in a pedagogised world, and specific, differentiated situations.

A disarticulated system

Ball (2008) describes the current school system as ‘disarticulated’, based increasingly on diversity of provision. Diversity has allowed opportunities for the exercise of parental choice, with ’skilled chooser’ parents, mainly middle-class, able to secure advantage for their children (Gewirtz et al, 1995). This is a competitive system, in which those who can afford it have developed the habit of buying resources to support their children, over and above what is offered by the school. Buckingham and Scanlon (2003) describe parents’ investment in home-based ICT; Ball (2007, 2008) shows the ways in which parents make use of the growing market in private provision (home tutoring, for instance) in an attempt to ensure success. Competition, also, is not just a matter of securing access to ‘good’ primary and secondary schools. It extends upwards to university level, with a growing status distinction between groups of universities, and with assessment systems that increasingly register the small differences in exam performance that make a difference to university admission. Here, too, individuals need to develop the skills of choice and calculation, so that, according to some researchers (Brown 2003), education is more than ever seen as a ‘positional’ rather than an ‘absolute’ good.

Are there any reasons to think that these strong tendencies, which have been in motion for nearly two decades, will lessen in their effects over the next 15 years? To answer the question, several possibilities need to be taken into account. One is that government investment in early years education and in targeted programmes of student support will lessen some of the effects of social disadvantage, and weaken the effects of middle-class advantage. Another is that the habits of ’skilled choosing’ will be learned by working-class parents and students. A third is that the cultures of schools – because they need to motivate rather than disengage students – will make a turn away from ‘performativity’ towards an agenda that emphasises other needs. We have already seen how this might occur under the banner of ‘creativity’. It is conceivable that ‘personalisation’ might also support such a change. Leadbeater (2008) thinks that a personalised agenda based on mentoring, family support, individualised timetables and a meaningful curriculum would transform the school experience of large numbers of working-class students, and claims to see the beginnings of such an agenda already, in some schools, taking shape. A pre-condition of success, he argues, is that schools should be capable of acts of ‘cultural recognition’, which understand and positively evaluate the meaning-making capacities of students, and of the communities they come from. Extending Leadbeater’s argument, one might envisage schools recognising, too, their students’ investment in popular culture.

Against these possibilities might be placed the stratifying influence of labour markets, an influence whose pressure on the school it is hard to see diminishing. Also relevant is the capacity of more privileged groups, demonstrated frequently in educational history, to keep ahead of the game (Crouch, 1998), or to turn to their advantage policies which were drawn up with equal opportunity in mind. From this point of view, it is possible to see how, when making an informed choice of secondary school has become a capability within the reach of all parents, the skills of choice are replayed at a higher and more complex level, in relation to A level pathways and to higher education. Likewise, ‘personalisation’ might become an effective means of providing for the privileged, as much as it served the needs of less privileged groups; while the content acquired by the ‘creativity’ agenda could quite feasibly vary according to class and status. Finally, as the Ajegbo Report on cultural diversity (2007, p34) pointed out, the capacities of schools to respond to the cultures of non-privileged students have often been limited: it is one thing to set out a policy of personalisation, another thing to construct a school that can deliver it. While one line of policy may offer support to the development of students’ voice, another may endorse practices of exclusion from school, or strong forms of surveillance and discipline, that tend to discourage it (Monk, 2005). It may be, too, that although schools have acquired many new capacities, especially in the area of ‘effectiveness’, there have also been significant losses along the way. Between 1970, say, and 1990, attentiveness to the languages, dialects and cultures of school-students was well-developed in some curriculum areas (Burgess and Martin, 1990) and was linked to an often-productive questioning of the relationship between the formal knowledge of the school and the everyday experience of its students. Arguably, since 1988, this interest has been pushed to the margins of a teacher consciousness shaped by the requirements of national curricula and literacy frameworks.

Identity issues

Schools are places where attempts occur to realise the designs of policy – to produce responsible citizens, capable workers and so on. But if we limit ourselves to such topics, we do not fully capture the ‘identity work’ that occurs in schools – work which involves the responses of the school population as much as it does the intentions of policy-makers. Ethnographic research in schools has, since the 1960s, uncovered various and localised patterns of sub-culture that are often resistant to the official culture of the school, and that are important sites for the formation of student identity. Willis (1990) showed the extent to which such identity formation made use of commercial culture – clothes, music, pub culture – partly because of its lack of connection to formal education. Phoenix (2005) presented evidence to suggest that this identity work was significantly differentiated by class. Others, more recently, have researched the affordances for identity formation that electronic media provide (Pahl and Rowsell, 2005). One important and consistent finding of research is that the identities that some groups of students make for themselves are both resources from which they can achieve a sense of self-worth and group solidarity, and, at the same time, a route to educational exclusion. This was the conclusion of Paul Willis’s classic work ‘Learning to Labour’ (1977), and it has been reiterated by other researchers since. Most recently, Louise Archer and her colleagues (2003, 2007) have shown the processes through which students construct identities that equip them well for aspects of urban life, while disqualifying themselves from prospects of educational success. The problems that arise from such choices are all the more difficult because the identities which students construct are plainly seen by them as a valuable resource, rather than the result of a mistaken choice. It is reasonable to predict, that if inequality continues to be a feature of the social life of young people, then so, also, for some groups, will be what Willis calls the ‘desperate work’ of (counter-cultural) identity formation.

Elsewhere, in a disarticulated school system, other kinds of identity will be constructed, whose cultural markers will be different. Still salient here are the distinctions between high and low culture which framed discourses about culture and education in the post-war period (Jones, 2009, forthcoming). A complete polarisation of these terms is unfeasible, since the vast growth of the culture industries has blurred the distinction between the two spheres, and high culture itself, now more thoroughly exposed to commodification, has incorporated popular forms. (Anderson, 1998); even the most culturally privileged of students will have a knowledge of popular media culture. Nevertheless, markers of cultural difference, arranged along an axis of ‘high’ and ‘low’, facilitate the processes of ‘distinction’ that is vital to class and group identities (Bourdieu, 1986) and high culture continues to supply elite groups with cultural capital.

Conjecturing the Future

What can these sketches of the present tell us about the future? One set of possibilities insistently presents itself: 2010-2025 will not see a profound rearrangement of the education system. The main reason for thinking this is that the social and political energies that are needed to bring about transformative change are lacking. A decade before 1944, it was obvious that there existed a powerful demand for ’secondary education for all’. Likewise, in the decade leading up to 1988, the existence of a Conservative project, capable of addressing the social and economic tensions of the 1970s, was plain to see. Nothing comparable exists now, and for this reason it is plausible to construct a future based on the projection of current tendencies, rather than the emergence of a radically new scenario. And what applies to education applies, a fortiori, to the wider tendencies that shape knowledge identities, cultures and communities.

On such a basis, one might construct a scenario like the following:

Conflict beyond British borders catches Britain in its flames. A narrow and embattled national identity is reinforced. Race and religion become conduits through which global tensions flow. Environmental issues likewise become a battleground: climate change,

global shortages of food and natural resources, provoke a competition for survival.

Economic and social polarisation continues. For large sections of the population, precarity – intermittent and partial access to the labour market – becomes a way of life. In the absence of social housing, the dependency of younger on older generations grows. Education remains a field in which processes of differentiation are intense, and where the pressure to perform is the basic principle that regulates institutional life.

The problems of youth are at the heart of the country’s social conflicts. The promise that educational achievement will enable security and fulfilment is seen as a rotten one. One response – following the model of France in 2005/6 and Italy in 2008 – is spectacular outbreaks of protest. Another is the everyday ‘refusal’ of the school by large sections of its population.

There develops also a culture of refusal and defiant marginality. In an effort to re-engage their students, schools attempt to relate to it – under a variety of banners, from ‘creativity’ to ‘thinking skills’ to ‘emotional intelligence’. But the pressures of performativity, the difficulties faced by teachers trained to work with a fixed and orthodox curriculum, the intensity of students’ refusal and the overwhelming effects on the school of social breakdown, make this attempt, in many urban schools, a failure. Aspirations to ‘cohesion’ are still voiced by policy-makers, but increasingly ring hollow. Private sector education, meanwhile, continues to guarantee future security, and in those schools (academies, trust schools, well-located church schools) that form large enclaves of relative privilege within the public sector, another kind of education is evolving. Though performance-focused, it sees the necessity of creativity in a knowledge economy, as well as the advantages it can confer. It is here teaching and learning mutate away from the mould in which they were fixed by the national curriculum and by testing. Authentic reform occurs, but is, as always, limited by social situations.

Yet, were other sorts of social energy to be released, culture and education might be configured in very different ways.

Accepting their relative decline, governments of the West withdraw from conflicts whose blowback has heightened domestic tensions. Responding to public clamour, governments co-operate to mitigate the effects of climate change and to apportion the planet’s resources equitably. Strong environmental movements monitor what they do, and make the fate of the earth the central issue in political and social life.

Economic production is reshaped on environmentalist principles. Public investment and redistributive taxation diminish inequalities, and in this new context, the employment and housing prospects of young people improve. As the occupational structure comes to resemble less an hour-glass than a broad-based, low-angled pyramid, so students become more attached to an educational system whose promises they can see as reliable.

The lessening of economic insecurity lifts pressure from the school. Education is less likely to be seen as a positional good, possession of which is only valuable if it confers advantage. Equity becomes a stronger working principle in education, while differentiation diminishes. A new assertiveness among teachers means that they play a greater role in innovation, and can respond without anxiety to cultural change and the tensions that accompany it. Students find that their symbolic creativity is recognised and valued, and that the school has become a place where they can experiment, refine and develop the creativity of home and community.

Argument, debate and protest become ordinary features of the life of schools and communities, which engage continually with the ‘real life’ issues. They contribute to the common stock of intellectual resources that is needed to devise responses to social and environmental problems that exist on a planetary scale. They provide a context and a resource for cultural production.

Neither of these scenarios will come to pass, but they at least measure out the spectrum of possibilities that is open to education and culture. One end of that spectrum, darker in its colours, is closer to realisation than the other. But,as ever, what will happen is not written in the stars, nor even in the best efforts of policy-makers. Identities, knowledges, cultures – even schools – are less ductible than policy sometimes imagines, and there are surprises in store for us, beyond current horizons.

References

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‘The Nintendo Generation’ (Green, Reid and Bigum 2003), ‘The (tech savvy) Next Generation’ (Carlson 2005); ‘Cyberkids’ (Facer and Furlong 2001); Holloway and Valentine 2000) and ‘Digital Natives’ (Prensky 2001). All these labels, given to young people in the last decade, make one thing very clear: the current generation of young people is born in a digital world in which they are seen as more at home than their parents, educators and future employers. For the first time in history young people are assumed to be more competent than adults in managing and living with new technologies that have become integral to everyday life (Tapscott, 1998).

Prensky’s (2001) definition of the Digital Native has been picked up by many researchers and educators working with youth, it is a catchy phrase which intuitively reflects the image many have of young people. Especially in the area of education this term has been seen as enlightening because he argues that the environment in which this tech-savvy generation grows up influences not only what they do with their time but also how they think and learn.

“Digital Natives are used to receiving information really fast. They like to parallel process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked. They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards. They prefer games to “serious” work” (p1).

Researchers eagerly cite young people’s intense interaction with a wide number of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), their enthusiasm for new gadgets, and the speed with which they learn to use new applications as evidence for the existence of a new and different generation of people (Hsi, 2007). Implicit in these descriptions is that older generations will not be able to work, think or learn to interact and live with ICTs in the same way as the younger generations. Prensky put the cut off point at 1980. According to him those born before then should be labelled Digital Immigrants. The concept of Digital Native is therefore almost completely linked to age; young people are grouped together by identifying a whole generation as Digital Natives and are expected to be technologically way ahead of anyone born after 1980. Prensky’s Digital Natives would now be around 25 years old. However, ICTs have changed quite a bit since Prensky first coined the term and it is now perhaps more appropriate to speak of first and second generation Digital Natives. In most research the current generation of teenagers are seen as the real Digital Natives. Since they have grown up in a Web 2.0 environment, they could be labelled second generation Digital Natives. This is in contrast to the first generation of Digital Natives (now between 19 and 25 years old) who grew up in an age when ICT interactivity and participatory production were less common.

This definition of the Digital Native as based purely on generational differences has not been challenged extensively. There is research which brings nuance to our understanding of the youngest generation, but this still mostly ignores whether the distinction between young and old is really the most important one to make within the framework of a digital world in which one can be either an immigrant or a native. It seems likely that a person’s skills, their extent of engagement with ICTs, as well as the number of years that a person has been using ICTs are just as important in indicating digital nativity as age (Helsper and Eynon, forthcoming).

Helsper and Eynon (forthcoming) have criticised the notion of the Digital Native as based purely on generational factors. This paper will briefly review these and other critiques of the Digital Natives concept and extends this debate by looking at what (erroneously) labelling young people as Digital Natives does to their perceptions of themselves as ICT users, independent of whether they are in fact more expert than other generations. The paper focuses in particular on the way young people deal with risks and opportunities online and on whether our identification of young people as Digital Natives might lead to adopt certain coping strategies. Conclusions are drawn about what this means for our interpretation of literacy in relation to digital risks and opportunities across different and future generations.

Critiques of the Digital Native concept

Prensky (2001) took a deterministic view about the influence of age on the ability to use ICTs. He says that “Those of us who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted many or most aspects of the new technology are, and always will be compared to them, digital immigrants.” (p1-2) At first glance young people, on average, do seem all they are said to be; they integrate ICTs into every aspect of their everyday lives and take to new ICTs quickly if access is provided to them, much more so then their parents (Livingstone and Bober, 2005b; Ofcom, 2006).

Researchers working with the term Digital Native have started to question this idea of expertise based on date of birth, as there is enough evidence that real life is a bit more complicated than Prensky proposes. Two arguments have been given against the use of the term Digital Native: (1) it puts young people on one heap and thereby glosses over quite severe inequalities within this generation (eg Facer and Furlong, 2001) and (2) there is enough evidence that young people are not completely comfortable with ICTs such as the internet because they are often unable to avoid or evaluate online risks (Hope Cheong, 2008; Livingstone, 2008).

As an illustration of the first argument two papers merit more attention. In the same year that Prensky coined the term Digital Native Facer and Furlong (2001) wrote an article warning that labelling a whole generation as Cyberkids could have negative consequences. They argued that this term ignored the persistent inequalities within this younger generation in terms of access, skills and attitudes towards technologies. More conclusively, Bennett, Maton and Kervin (2008) reviewed the evidence for the existence of Digital Natives seven years later, and argued that grouping young people together as ICT experts and overlooking inequalities can lead to overconfidence in young people’s skills. The same authors show that “emerging research challenges notions of a homogenous generation with technical expertise and a distinctive learning style. Instead it suggests variations and differences within this population which may be more significant to educators than similarities.” (p781)

In relation to the second critique of the Digital Native, there has been empirical work by Livingstone and colleagues who criticise the notion that young people are, by nature, digitally literate (Livingstone, 2008; Livingstone, Helsper, and Bober, 2008). Livingstone and Helsper (2007) showed clear differences in internet-related skills amongst younger people and also showed that young people who were perceived to be more skilled and those were more active online were also more likely to be exposed to risks. Another paper by Livingstone and Straksund (forthcoming) shows that young people in different countries encounter different types and levels of risks, but that there were no European countries in which this generation was able to avoid negative experiences on the internet completely.

The perception of young people as more ICT expert than adults when they, in actual practice, are not could have negative as well as positive implications in a world where many activities and services are internet and technology based. These implications are not clear and no empirical evidence exists that addresses this issue comprehensively. Nevertheless, it should be possible to deduce some possible effects of this image on young people’s behaviour and the way they perceive themselves by looking at what labelling in other areas of learning does to people.

This paper will address two questions in relation to digital literacy and learning. These two questions are seen as in need of an immediate answer in an environment which perhaps erroneously labels a whole generation as Digital Natives:

• Does openly identifying and addressing young people as Digital Natives prevent them from seeking advice from others who are labelled novices (ie Digital Immigrants)?
• Does this situation mean that young people fail to perceive or deal adequately with risks or hurdles when they come across them because they overestimate their own ability to deal with them?

Some evidence will be presented that suggests which direction the answers to these questions might take. However, current research and evidence does not allow us to answer these questions with confidence and one of the recommendations of this paper is therefore that this issue of young people’s forced identity as expert ICT users and their actual digital skills needs to be further thought through and researched.

Skills, self-efficacy and self-image?

Social psychologists have long studied how others’ views of us influence our identity. The importance of family and peer perceptions is especially important for the way we see ourselves (eg our perceived self) during childhood and adolescence. These perceptions of others might differ from who we would like to be (ideal self) or who we think we really are (true self). Developmental and social psychologists have shown repeatedly that when we hear over and over again that we are ‘bad’ we start living up to this label and start internalising this image of ourselves (Bargh, Chen, and Burrows, 1996; Chen and Bargh, 1997; Goodey, 1997; Link and Phelan, 2001). This relationship between internalising others’ perceptions of the self, which brings perceived self and true self closer together, is undoubtedly also applicable when someone is repeatedly told that they are, on a more positive note, an expert. It would therefore not be a long jump to expect that if young people hear often enough that they are ‘tech-savvy’ or ‘digitally native’ they will grow up with high levels of confidence in their digital skills. In support of this argument, Helsper and Eynon (forthcoming) show that young people have higher levels of confidence independent of their actual levels of experience or expertise. Other research shows that young people in general see older people as less expert (Helsper, 2007) and that parents often think their children are more expert than they are (Livingstone, Helsper and Bober, 2008).

Other research streams show that confidence breeds success, that is, if you believe that you are an expert you are more likely to act like one. Presumed experts are more likely to take risks and learn from their mistakes and through this process advance in the area in which they are the supposed expert. This self-fulfilling prophesy is evident in much of the research on self-efficacy. Bandura has shown over and over again that when people identify themselves as novices they perform badly even when they have the levels of skills required for a certain task (Bandura, Barbaranelli, Caprara, and Pastorelli, 1996; Bandura and Locke, 2003). Gender has been a particular focus of studies into the relationship between perceptions of others, self-efficacy and behaviour in relation to educational outcomes. Girls are stereotypically seen as less apt at sciences and at interacting with technologies and this perception causes girls to underestimate their own skills in maths (for a critique see Hackett and Betz, 1989) and interaction with technologies (Broos and Roe, 2006; Busch, 1995; Durndell and Haag, 2002; Hargittai and Shafer, 2006; Imhof, Vollmeyer, and Beyerlein, 2007; Jackson, et al 2001; Joiner et al, 2005, 2007; Li and Kirkup, 2007; Torkzadeh, Chang, and Demirhan, 2006; Vekiri and Chronaki, 2008; Yao, Rice, and Wallis, 2007). The other side of this coin is that boys who are aware of their status as ICT/math experts are likely to perform better and feel more comfortable with technologies than girls with equal skills who are not put on this pedestal (Selwyn, 2007).

It is thus safe to argue that the way in which young people are perceived by others is likely to influence the confidence they have in interacting with technologies. What remains unclear is what happens when the current young generation, labelled Digital Natives, encounter situations which they do not know how to handle (despite their confidence). Cheong (2008) showed that young people frequently encounter computer-related problems such as error messages and not being able to load certain websites or programmes. Young people in particular are likely to try to solve these types of things on their own, more so than older generations.

Problem solving

Figure 1: Getting help for the use of the internet by age

Source: Oxford Internet Surveys: 2007 (Dutton and Helsper, 2007)

Base: All internet Users (N=1578). Weighted to represent UK population.

Note. Differences Significant at p<0.05

The Oxford Internet Surveys (Dutton and Helsper, 2007), for example, show that 80% of young people under the age of 19 work things out for themselves if there is a problem while 70% of internet users older than 55 years old do this (see Figure 1). However, this does not mean that the youngest generation has no one to turn to. Teenagers do rely on family or friends to help them out while 71% of young adults does this; even senior internet users are less likely to turn to their family and friends in times of need than the supposedly tech-savvy generation. These data do not show whether or not it is family or friends who are most relied upon.

The widespread perception of young people as more expert than adults, whether this perception is correct or not, could therefore change the way generational relationships function in society. One consequence, in light of the evidence which shows that young people and their parents perceive themselves to be more expert digital problem solvers than adults even when they are not (Livingstone and Bober, 2005), might be that adults do not realise when young people need their help and young people might be reluctant to ask for help in a situation where they are supposed to know what they are doing (Helsper and Eynon, forthcoming)

Risks?

As pointed out before, there are a number of studies that show that young people’s wide exposure to and general enthusiasm for ICTs does not always equate with an ability to participate safely in the digital world (Buckingham, 2005; Liau, Khoo, and Ang, 2005; Livingstone, 2008; Livingstone and Bober, 2005a; Livingstone and Helsper, 2007; Livingstone, Helsper, and Bober, 2008; Livingstone and Millwood-Hargrave, 2006; Ofcom, 2006). However, we know very little about how young people cope with these more negative aspects of their engagement with technologies. Some of this uncertainty is related to a lack of clarity about what constitutes risky behaviour and which of these behaviours might subsequently cause harm to young people.

Therefore before continuing the discussion about how younger people actually deal with risks it is important to address what is generally meant by digital risks. This paper focuses, like most other research, on the internet while keeping in mind that young people’s lives and identities are shaped through a number of different technologies which include, but are not limited to, the internet.

Recently progress has been made in the area of classifying different types of online risks that young people encounter, but it is still unclear what research and policy should include when talking about actual harm. In a recent very comprehensive review of research into online risks in Europe Hasebrink, Livingstone and Haddon (2008) have classified risks along four dimensions (commercial, aggressive, sexual and values) and with three category types (content, contact and conduct) and related these to the potential harm that might follow from these types of risks. Their classification is replicated in Table 1.

Table 1: A classification of online risks to children

Source: EU Kids Online (Hasebrink et al, 2008)

This review deals with relatively low level, ‘everyday’ negative experiences and not with more infrequent but more severe risks such as grooming by paedophiles. While the severe types of risks are clearly more harmful than these types of everyday experiences, they are also less frequent and therefore less influential in the general online experiences (and perceptions of expertise) of the average Digital Native (Cheong, 2008). A review of the literature shows that low level risks, defined here as activities that may cause technical, emotional or financial, but not physical, harm have been a part of the internet since its early days and are unlikely to disappear even when adults and young people become more expert at navigating the digital world. This definition of risk includes activities initiated by young people that expose them to risks (ie providing personal details, downloading material, posting pictures) as well as activities that young people are subject to without their initiating interactions (ie bullying, technical problems).

Coping

In relation to lower level, everyday negative experiences Livingstone and Helsper (2008) identified four types of risks: violent (eg bullying), pornographic (eg seeing or being sent sexually explicit messages), privacy (eg sharing of personal details) and contact (eg file sharing and communicating with strangers online) risks. While this and other research shows how parents and educators (try to) mediate and regulate young people’s use of ICTs, such as the internet, it is less clear what young people themselves do to protect themselves or to deal with something once it has happened. In relation to everyday offline activities research shows that teenagers take risks in all sorts of behaviour. Often they know they are taking a risk but do not think that the consequences will happen to them (Cohn, MacFarlane, Yanez and Imai, 1995; Trad, 1993). The equivalent in traditional media research is the ‘third person’ effect, which refers to the tendency for people to think that harmful media content has bad influences on (vulnerable) others but not on themselves (Davison, 1983). It is unclear whether the same is true for internet risks; are young people aware of the risks they are taking and if they are, do they consider themselves vulnerable to the negative consequences?

The research that does exist refers almost exclusively to post-hoc strategies, that is, to young people deleting nasty emails or blocking someone after they have sent a negative message. Potentially pro-active and preventative strategies, such as protecting personal information are more often done as part of a ‘fooling friends’ strategy than as part of a ‘protection of privacy’ strategy.

Three behavioural scenarios based on the Digital Native paradigm

Three possible scenarios can be constructed in relation to young people and online risk taking. The first two assume that young people (as experts) avoid risks when on the internet, while the second two assume that young people (even when expert) do encounter risks:

• (1) Young people are experts at avoiding negative or risky experiences because they are native to the digital environment and know how to manoeuvre in it.
• (2) Young people use a ‘predator tactic’, that is they attack the problem with the means available and avoid it happening again. This is different from option (1) in that young people do encounter risks and are not pro-active in avoiding them. Therefore, they have to wait until negative experiences happen and then they deal with them – a post hoc strategy.
• (3) Young people use an ‘ostrich tactic’, that is they look the other way when negative experiences occur (eg quickly deleting an email) and continue as normal after the ‘threat’ has passed. This is different from option (2) in that young people are aware of the risks but judge them to be irrelevant or ‘facts of online life’ and cannot be bothered to prevent them from happening again.

What is important to note is that there is enough evidence to point out that not all young people are experts, and that internet skills differ by gender, ethnicity, socio-economic status, income, and education as well as by generation (Helsper and Eynon, forthcoming; Livingstone and Bober, 2005b). Nevertheless, all three scenarios apply whether or not we accept the commonly held assumption that all young people are digital experts. The scenarios were constructed to highlight that young people’s coping strategies might not correspond to Prensky’s original idea of the Digital Native or most adults’ perceptions of expertise. These coping strategies might be a result of labelling of young people as experts when they are not.

Scenario 1 is the wishful thinking that often takes place amongst those who label young people as Digital Natives, that is, young people are so comfortable with the online environment that they only go there where they will have positive experiences and are able to manoeuvre around the negative experiences. Scenarios 2 and 3 are more realistic, based on what we know so far but, especially 3, counter the arguments made about Digital Natives and expertise as proposed earlier.

Scenario 2 assumes that young people are experts with an active approach. They are willing to seek help or to teach others how to deal with risks and are continuously updating their skills to avoid coming across a similar type of harm again. These we could call the self-conscious but confident experts since this type of scenario requires understanding that neither the system nor the user is perfect. There is an awareness that negative experiences are likely to occur again but that it is worth trying to change strategies and behaviours to avoid the same negative thing from reoccurring. This scenario is often the one hope of adults and media literacy educators.

The third scenario corresponds to the predictions made based on the self-fulfilling prophesy framework, that is, the young people who consider themselves experts and are so considered by others take their mistakes and the risks they run for granted. Any negative experiences they see as the fault of the system or of other (stupid) people online and not as the consequence of their own behaviour. This allows them to navigate the online world for a considerable amount of time before something really significant and negative happens. When something happens that they cannot ignore it is difficult for them to ask for help because the image they have built up does not correspond to asking for help from (immigrant) others. So instead they try to ignore the risks and go on living in this imperfect digital world without having to admit to themselves or others that they are sometimes not able to deal with the risks in their ‘native’ land. This last scenario argues that young people are not experts at avoiding risks, but that they are ‘experts’ at living with risks.

Evidence for scenarios 2 or 3 would imply that we have to reconsider how we think about expertise and how we think about talking to young people about risks. The rest of this paper will set out to test which of these images of young people is the most appropriate by looking at how age and expertise influence risk-taking and encountering negative experiences.

Evidence for different scenarios

Evidence can be found that counters the idea that young people know how to avoid negative experiences. The UK Children Go Online Survey (Livingstone and Bober, 2005), The SAFT survey (Straksrud, 2005) and the PEW Internet and American Life (Lenhart, 2007) studies have all shown that young people, especially those who have more experience with the internet, run into more risky situations on the internet. These studies have focussed on young people and therefore are not a representative sample of all (older) internet users in the UK. This makes the comparison between younger and older generations difficult and it is unclear if young (digitally native) people run more or fewer risks than (digitally immigrant) adults. Analysis of the Oxford Internet Survey data (Dutton and Helsper, 2007) shows that age, but more than anything else experience, is important in explaining the number of negative experiences that people have online. Table 2 illustrates how the number of negative situations that people encounter varies by age, skill, years online and the extent of the person’s internet use.

Table 2: Describing the number of negative experiences people encounter on the internet

Source: Oxford Internet Surveys: 2007 (Dutton and Helsper, 2007)

Base: All Internet Users (N=1578). Weighted to represent UK population.

** Differences significant at p<.01

Negative experiences are: Received obscene or abusive e-mails from strangers, Received obscene or abusive e-mails from people you know, Received a virus onto your computer, Bought something which has been misrepresented on a Web site, Had credit card details stolen via use on the internet, Been contacted by someone over the internet from some foreign country, and Been contacted by someone online asking you to provide bank details.

Table 2 shows that the number of risks internet users run into does not differ significantly between those who are first and second generation Digital Natives (14-18 yrs and 19-25 yrs) and Digital Immigrants (26 and older). However, they do increase with self-perceived level of skill in using the internet, the number of years that the person has been using the internet and the number of activities that the person undertakes online. Helsper and Eynon (forthcoming) show that age and years of use are not significantly related in the UK; amongst young people and older people both short term users and long term users can be found.

Figure 2 shows how the different negative experiences are distributed over the different age groups.

Figure 2: Types of different negative experiences by age

Source: Oxford Internet Surveys: 2007 (Dutton and Helsper, 2007)

Base: All Internet Users (N=1578). Weighted to represent UK population.

** Differences significant at p<.01

That risks do not differ by age can also be seen in Figure 2. Only financial risks were more often encountered by the older generation; for all other types of risks there were no significant differences between older and younger generations. The two types of risk, both having to do with people trying to ’steal’ personal financial information, differed significantly between age groups and in this case it was the older persons who were more likely to encounter them. This could suggest that Scenario 1 is valid – young people are indeed Digitally Native, and they are more expert than the older generation in avoiding these types of scams. There is a more plausible explanation: young people are simply less vulnerable to financial deceit. That is, they are less likely to be the target of financial scams since they, in general, do not have access to credit cards or enough funds to be of interest to financial scammers. This is supported by the fact that other contact and technical types of harm are just as likely to occur in young as in older internet users.

To understand which factors are more important in explaining people’s negative experiences online linear regression can be used (see Table 3).

Table 3: Explaining the number of negative experiences people encounter on the internet

Source: OxIS 2007 Internet users (N=1,578)

Table 3 shows that when all variables are controlled for, age does influence the number of risks people run, younger people are less likely to encounter risks. This counters some of the moral panics that exist around young people and online negative experiences, as older people are more likely to encounter these. The definition of Digital Natives purely in terms of age seems misguided since experience and the extent of immersion in the internet (breadth of use) are even more important. From these analyses we can deduce that for every 10 years of using the internet about one negative online experience is added. For every 10 activities added, about half a negative experience is added. This seems to support Scenario 1 where young people avoid some risks that older people run into.

Livingstone and Helsper (2008) as well as Liau, Khoo and Ang (2005) argue that risks are the flipside of opportunities and that those children who are more eager to take up the opportunities that the internet offers are also more likely to encounter what adults would label risks. Indeed the analyses above show that for both Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants being an intense user is related to more negative experiences. This suggests that scenarios 2 and 3 might also be valid for internet users, no matter which generation they belong to, but expert and intense internet users are likely to encounter more risks than novices. Where Digital Natives might differ from Digital Immigrants is in how they deal with these negative experiences.

Coping with negative experiences

The previous section of this paper addressed how online negative experiences are related to generation, but also to experience and immersion in the technology. This does not say anything about how young people deal with negative experiences when they encounter them. As shown before, while there is some evidence that young people avoid certain types of negative experiences, it is not clear what their general strategy is in dealing with them, and therefore it is unclear whether, as Digital Natives, young people take up responsibility and use ‘predator’ tactics or whether they ignore risks using ‘ostrich’ tactics.

Table 4: Dealing with negative experience by age

Source: OxIS 2007 Internet users (N=1,578)

All differences significant at p<.01

^a Considered evidence of Ostrich Tactic

^b Considered evidence of Predator Tactic

Table 4 suggests that the ‘ostrich’ tactic is more prevalent in the young than in the older generations when it comes to dealing with spam and Virus messages. They are more likely not to be bothered by spam messages although they do say they receive them. They are also proportionally more likely to say they are either not concerned or concerned about unpleasant experiences but have not done anything to deal with these experiences when using email. It is especially the second generation Digital Natives (ie teenagers) who are more likely than other generations to use this Ostrich tactic (see Table 5).

Table 5: Explaining spam ostrich tactics (‘not bothered by spam’)

Source: OxIS 2007 Internet users (N=1,578)

Table 5 shows that generation and especially second generation Digital Nativeness (ie 14-18 year olds) significantly explains whether people use Ostrich tactics to deal with spam or unwanted email. Teenagers were twice as likely as those over 26 years old to use this tactic even when online experience and expertise were controlled for. In fact the distinction between Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants was the only one factor that significantly explained the use of the Ostrich tactic.

Table 6: Explaining Ostrich tactics as regards unpleasant email experiences (‘Haven’t done anything’)

Source: OxIS 2007 Internet users (N=1,578)

Table 6 contradicts the findings for SPAM because age is here not a significant explanatory factor. However, self-perceived skill is. Surprisingly, the more confident the person is in their skills the less likely they are to take the Ostrich tactic in dealing with negative emails. Here the Digital Nativeness is not determined by generation but by expertise.

Straksrud and Livingstone (forthcoming) showed that the Ostrich tactic is also more common in young people as regards social interactions (ie. contact risks). Young people are most likely to just delete messages when they do not like them, ignored certain sexual or violent content, or said they did not much think about it. They call this strategy ‘neutral’ because it does not require action on the side of the user.

There is thus some evidence for the high use of an ‘Ostrich tactic’ by the Digital Native as defined by generation in comparison to Digital Immigrants (Scenario 3). There is more support for this argument than for the argument that young people are so expert that they can avoid risks (Scenario 1) or that they deal with risks when they encounter them (Scenario 2 – predator tactics).

Discussion

This paper proposed that the labelling of young people as Digital Natives might have unexpected consequences. It was argued that this label might make them perceive themselves as more competent than they really are, therefore more willing to take risks and more likely to acquire skills rapidly. This has to be seen in comparison to the Digital Immigrants who would have lower internet self-efficacy levels and might consequently be more likely to admit they do not know something and ask for help, but they might also underestimate their own skill. The consequences of young people adapting their identity to the general perception that exists of them for problem solving in relation to the internet are still unclear. The paper asked if this label of Digital Natives makes young people less likely to ask for help and whether it makes them less likely to be aware of the risks they are taking online. Reviewing the findings from UK studies, the Oxford Internet Surveys in particular, this paper showed that young people are indeed more likely to try and sort things out on their own and not ask for help, although second generation Digital Natives (teenagers) were slightly more likely to seek help from others than the first generation of Digital Natives (young adults). The paper also argued that young people, while perhaps encountering fewer risks, are by no means able to avoid negative online experiences. They might encounter fewer risks because many of the privacy-related risks are more relevant to older generations who have financial concerns, such as credit card fraud and identity theft to worry about. It is therefore not the case that the young people are able to avoid these types of risks, but instead they simply do not come across these situations because they are not part of their digital world. It seems Digital Natives are just as likely to encounter other conduct, content and related risks as older users with the same level of skill and experience.

Three scenarios were proposed based on the Digital Native paradigm that would predict how young people deal with risks, the first – expert avoidance – paradigm is rejected based on the fact that young people were not able to completely avoid risks and did seem aware of them. The second – predator – scenario was not really supported since young people were not more likely than other groups to actually deal with a negative situation to make sure that it did not happen again. Instead the third – Ostrich tactic – scenario seems more plausible. Young people were likely to either ignore the risks when they came along or to take a passive action which was unlikely to prevent the same negative experience from happening again. The evidence presented in this paper suggests that while generation might explain how people cope with negative online experiences, it is not clear that it is the most important influence on the number of negative experiences or risks encountered. Experience and expertise are more significant predictors of the latter than generation. Prensky’s original concept of a generation of Digital Natives, here measured as the skills to avoid risks, was thus not supported. Instead the difference between generations might be in how they cope with negative experiences when encountered, but not clearly in a way that shows young people as employing more advanced coping strategies.

This overview of research and existing data could not determine if young people’s ‘Ostrich style’ coping strategies were caused by young people not wanting to admit that there are situations online that they are not able or do not want to deal with because they are supposed to be Digital Natives. One conclusion is that Digital Natives see Digital Immigrants as incapable of helping in the digital world where young people are considered to be native, but evidence is needed to support this claim. There was a hint that the future might be different: first generation Digital Natives were less likely to rely on others than digital migrants, but second generation Digital Natives seem not to have ‘inherited’ this refusal to seek others’ support. They mostly seek support from their peers, however, or try to figure it out themselves.

Conclusions

Young people tend to use a tactic that is passive when it comes to dealing with negative experiences online. They seem to stick their heads in the sand and wait for the negative experience to pass and then continue as before. This was labelled the Ostrich tactic in this paper. This type of reaction could be influenced by older generations placing them in the role of Digital Natives even when not all young people fulfilled the requirements of expertise. It is imperative that the image of the latest generation as ‘Digital Natives’ does not distract educators and parents from understanding the complex issues that lie beneath young people’s everyday interaction with ICTs. Young people should be given room to fail and should develop trusted relationships in which they can admit that they are not able to do everything perfectly when it comes to the digital world.

Adults need to make sure that their perception of young people as digital experts does not make them blind to the fact that ICTs often represent everyday offline life for these young people with all its highs and lows. I propose that (a) risks are part of everyday life and of learning experiences, and that (b) cutting young people off from ICTs denies them the learning, social, and emotional opportunities that these offer. Educators need to understand that there is no such thing as riskless ICT use and ways need to found to help young people develop active instead of passive ‘Ostrich’ tactic styles of coping with the negative aspects of digital living. In most cases experiences of what Prensky called Digital Immigrants are not that far removed from those of Digital Natives and parallels can be found with the commercial, aggressive, sexual and value risks (see Hasebrink et al, 2008) that previous generations have run in offline life.

It should be stressed that this paper by no means implies that young people are stupid (ie they do not see any risks) or that they completely lack the skills to deal with problems. Perhaps an alternative explanation is that they honestly do not care as much as adults about these everyday nuisances in using technologies and that, in this sense, they are different from adults. Perhaps adults are immigrants in the sense that the digital world is still separate to them from ‘real life’. They have different criteria and different strategies for the online and the offline worlds. Young people might accept digital experiences as part of every day life online, as part of who they are, and negative experiences do not influence their functioning to the extent that they might for those who are not Digital Natives. Young people will be able to use their varying skills to avoid embarrassing or negative experiences in those areas which truly matter to them, especially in relation to their peers but not in relation to other privacy, social, technical, financial or other ‘glitches of the system’.

Young people perhaps see these risks as unavoidable if they want to take up the benefits of online life. Just as most young people will not stay locked up inside because there are careless drivers or potential bullies outside, they will not stay off the internet because they might receive annoying messages or receive a computer virus. While they perceive risks as part of everyday online and offline life, adults still see these two arenas as separate and assume that young people are better at navigating the online than the offline. The ideal situation would be if young people can adopt what was, in this paper, called the predator tactic, that is, face the negative experience and try to avoid it in the future by using the tools available to them. A completely risky and harmful online world is an illusion that might have been perpetuated by the image of young people as Digital Natives: instead of steering young people away from risks it might have led them to take a passive approach where problems are encountered but not faced or dealt with. A preferable future scenario would be a realistic evaluation of which negative experiences are most likely to bother young people in their everyday interactions with the technologies and accept that they are fallible while handing them to tools to deal with these types of situations. In other words, use a similar technique to how we teach young people to cross the road… not by keeping them inside but by allowing them incremental further steps, and perhaps a few close encounters, to really appreciate the risks while at the same time teaching them about the warning signs.

The futures

This paper was written for the Beyond Current Horizons programme which stimulated the imagining of possible future scenarios with a special focus on educational futures. To end this paper three scenarios based on the topic under discussion in this paper which can be divided into plausible, possible and preferable scenarios will be discussed.

The plausible

It is likely that the integration of interactive technologies into our everyday lives will continue. The internet, on a myriad of different platforms, will become an even more integral part of everyday life. I would even go so far as to say that it will become so ubiquitous and integrated that people will not consciously separate it from the fabric of society. The internet and associated technologies will thus become invisible. From the material presented in this paper it seems that in this type of society the current generations are indeed ‘Digitally Native’. While there might still differences in (quality of) access, skills and types of engagement with ICTs amongst young people, they do not seem to see the digital world as separate from ‘real life’, at least not to the extent that adult Digital Immigrants do. This would mean that instead of ignoring or being afraid of interacting with their own children in digital environments as the current generation of adults are supposed to be, the generation of Digital Natives will be comfortable with facing the reality of the digital world as part of their children’s everyday life. The current generation should therefore be equipped, perhaps through educational institutions, with the tool kit that allows them to talk to their children about the risks and opportunities that occur online. Most young people will already have the vocabulary to do this. So as long as current generations of adults (ie digital migrants) accept that young people are not completely tech-savvy and that the experiences of adults in the offline world have their parallels in the online world adults and young people should be able to strike up a constructive conversation in this area. Thus if we move away from the (erroneous) perception of unbridgeable chasms between generations and if we instead focus on the importance of expertise and literacy which can be learned independent of age, this scenario is indeed plausible.

This scenario also means a shift to an education in digital literacy that focuses on critical literacy instead of technical literacy. It focuses on dealing with general situations that might occur in a digital world and not with specific applications. Many of these critical skills have been passed on by parents and teachers over the centuries in an offline context and a mutual discussion and understanding is necessary so that young people feel that it is okay to ask for help even if the adults do not have the specific technical experience. In a way a dictionary which translate the offline to the online and back again, where parallels are drawn between the past and the future, is needed.

The possible

It is possible that the internet and technologies will change so much that the current generation of Digital Natives become the Digital Immigrants of the future. This scenario assumes that Prensky’s ideas of an evolutionary development of the brain based on drastic changes in the environment are correct and that humans are fundamentally and irreversibly changing. This would mean a continuing disconnect between generations and a continuation of the mistaken perception that young people and older people cannot communicate or learn from each other about interactions with ICTs. This is a scenario which could lead to what Selwyn (2008) labelled the ‘death of schools’ scenario. Those in favour of this perspective (Rowan and Bigum, 2003; Tapscott, 1999; Underwood, 2007) say young people are so disconnected and teaching styles so alienating that schools become obsolete as learning environments. One possibility is that while the physical school might continue to exist it no longer serves as the seat of power for teaching, that is, educators will take on a different role. They will serve as conduits or guides for young people to link up with experts around the world who do speak the language of the Digital Natives of that time and understand the risks and opportunities out there. Teachers might not teach anymore, they might just become supervisors of personalised learning by students from different backgrounds who come into the physical school building to then reach out to different areas and experts around the world. Peer-to-peer learning will be an important part of this system where young people learn from others’ experiences who have grown up in the digital world, that is, trial and error learning in those areas where adults cannot be of any help. Teachers will be present to help young people learn and answer basic questions, but the real learning will take place amongst the students who are attending courses by world-wide experts through links with others outside the classroom. Schools are still necessary in this scenario to ensure that young people participate in these world-wide curricula.

The preferable

The preferable future would clearly lie in a world where socio-economic status, education and other factors related to offline inequalities were not replicated in the digital world; a world in which all have equal access, skills and opportunities to use technologies to improve their quality of life, a world in which generation and gender do not put a wedge in between people’s abilities to deal with technologies; a world in which experience and expertise are really the most important aspects of adopting active tactics of dealing with negative online experiences would mean that adults with dedication can catch up and help young people deal with issues as educators and teachers again.

I hope that it is clear from the above that I am optimistic, my preferred and plausible scenarios are not that far removed from each other, at least not when it comes to generation gaps. Nevertheless, I do believe that social/socio-economic inequalities in the ability to access high quality ICTs and in the skills people have to get the most out of ICTs while avoiding the risks associated, will continue to exist although in an ideal or preferred world they would have to disappear.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

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This scenario is likely both in case of an energy crisis and in the absence of one. The internet and the world wide web might be the only way to continue conducting global business when raw materials such as oil and gas run out or become prohibitively costly.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

The starting point for this review is the assumption of a globalised world characterised by interdependent network spaces, the diminished importance of distance, and the existence of multiple spatialities of organisation and practice, as well as the availability of multiple geographies of belonging (Amin, 2002). From a theoretical perspective, Bourdieu’s (1990, 1999) work on fields and the concept of habitus recurs due to an increased sociological research emphasis on and interest in embodied practices in a world characterised by fluidity and flexibility. This fluidity has also been recognised by Cliff, O’Malley and Taylor (2008: 18) who argue that:

“…the blurring of distinctions between boundaries, at multiple levels: blurring between the personal/private and the public; between the individual identity and group identity, and therefore between individual output and group output; between what is part of the digital landscape and what is “reality”; between formal and informal learning; between work, play and education…”

will be key issues in the future. The flexibility of residence and increasing mobility is present in contemporary society in the form of migration and the fact that today’s societies are both emigrant and immigrant societies. The new kind of migration characterised by extra-territoriality and anchors instead of roots for identification then “casts a question mark upon the bond between identity and citizenship, individual and place, neighbourhood and belonging” (Bauman, 2008). Another trend which has been recognised by academic and policy circles alike is the decline in formal political engagement (Cornwall, 2008) and therefore “alternative ways of ensuring that voices are heard are required” (National Consumer Council, 2004: 10 quoted in Clarke and Newman, 2007).

Argument: locality, place and territories matter through virtual and material boundaries

Although globalisation processes are characterised by a diminished importance of space, they are also evident in a “transformation of practice and experience which is felt actually within localities” (Tomlinson, 1999, p9, emphasis in original). While there is an argument for the blurring between public and private spheres, there is also a debate about the growing diversification of social fields (Fowler, 1997). As people occupy multiple relationships and multiple subject positions, there are two opposing trends: a striving for belonging (feeling similar) and a striving for distinction (feeling separate).

Conceptions of citizenship and belonging need to be rethought as the nation-state as the preferred scale of political involvement has been de-centred. This means including practices such as social action, volunteering (Lister et al, 2002) and other than nominally formal political practices in the community (both real and virtual) in the notion of citizenship as well as allowing belonging to multiple communities (cf. Pell, 2008; Purcell, 2003). This leads to the evolution of different political practices in emerging public spheres – sites of emergent democratic citizenship.

Citizenship is an embodied practice and can be seen as a consequence of dispositions acquired in the private sphere. In this sense, the boundaries between public and private are indistinct and thus the personal is political and the political personal. Technology facilitates and exacerbates this blurring and thus opens avenues for direct democracy and widened access but unevenly distributed access can also reproduce existing hierarchies of power (cf. Cass, Shove and Urry, 2005).

Accessibility then becomes the main concern. Penetration of digital technologies has increased over the years but access to technology remains linked to patterns of social exclusion, with the most socially disadvantaged being the least likely to have or use access to digital technology. Barriers to access are then not only determined by inappropriate market provision and affordability but also by lack of confidence, skills and support. With the lack of digital technology skills becoming the new illiteracy stigma (OPM, 2008), the digital and social divide amplify each other.

Studies and data

1. Communities and place

The concept of community

There is an extensive sociological and anthropological literature on the changing meanings of community (Davies and Jones, 2003; Pahl, 2005; Philipson and Thompson, 2008) paying attention to the questions of disembedding and de-territorialisation of social relations in modernity which seem to have become accepted trends in the field (starting with Bell and Newby, 1971 and continued in Giddens, 1990; Tomlinson, 1999). Diminishing importance of space has also been claimed by Castells (1998, 2001), with special reference to the influence of ICT and the internet as appropriate medium of communication for the type of society and social relationships that he envisaged. Despite the ubiquity of the disembedding and de-territorialisation claims, local identifications, ie “communities-on-the-ground” (Pahl, 2005; Savage, Bagnall and Longhurst, 2005) and attachment to place have remained salient.

These questions have also been examined in the context of socio-economic transformation and regeneration where place identity and the forms it takes through community engagement have been considered central issues. Such studies have covered deprived neighbourhoods especially in old industrial regions (eg the author’s own research; Bennett, Beynon and Hudson, 2000; Harding, 1997; Waddington, 2003) and dynamic city centres (e.g. O’Connor and Wynne, 1996, Binnie and Skeggs, 2004) as well as (middle-class) residential areas (Savage, Bagnall and Longhurst, 2005).

A particularly promising attempt seems to be an approach which links networks, ie people’s interconnectedness, class and place as suggested by Blokland and Savage (2001). Liepins (2000) examines different approaches to the concept with particular reference to rural communities, and highlights the move away from community as a “fixed object” to a scale of inquiry, a symbolic construction (eg Cohen, 1985) or investigations of power where the politics of contrasting voices, spaces and actions can be considered. Neal and Walters (2008) also deal with the contentious nature of community, stressing the need to explain it rather than seeing it as the explanation (Alleyne, 2002). They highlight the importance of the material aspect of community, ie the actual social relations and groupings in addition to the symbolic aspects of community as repository of meaning. Community remains both a discourse and a practice; it operates on the symbolic and the personal (and therefore physical) level. This means that places continue to matter as the basis of shared socio-spatial practices.

There seem to be two trends concerning the challenge of the meaning of place and space for individual and collective identities and their expression in “communities”: a re-definition of the local and the development of cosmopolitan identities.

Redefining local identity and belonging – ‘elective belonging’

In a society characterised by flexibility, mobility and fluidity the construction of local identity has become more precarious – less inherited and based on a shared past, but more practised and performed. The argument is that the emergence of mobile fields and the disjunctures between a growing number of fields has led to a heightened importance of “ordinariness”, a heightened importance of the commonality of shared positions. Belonging is fluid and contingent. This provides for a community of strangers, according to Simmel, those who come today and stay tomorrow. It also, however, presupposes agency and choice. Choice is here seen as a value, a sign of achievement – mobility is the norm (cf. Beck, 2000), staying in the place you were born and brought up in is deviant:

“[a]ll of us are , willy-nilly, by design or by default, on the move. We are on the move even if, physically we stay put: immobility is not a realistic option in a world of permanent change. And yet the effects of that new condition are radically unequal. Some of us become fully and truly ‘global’; some are fixed in their ‘locality’ – a predicament neither pleasurable nor endurable in the world in which the ‘globals’ set the tone and compose the rules of the life-game.” (Bauman, 1998, p2)

In tune with the idea of the “elective biography” (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002), local identity, too, has become a choice – “elective belonging” (Savage et al, 2005). This starts from the fact that (social and geographical) mobility has increased and thus life-long connections with one place to establish a particular “fixed” local identity and sense of belonging are becoming less likely. Referring to a study of middle-class residential areas in Manchester (Savage et al, 2005) Savage (2008) argues that “the actual lived history of the place in which they [interviewees] lived was less important as the way in which they could define the place as belonging to them through their conscious choice to move and settle in it” (p.152). For the “mobile classes” place then remains important as manifestation of their “lifestyle” or consumer choice. The element of choice is essential in this identification and understanding of place because according to Savage (2008: 153) for those who do not possess the necessary resources, “nostalgia becomes the counterpart to elective belonging.”

To juxtapose this story of nostalgia, a look at post-industrial, formerly “traditional” working-class communities is necessary. Valerie Walkerdine’s research on communities in the South Wales valleys and my research on mining communities in Kent has shown that individuals do not stay in these places out of a longing for an idealised past but due to the persistence of social networks linking family, friends and (former) work-places (see also Strangleman, 2001; Parry, 2003). Research participants explained how the social infrastructure which used to be supported by the economic infrastructure (ie the colliery or the local steel plant) is now predominantly linked to the particular village and individual residents’ commitment – and in this sense to a notion of local citizenship. There are opportunities and threats in this very local notion of belonging. On the one hand, this should strengthen the need for all local residents’ involvement in local affairs, including children and young people. On the other hand, in my study, this facilitated a sense of insularity and lack of awareness of similar issues and experiences in other places. Here, digital technologies can help to bridge gaps and facilitate links between “local citizens” within and between localities.

In Savage et al’s (2005) study individuals are assumed to be free in their choices – to move or to stay. This does not take into account economic or social necessities. It is presupposed that moving socially requires moving geographically while staying put equals displacement. Constraints posed by power hierarchies are neglected. Mobility and the capacity for mobile/multiple identities, however, are dependent on resources. In their study of East German youth, Hörschelmann and Schäfer (2007) conclude that young people’s desire to travel, to become “cosmopolitan/global”, was shaped by different motivations and expectations, which in turn were influenced by education, parental influence and material opportunity, or, in other words, social, economic and cultural relations of power. Mobility has a class dimension. DIY biographies and mobile selves are accessible to those with the necessary economic, social and cultural capital – and this is true for the offline and the online world, as those most socially disadvantaged are also those most likely to be digitally excluded.

Cosmopolitan identities

Szerszynski and Urry (2002, 2006) argue for the emergence of a spatially dispersed culture of cosmopolitanism which involves awareness and knowledge of other places, cultures and people. It combines abilities and dispositions, eg a willingness to take risks, curiosity about other places, as well as an ability to read different images (Szerszynski and Urry, 2006). Such cosmopolitan ways of thinking need to be incorporated into people’s identities, everyday practices, rituals and dispositions to become an effective force in the world (Beck and Sznaider, 2006). As with the concept of elective belonging, spatial mobility and spatial awareness become paramount to the knowledge and understanding of a particular place’s history/histories. Being part of a cosmopolitan community is not dependent on a shared and collectively remembered past but on the experience and appreciation of similar socio-spatial practices and rituals. From a negative perspective, this can take on the semblance of tolerance when this actually means tolerance of a similarly “open” lifestyle, eg similar political, ethical, consumption choices. Thus, the internationally mobile professional can feel at home anywhere suitably cosmopolitan, eg New York, London, Berlin or Sydney, among other suitably cosmopolitan professionals. They might, however, face difficulties in participating in the leisure and work patterns of small rural hamlets.

The aims of education then become instilling a disposition towards, an acceptance of, and an ability to deal with, mobility – intellectually, physically, virtually. Education needs to prepare for flexibility and the possibility of multiple trajectories and ideally counteract the fact that the access to choice is still “heavily circumscribed by social, cultural, and economic relations of power” (Hörschelmann and Schäfer, 2007, p1869). As much as the global is increasingly present in the local and in young people’s daily experience, this experience is also structured by existing power hierarchies where choice is easily turned into necessity and the tourist turns into the migrant or vice versa (cf Bauman, 1998).

2. Questions of citizenship

“The common conception of citizenship is that of belonging to a political community, with the ensuing rights and responsibilities of membership.” (Pell, 2008, p143)

Citizenship is a political project as much as it is a sociological concept. It is inextricably bound up with the powers that be at any point in time. Therefore, future projections of the meaning of citizenship are particularly difficult. It can be assumed, however, that “traditional” notions of citizenship have become problematic. There are different ways in which citizenship is currently being reconfigured:

• (a) A (passive) notion of citizenship which is based solely on citizenship activities which are predetermined and contained in the institutions of the state (Pell, 2008), eg voting rights and participation in the electoral process, has become obsolete.
• (b) Membership of traditional collective organisations such as parties and trade unions has been replaced by alternative forms of engagement, eg social movements, issue-based politics and the politics of the everyday.
• (c) Citizenship is being rescaled, re-territorialised and re-oriented away from the nation-state as the predominant political community (Purcell, 2003).

Following on from the argument above, ie that place retains meaning both as a basis of a particularly local as well as a cosmopolitan community, this has implications for citizenship. As belonging to place is performed and thus contingent, so is citizenship. It is no longer solely defined by the nation-state but by other forms of engaging with state power, which opens up opportunities for multiple belongings and thus multiple citizenships.

As the role of the state shifts and as more complex and ‘messy’ governance mechanisms evolve (Woods and Goodwin, 2003), future forms of citizenship might be based on mundane, proto-political forms of engagement and community-making, especially as a manifestation of belonging. While Bauman’s (2008) analysis stresses the diversity of lifestyles and options, ie the fact that territorially determined citizenship turns into the right to remain different, Savage et al (2005) see this as the basis for solidarity and potential for collective action. Bauman emphasises the precarity and ephemeral nature of such bonds as “it is a moot question whether it is fit to conceive group solidarity in any other form than that of the fickle and fray, predominantly virtual ‘networks’, galvanised and continually re-modelled by the interplay of individual connecting and disconnecting, making calls and declining to reply [to] them.” For Savage et al (2005) the potential for collective action lies in the fact that a lack of feeling at home all the time increases the importance of feeling at home some of the time. This would motivate individuals to opt into shared practices. Place thus becomes valuable to the individual even if they are no longer part of a community rooted in place, the community is rooted in practice.

Place and residence becomes the basis for civic engagement (cf. Purcell, 2003). Pahl (2005) argues that common awareness of a social situation is required for any community to act as collectivity. Such common awareness, if it is no longer provided by a shared past, can only be drawn from a shared present, the co-presence in the everyday which is manifest in local social capital. This is evident in community participation, especially in local planning and governance processes, which has been seen as indicative of a combination of local identification and social cohesion. Another example is parental involvement in schools which can also be redefined as proto-political, civic engagement (cf. Savage et al, 2005). These practices are not place-specific but place-bound in that they have to be enacted in a particular place and thus provide the basis for “community” in contrast to “local” involvement. Sociological literature has dealt with the concept of active citizenship in the context of mechanisms of governmentality (Marinetto, 2003).

This is often linked to ideas of the state enabling and empowering citizens but the notion of empowerment through engagement has been heavily criticised and contested. In this conceptualisation the state confers the status of citizenship onto the individual, which highlights the passivity assigned to citizenship. New forms of engagement, however, are more creative and proactive and are linked to individuals creating their own political spaces, their own emergent public spheres, virtual or material. An example of this is the trend towards the citizen-consumer. Here citizenship is found in life-politics (eg Giddens, 1991) and the everyday act of consumption is a site for individuals’ political involvement. The supermarket becomes a political space. Digital technologies and especially the internet then provide access to a greater consumer choice and information which will enhance the (political) power of the consumer (Scammell, 2000).

Part of the drive for active citizens has been the emphasis on inclusive and accountable networks for citizens, ie the manifestation of different practices of citizenship. Davies (2007) describes this as the current network ‘orthodoxy’ in UK policy studies. The citizen-consumer as envisaged by New Labour, ie the individual exercising choice in pursuit of individual wants (Clarke et al, 2006), can be motivated to be involved in the institutions providing public services. Recent research has therefore focused on the partnership approach as one form of democratic inclusion/deliberative democracy (Ball and Maginn, 2005; Perrons and Skyers, 2003). Davies (2007) and the author’s own research showed that “community” knowledge and understanding of partnerships or the regeneration/planning process can contrast dramatically with policy understanding and knowledge. Residents in a former mining community in Kent who were included in the local regeneration forum still felt excluded from the actual decision-making process. Their idea of involvement also meant ownership of the regeneration outcome, the regenerated space (in this case through heritage displays, ie a performance of a shared past). As their plans were not incorporated for a number of economic/political reasons, the residents felt powerless rather than empowered and thus ultimately disadvantaged.

Thus particular forms of community participation reproduce existing power inequalities rather than empower the residents. The problem arises because the gap between the cultural capital needed to participate in “legitimate” nominally participatory structures, and the cultural capital available in those groups which are supposedly most able to benefit from those structures is not acknowledged or articulated (cf Davies, 2007). Questioning the empowerment effects of particular governance mechanisms then leads to questioning the neo-liberal idea of “active citizenship”. Active citizenship might not be achieved within the constraints of state institutions but requires the creation of political and public places which resonate with the social and cultural capital of the affected communities. Here, access to and use of digital public spaces might be particularly helpful as a recent community campaign in Kent (www.save-wye.org) has shown.

As residence and the politics of the everyday take on more prominence in the constitution of citizenship, the question of permanence and sustainability arises. Amit and Rappaport (2002) emphasise the short-lived nature of circumstantial associations such as with neighbours, work colleagues, club members and also fellow parents at parents’ associations. The importance and feeling of belonging of such consociate relationships depends on the continued involvement in the contexts in which they were formed. This is of particular importance in communities undergoing major socio-economic transformation where the traditional forms of association (trade unions, working-men’s clubs) lose their centrality. In these cases a focus for the maintenance of community becomes essential. Neal and Walters (2008) argue that the material relationships are enhanced through the dual belonging to a material place and an imagined community, in their case the rural community (cf.also Anderson, 1983).

In my research, this is similarly true, as the notion of the (symbolic) mining community was regularly mobilised and referred to in the description of everyday life in the village. The symbolic community is then constructed through campaigns for statues representing the preferred image of the village, village carnivals or newsletters. These place-making activities also need to allow space for young people as citizens and competent actors within the community, so that they can make their own communities as part of (or even in spite of) the local everyday spaces of (adult) community (cf. Panelli et al, 2002). As Weller (2003, p164) describes, “local boundaries shape the everyday spaces of citizenship and belonging for the teenagers (…) [so that] in the immediate future citizenship will be acted out at the local level.”

In conclusion then, citizenship is increasingly linked to the local and local, everyday practices. So the emphasis is then placed on recognition of citizenship practice rather than the bestowal of citizenship rights and it could be argued that this citizenship practice is undergoing transformation in the light of technological advances. Community-making practices encompass both community responsibility and care, and social pleasure and conviviality. The line between a citizen and someone practising community then becomes blurred as the proto-political, small-scale activities as a result of convivial practices make the social and political capital of social organisations visible. This means that social organisations can wield power and influence in local governance processes despite being nominally outside of the political process which illustrates the idea of the emergent public sphere. Although Neal and Walters (2008) discuss this in the rural context they also draw parallels to Thrift’s (2005) analysis of “lighter touch urban politics”.

The common denominator in studies of participation and citizenship seems to have become the importance of everyday activities and the resonance of the everyday in the political sphere and vice versa (cf Macnaughten, 2003). The argument is especially important when coupled with the recommendation by FreshMinds (2008) which highlights the importance of meaningful benefits of digital technologies in mundane activities for non-users to integrate them into their daily life. If, therefore, small-scale activities which lead to a feeling of belonging and an affective connection with place- or non-place-based social groups can be enhanced by digital technologies this can facilitate their uptake and prohibit a deepening of the digital divide.

Conclusions and directions

“Technology alone does not transform government, but government cannot transform to meet modern citizens’ expectations without it … The vision … is also about making government transformational through the use of technology…” (Cabinet Office, 2005)

As I discussed above, the role of the state in the construction of community and citizenship is changing. Digital technologies can drive this process forward and the integration of ICTs into the mechanisms of government has been described as a goal for transformational government. Enhanced ICTs can have particularly beneficial effects for organisations, institutions and for individual citizens, employees or social groups in the form of access to new opportunities and capabilities (CIOC, 2006). An important potential benefit is the integration of “direct democracy”, ie citizen engagement and polling, with the existing form of representative democracy where decisions are made via elected representatives. Commentators on the Obama campaign emphasised the successful engagement of the grass roots through digital technologies. Citizenship education, therefore, will mean making visible all the different routes to political participation with digitally enhanced ways of community-making and political action providing particularly fruitful opportunities for the creation of new public spheres.

Digital inclusion is linked to social inclusion. FreshMinds (2008, p5) argue that digital equality can mitigate “social inequalities derived from low incomes, poor health, limited skills or disabilities.” There could therefore be a virtuous circle: digital inclusion can enhance social inclusion and thus community engagement and social cohesion. Digital inclusion does not only mean the provision of ICT skills, it also means building up of trust among disadvantaged groups – in the public service providers as well as ICTs (DIT, 2007) so that the danger of a reproduction of offline exclusion in the online world can be addressed, and the potential of virtual communities as providing open, accessible, more democratic, alternative and safe spaces (Evans 2004) can be achieved.

Active citizenship does not only require cultural capital in the sense of openness and awareness of spaces for creative engagement but also digital literacy. This is becoming necessary to participate in contemporary and future society as lack of ICT skills is perceived to “greatly restrict” what adults can do privately and professionally (FreshMinds, 2008, p34). This suggests a particular subjectivity to participate fully:

“Access is still not enough: nearly two fifths of non-users fail to see the need or benefit of using the internet and other ICTs or feel that they are not the right kind of person to use them. The greatest share of the population who hold this view is the elderly and those on low incomes. These groups were also the most likely to not use the internet – even if they had a connection at home.” (2008: 37, my emphasis).

This means that attitudes towards technology are as important as affordability: both cultural and economic capital are required to deal with the information society. Here it is possible to refer to the discussion of “Digital Natives” by Prensky (2001) and Ellen Helsper in the context of this project. It could be argued that the 65+ generation of 2030 will have been socialised into the use of digital technologies and therefore the problem of lack of motivation and perceived need might not arise. This, however, does not address the lack of motivation and perceived need for those on low incomes – the digital divide is deepening for those who are not included and are not using digital technologies and thus are at risk at being left behind even further (FreshMinds, 2008, OPM, 2008). There remains a spatial element to social inclusion, however. As long as affordability of access rather than motivation to access is an issue, rural areas miss out on the availability of cheaper technology which is based on residential clusters. If these inequalities can be reduced then motivation becomes the main factor in digital inclusion.

Trends, surprises, predictions

“Attention to continuity is important for a number of reasons, among which is the capacity of social arrangements to persist despite expectations to the contrary.” (Crow, 2005, p3.2)

Trends

Places, territories and boundaries – both symbolically and materially – will continue to matter in everyday practices

In the discussion above, socio-spatial practices matter for the performance of citizenship has been regularly highlighted. The notion of the nation-state based citizenship is becoming obsolete as a result of the parallel tendencies towards localised and cosmopolitan identities. Residence becomes the basis for the political community (cf. Purcell, 2003). At the same time, the political is being redefined to include everyday and so-called “proto-political” activities. With regard to the interplay of belonging and technology, Savage et al (2005, p207) illustrate that fields of practice vary in their spatial extension, while some fields (eg cinema, music) “deploy IT to permit considerable spatial extension, yet other fields, notably that of residence, do not.” Following from this, then, it is possible to say that locality and boundaries remain important for identification. This can be translated into the digital world and efforts to construct and conceptualise digital territories are evidence for this: “without digital boundaries, the fundamental notion of privacy or the feeling of being at home will not take place” (Beslay and Hakkala, 2007, p69, emphasis in original). Beslay and Hakkala (2007) therefore suggest the concept of a virtual residence to tackle concerns about privacy, security and identity.

Belonging, whether offline or online, is performed through everyday practices. Therefore notions of citizenship need to be linked to the everyday, the individualised, embodied experience of social/political issues. Citizenship is thus no longer a status that is granted but a practice that is performed. Top-down-initiated participatory regimes will falter as more and more “community” activists will chose an exit-action strategy (Davies, 2007) and build their own stages and public spheres – both offline and online – for engagement and action.

Accessibility matters – social and cultural capital becomes digital capital and vice versa

Communities and engagement are both based on sharing of, and access to, information. Future technological developments open up a range of avenues, eg the ubiquitous access to information via ambient intelligent systems. The question remains, however, whether the fact that access can be limited to certain groups of people on the basis of their membership of the information-”owning” (producing) institution or their access to the technology is qualitatively different to mechanisms of distinction and exclusion available and practised now. FreshMinds (2008) argue that the digital divide between those who are confident and motivated to use digital technologies and those who are not is deepened despite being narrowed. Although there are fewer people who are excluded, those who are, are so on a deeper level. This also applies to the idea that communities can become the basis of participation. Therefore, engagement is based on information and the access to information. “In the future, people will be able to leave virtual yellow post-it stickers where they want to. The only difference is in the visibility; they may be seen by everybody or only those who are allowed or only those who are able to see them” (Beslay and Hakkala, 2007, p75). This highlights the importance of equal access to technology and the necessary skills and confidence.

Surprises

Discussions of residence as the basis of citizenship and political engagement have neglected the class dimension. Little has been said about the geometries of power and social, economic and cultural constraints in building multiple identities and citizenships, especially for young people. There is a need to bring this dimension into any discussion of belonging and paths to citizen engagement. Class remains one of the determining factors of the embodied experience of the everyday and especially manifest in the places we live in. It therefore also remains a determining factor in the social relationships and communities that individuals form.

Predictions: possible – plausible – preferable futures

In the future, digital technologies will be part of everyday life, more so than now. From a dystopian perspective then, if the current importance of consumption as dominant mode of expression is combined with the proliferation of citizenships which are based locally but can also be exercised through digital technologies, then there could be a market for online political engagement and expression. Multiple identities and citizenships can then also mean a proliferation of interest groups which cater for ever more extremist tastes and interests. A more positive view would see a growth in political awareness and literacy through a sense of global citizenship. This would lead to mass grassroots mobilisation for global issues such as the environment, poverty, and human rights as digital technologies make the actual embodied experience of these issues accessible for everyone, even the privileged middle class in Western democracies.

Access to digital technologies is dependent on confidence, skill and dispositions. It is therefore plausible that cultural capital will become “digital capital.” Skill refers here not only to digital literacy but also to the ability to live in a globalised world and deal with mobility and flexibility. Digital technologies will enable multiple identities as several places “happen” at the same time and several time periods can “happen” at the same time with information about past, present and future on constant display.

Access to the past provides a basis for a shared awareness of one place and thus “community”, awareness of the relevance of everyday actions for a potential future can mobilise social action, and combining this sense of shared issues and their impact on a shared future can enhance the sense of the “global imagined community.” The response can be in self-reflective individuals building their own DIY biographies (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002) which are expressed in socio-spatial practices characterised by mobility and thus enabling openness and creating opportunities to deal with the o/Other rather than constructing imaginary boundaries, be that virtually or materially. Technology can help prepare for change and movement but can also provide a much needed anchor in a de-territorialised world and biography. The availability of multiple citizenships and the increased engagement through everyday practices and experiences facilitated through technology then also means a greater sense of ownership in more and more personalised campaigns around social issues.

Before such a normalisation of ICTs in everyday practices is achieved, however, it is of utmost importance to close the digital divide and motivate non-users to engage with digital technologies and promote transcending the offline/online dichotomy. Only when those who are perceived to be excluded and who perceive themselves to be excluded from the digitised world can be motivated and access for them can be facilitated can digital technologies contribute to dealing with social inequalities. Without the necessary (state-led) support to develop skills and confidence to deal with the opportunities and the threats of the risk society, then young people might “stay put” which will pose significant risks for personal biographies in locations where work and training opportunities are scarce (cf Hörschelmann and Schäfer, 2005).

The role of education is then the provision of skills and abilities to deal with plurality, ambiguity and the adaptability to change (Springate, 2004). This means training for collaborative environments, understanding of complex systems and the encouragement of creativity. Society is faced with the consequences of complex political-economic systems and everyone, not only young people, needs to be prepared to be willing to learn about, understand and engage with them to enable change. The citizens of the future need to be able to navigate fluid material and virtual worlds and therefore need to be adaptable, familiar with complex systems and creative in their creation of engaging and engaged places.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

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Another interesting point here is an issue around ownership: while Andrew Harrison in his submission to Futurelab argued that ownership of property is becoming less and less important, it is interesting to note as Angus Cameron (2008) does that even virtual universes such as Second Life are based on land ownership principled copied from the politico-economic system of the “real” world.

The scenario painted by them is very much reminiscent of Marge Piercy’s He, She, It (1991).

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

Adolescence in humans is the period of psychological and social transition between childhood and adulthood. The beginning of adolescence, around the onset of puberty, is characterised by dramatic changes in hormone levels and, as a result, in physical appearance. This period of life is also characterised by psychological changes in terms of identity, self-consciousness and mood. After puberty, children become more aware of the opinions and emotions of both themselves and other people around them. The typical teenager is more moody and uncommunicative than a younger child (at least towards adults), and may take unnecessary risks. In addition, there are educational changes: some children go through an educational performance dip in Year 8 (age 12-13). Hormonal fluctuations alone might not account for these changes; recent neuroscience research shows that there are also dramatic transformations in the brain during adolescence.

Much has been known about early brain development since experiments on animals carried out in the 1950s and 1960s. One major developmental process affects the ‘wiring’ of brain cells (neurons) – the intricate network of connections (synapses) between neurons. Early in development, the brain begins to form new synapses, so that the synaptic density – the number of synapses per unit volume of brain tissue – greatly exceeds adult levels. This process of synaptic proliferation, ’synaptogenesis’, lasts up to several months, depending on the species of animal (Rakic et al, 1986; Bourgeois et al, 1994).

The increase in the number of synapses is followed by a period of synaptic elimination (or pruning) in which excess connections wither away. This process is pre-programmed to a large extent – it will happen in all environments. However, the environment can also influence synaptic pruning (Hubel and Wiesel, 1964), in that frequently used connections are strengthened and infrequently used connections eliminated. Indeed, this research has been used to argue that ages zero to three represent a ‘critical period’ for brain development. However, this argument neglects the fact that the animals in which this early development research was carried out, such as cats and monkeys, do not go through the same extended developmental period as humans, and are sexually mature at a much younger age.

This research suggested that brain development is particularly sensitive to environmental influences very early in life. It was not until the 1970s that research on post-mortem human brains revealed that some areas of the human brain, in particular the frontal cortex, continue to develop well beyond childhood. The frontal cortex is the area responsible for cognitive abilities such as the ability to make plans, to remember to do things in the future, to multi-task, and it inhibits inappropriate behaviour (executive functions). The frontal cortex also plays an important role in self-awareness and understanding other people. Peter Huttenlocher, at the University of Chicago, collected post-mortem brains from humans of all ages and found that the frontal cortex was remarkably different in the brains of pre-pubescent children and post-pubescent adolescents (Huttenlocher et al, 1979, 1983, 1997). While in sensory brain areas such as the visual cortex, synaptogenesis and synaptic pruning occur relatively early and synaptic density has reached adult levels by mid-childhood, synaptic reorganisation in the frontal cortex continues until well into adolescence. Huttenlocher found that the number of synapses in the frontal lobe is high around puberty, after which their number decreases (due to synaptic pruning) throughout adolescence.

Another developmental mechanism that occurs for several decades in the frontal cortex is myelination. As neurons develop, they build up a layer of myelin on their axon (the long fibre transmitting signals from each brain cell). Myelin is a fatty substance that insulates the axons and vastly increases the speed of transmission of electrical impulses from neuron to neuron. Whereas sensory and motor brain regions become fully myelinated in the first few years of life, axons in some cortical regions, particularly the frontal and parietal lobes, continue to be myelinated well into adolescence in the human brain (Yakovlev and Lecours, 1967). This finding suggests that the transmission speed of neurons in these areas may increase after puberty.

Recent MRI studies of the developing brain

Until recently, the structure of the human brain could be studied only after death. In recent years, non-invasive brain imaging techniques, particularly Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), have enabled scientists to study development of the living human brain. In the past decade, a number of MRI studies have provided further evidence of the ongoing maturation of the cortex into adolescence and even into adulthood. These studies show that the amount of white matter in various cortical regions, including the frontal cortex and temporo-parietal cortex, increases between childhood and adulthood (Giedd et al, 1999; Paus et al, 1999, 2001; Durston et al, 2001). Myelin appears white in MRI scans. Therefore, the increase in white matter seen to occur throughout adolescence may represent an increase in axonal myelination.

At the same time, there is a change in the volume of grey matter (made up of cell bodies, dendrites and synapses) in various cortical regions during adolescence (Giedd et al, 1999; Sowell et al, 1999; Gogtay et al, 2004). Several large MRI studies, which have acquired brain scans from hundreds of people of different ages, have consistently shown that grey matter volume in the frontal cortex increases gradually during childhood and peaks at around the onset of puberty (around 11 in girls and 12 in boys) (Giedd et al, 1999). This is followed by a gradual decrease in the volume of grey matter during adolescence and early adulthood. It has been suggested that this pattern of grey matter development may, in part, be due to an increase in the number of synapses during childhood, followed by synaptic pruning during adolescence (eg Giedd et al, 1999).

Cognitive development during adolescence

The brain regions that undergo particularly protracted development during adolescence, that is prefrontal and temporo-parietal cortices, are involved in a variety of cognitive abilities, including executive functions and social cognition. In the past few years, empirical research has looked at the cognitive changes that occur during adolescence. As yet we do not know how these relate directly to the structural brain changes described above, but research in this area is progressing rapidly.

Development of self-concept during adolescence

Anecdotal evidence and self-reported data indicate that children become progressively self-conscious and concerned with other people’s opinions as they go through puberty and adolescence (Adams and Berzonsky, 2003). The period of adolescence seems to involve both the establishment of a sense of self as well as a process of orienting towards others. The emergence of the social self is marked by a period of heightened self-consciousness, during which adolescents become preoccupied with other people’s concerns about their own actions, thoughts and appearance. Social psychological studies have investigated changes in social thinking during adolescence and emphasise that this phase is characterised by a focus on “what other people think”.

Social psychologists have posited several theories regarding this apparent increase in social and emotional sensitivity. Elkind’s (1967) twin constructs, the Imaginary Audience (IA) and Personal Fable (PF) have been particularly influential. According to the IA theory, adolescents believe that everyone is as concerned about their behaviour as they are, and construct an abstract (and imaginary) audience observing their every move. The PF, on the other hand, is the tendency for adolescents to believe they are unique, invulnerable, and destined for greatness. Between them, the IA and PF cover many behaviours regarded as particular to adolescence: heightened self-consciousness, increased concern with the opinions of others, and susceptibility to peer pressure (IA); and reckless behaviours such as drug use and unprotected sex (PF). Although it is generally accepted that many (though not all) adolescents go through a phase of constructing IAs and PFs, there is little consensus as to why they do so, or the underlying neural basis (Vartanian, 2000).

Elkind’s (1967) own explanation was that the IA and PF arise from cognitive development between childhood and adolescence, and that this phase is characterised by ‘cognitive egocentrism’ ie a difficulty in differentiating one’s own thoughts from those of others. The idea of a developing ’self-concept’ is at the centre of many theories of adolescent social adjustment. Although the precise definition varies between studies, it is generally conceptualised as the way in which individuals view and treat themselves, and is seen as a product of interpersonal interactions (Benjamin, 1993; Ybrandt, 2008). A recent study found that having a negative self-concept (high scores on self-hate, self-neglect and self-blame) was associated with both internalising behaviours such as depression and anxiety, and externalising behaviours such as delinquency and aggression (Ybrandt, 2008). Therefore, it is important that adolescents are supported emotionally as they develop their self-concept. While such findings have immediate real-world applicability, however, they tell us little about the underlying brain mechanisms. Furthermore, it is difficult to disentangle cause and effect. Does having a negative self-concept cause depression and anxiety, or vice versa? Or are both caused by a third factor?

The development of perspective-taking during adolescence

The brain regions that undergo the most significant development during adolescence include those areas involved in self awareness and in the ability to understand other people’s perspectives. Given that the social environment dramatically changes during adolescence, and that the brain undergoes a restructuring process, it might be expected that social cognitive abilities such as self awareness and perspective-taking develop during this period.

We recently investigated the development of perspective taking during adolescence (Choudhury et al, 2006). Pre-adolescent children (age 9 years), adolescents (age 13 years) and adults (age 24 years), were tested using a perspective-taking task. In the First Person Perspective (1PP) condition, the participant was asked to imagine how s/he would feel in various scenarios. An example of such a scenario was “You just had an argument with your best friend. How do you feel?” In the Third Person Perspective (3PP) condition, the participant was asked how someone else would feel in the same set of scenarios. The participant was asked to choose one of two possible emotions in answer to each question, as quickly as possible. The results demonstrated that the difference in reaction time (RT) between 1PP and 3PP decreased significantly with age. The difference in RT in both groups of younger participants was larger and spread almost equally in both directions, whereas among adults there was little difference in timing for 3PP and 1PP. A similar RT to 3PP and 1PP, as shown by the adult group, is likely to indicate the highest proficiency in perspective taking. In contrast, the most pronounced difference in RT between 1PP and 3PP, seen in the pre-adolescent group, would indicate relatively inefficient processing. It might be speculated therefore that, prior to adolescence, the difference in RT reflects an immature cognitive mechanism for perspective-taking. Whether this response pattern among the adolescents is a result of a relative difficulty in differentiating between the first- and third person, or because children of this age group are less inclined, or find it more difficult, to enter into another person’s ‘mental shoes,’ requires further investigation. The differences between age groups may also be influenced by differences in social experience. Compared with children and adolescents, adults are generally more skilled at instinctively inferring the perspectives of other people. Perhaps adults show no difference between RTs for 1PP and 3PP as a result of their mature neural circuitry supporting social cognition, as well as their greater social experience.

Functional development of the social brain during adolescence

Recent functional neuro-imaging studies have investigated social brain development during adolescence and there is some indication that, for social cognitive tasks, activity in the frontal cortex decreases between adolescence and adulthood. A recent fMRI study investigated the development of this ability by asking participants to think about what action they would take given a particular intention (Blakemore et al, 2007). Adolescents (aged 12-18) and adults (aged 22-37) were scanned while answering questions about intentional causality (e.g. “You want to see what’s on at the cinema; do you look in a newspaper?”), or physical causality (eg “A huge tree suddenly comes crashing down in a forest; does it make a loud noise?”). Consistent with the self/social knowledge study described above, adolescents activated part of the dorsal MPFC more than did adults when thinking about their own intentions compared to during physical causality judgments. In contrast, in the same comparison (intentional – physical), adults activated part of the right superior temporal sulcus more than did adolescents.

A different fMRI study investigated the development of high level communication using an irony comprehension task and found that children (aged between 9 and 14) engaged frontal regions (medial PFC and left inferior frontal gyrus) more than did adults (Wang et al, 2006). A similar result was found in a recent fMRI study that investigated changes during adolescence of the neural processing of social emotion in the first- or third-person perspective (Burnett et al, 2008). Adult (age 22 to 32) and adolescent (age 10 to 18) participants read scenarios that described either social emotions (guilt or embarrassment) or basic emotions (fear or disgust), and were asked to imagine these scenarios happening either to themselves (self condition) or to someone else (their mother – other condition). First, activity in the dorsal MPFC during social relative to basic emotion was higher in the adolescent group than in the adult group. Second, the left temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) showed differential activity to protagonist and emotion, depending on age group. Specifically, this region differentiated better between self and other in adults than it did in adolescents, while in adolescents the left TPJ was more responsive to the difference between social and basic emotion irrespective of perspective.

These results suggest that the neural strategy for social and self understanding changes between adolescence and adulthood. Although the same neural network is active, the relative roles of the different areas change, with activity moving from anterior (medial prefrontal) regions to posterior (temporal) regions with age. One possible explanation for the decrease in prefrontal activity between adolescence and adulthood in these studies is that the PFC is still being organised during adolescence, and is therefore less efficient: more activity is required to achieve the same task (see Blakemore, 2008, for review). Further studies are needed to explore this possibility.

Susceptibility to peer influence

Adolescents are particularly susceptible to peer influence (Steinberg and Silverberg, 1986). The consequences of peer influence have been well researched, both in the laboratory and in a socio-cultural context. For example, it has been found that, while adults who commit crimes do so alone, most adolescent crimes are committed with peers (Zimring, 1998). This suggests that peer influence may contribute to teenage engagement in inherently risky activity (although it may also reflect the fact that teenagers spend more time with peers than do adults). A recent laboratory study by Gardner and Steinberg (2005) looked at incidences of risky driving in a car simulation video game when adolescents and adults played either alone or with two friends present. It was found that the presence of peers led to an increase in risky driving, for example, failing to stop at a yellow traffic light, specifically in adolescents. Levels of risk taking did not differ for adult participants depending on whether they were alone or with peers, and adolescents showed the same level of risk taking as adults when they were alone. However, in the presence of peers, the number of risks taken was greatly increased (see Figure 1).

These findings suggest that decision-making and planning are more fallible in adolescents when in the presence of peers. The immaturity of the PFC could explain these consequences, in that the developing system is less able to cope under added emotional pressure. This is a plausible but speculative idea which needs further work. At present, cognitive neuroscience has not addressed whether the immaturity of the PFC could also explain the susceptibility to peer pressure in the first place.

Gender differences

Cognitive changes during adolescence may not be equally applicable to males and females, or they may follow different time courses. Anatomically, sex differences have been reported in grey and white matter volume during adolescence (Yurgelun-Todd et al, 2002), as well as in the time course of neural development (Giedd et al, 1996, 1997), with grey matter volume peaking at around age 11 in girls and age 12 in boys. Links between anatomical differences and behaviour are also apparent. A recent study (Silveri et al, 2006) looked at impulse control (the ability to control and regulate behaviour), and found that different regions of white matter were associated with task performance in male and female teenagers. The findings suggest subtle differences in the brain networks recruited for cognitive control by males and females during development. Such gender differences at the neural level may help to explain behavioural differences in executive processes such as decision-making and risk assessment. For example, several studies have found that, relative to females, male adolescents give more weight to the potential benefit of a risk than its potential costs (Gardner and Steinberg, 2005), and are also more prone to risk-taking in the presence of peers (Parsons et al, 2000).

Gender differences in social behaviour have also been well documented during the adolescent years. For example, young adolescent females are much more likely to use social aggression such as ostracism during interpersonal interaction (Cairns et al, 1989), while males tend to use physical aggression. Additionally, teenage girls who have a negative self-concept (high levels of self-hate, self-neglect and self-blame) are more likely to engage in internalising behaviours, ie depression, anxiety and withdrawn behaviour, while boys tend to engage in more outwardly aggressive externalising behaviours (Moffitt et al, 2001; Roussos et al, 2001).

The next step is to link these social observations with what we are learning about the brain. Brain development patterns may shed light on gender-related differences in the onset of various mental illnesses (Silveri et al, 2006; Kovacs et al, 2003; Evenson et al, 1993). This is especially likely given that the tendency for certain disorders to be more prevalent in one gender than the other first emerges during adolescence (Angold et al, 2004), for example, higher incidences of depression/anxiety in females. However, psychosocial factors such as gender expectations and differential exposure to social stressors (Kendler et al, 2001) may be important in explaining gender differences in both clinical and typical populations. An important goal, therefore, for cognitive neuroscience is to integrate research on the brain with findings from the social and behavioural sciences.

Implications for society and future developments

The teenage years are a time of marginalisation for many, and it could be argued that highlighting differences in behaviour and neuro-anatomy merely serves to increase the sense in which members of this age group are not yet fully active members of society. However, despite meeting the material needs of this age group better than at any previous point in human history, many developed countries, including the UK, are seeing rising rates of mental illness, disaffection and criminal behaviour (UNICEF, 2007). Improving knowledge of adolescent development at the neural, as well as psychosocial, level will only increase the chances of helping those who need it.

In practical terms, research on the development of the neural structures underlying the appraisal of risk and reward may have implications for the criminal justice system (Blakemore and Choudhury, 2006; Greene and Cohen, 2004). Additionally, recent efforts have been made to integrate findings about brain development into educational policy, both for special educational needs, such as autism and dyslexia, and for typical development (Goswami, 2006). One potentially positive implication of the neural development occurring during adolescence is that the teenage brain is well adapted to learning. Although a ‘Year 8 dip’ in academic performance has been reported, this might correspond, at least in part, to the reorganisation of the brain so that it can learn more efficiently. Appropriate education is crucial during the adolescent years. The data suggest that it is not too late for those still struggling with educational attainment.

An important next step is to extend these efforts to the pastoral side of education, in order to inform anti-bullying and extra-curricular policies. One purely speculative possibility is that, just as the environment influences synaptic pruning in the first few years of life, so might it have an impact on the pruning that occurs in the frontal cortex during adolescence. There are no tools as yet to look at pruning in the living human brain. However, if the environment influences synaptic pruning during adolescence, this has implications for what kind of experiences adolescents should encounter, both academically and socially. Secondary school is often socially stressful (Erath et al, 2007), just at the time when the social brain is undergoing profound development. Provide a social environment at school that is more in line with neural maturation might be useful. It might be fruitful to include in the curriculum some teaching on the changes occurring in the brain during adolescence. Adolescents might be very interested to learn about the changes that are going on in their brains.

Medical policy could also benefit from research on the adolescent brain. For example, treatment of substance abuse disorders may require modification for this population in light of the differences in risk and reward circuitry. Similarly, mood disorders such as depression and anxiety may differ between adolescence and adulthood due to differences affecting regulation and emotional sensitivity. Implications are also raised for young people who take recreational drugs such as cannabis, as the effects they have on the developing teenage brain are likely to be different to those on the adult brain, and may have longer term consequences. Indeed, regular cannabis use is associated with a significant increase in the risk of a later schizophrenia diagnosis, and this risk is even higher if the onset of use occurs during adolescence (Arseneault et al, 2004). This may well be because the brain is more vulnerable to the effects of the drug during development (Pope et al, 2003). Education of young people based on new findings about the brain may act as a more effective deterrent against heavy and regular use than current techniques.

Conclusions

Research on neuro-cognitive development during adolescence is still a relatively new field. However, in the past few years there have been some important developments. Research is currently exploring how the brain changes and how these changes might help to explain certain aspects of typically teenage behaviour, such as risk taking and emerging competence in interpersonal interactions. In turn, these findings might contribute to improving the quality of education and pastoral care for this age group, and may also have implications for the way young people are seen in the eyes of the law and are treated by the medical profession. In all, the research discussed throughout this review serves to highlight that adolescents are a distinct sector of society with specific needs.

Acknowledgements

Our research is funded by the Royal Society, the Wellcome Trust and the BBSRC. SJB is a Royal Society University Research Fellow. SB is funded by the Wellcome Trust four year PhD programme in neuroscience at UCL. CS is funded by a BBSRC PhD studentship.

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.