Risks and opportunities of digitally mediated interactions: young people’s meanings and experiences

Abstract

ABSTRACT Young people’s digitally-mediated interactions entail negotiating co-existing risks and opportunities. This paper discusses youth perspectives on these risks and opportunities, based on data from focus groups conducted with 12–21-year-olds in England. Analysis of examples of digitally-mediated interactions shared by participants suggests that pursuing opportunities involved or created risk for oneself and/or others, while motivations to pursue opportunities were shaped by risks resulting from the actions of others. Flows of risk and opportunity were, therefore, reciprocal across a dynamic continuum of ‘digital’ – ‘non-digital’ contexts and relational both for and between young people. It is argued that a reciprocal and relational conceptualisation of ‘post-digital’ negotiations of risk and opportunity among youth facilitates critical engagement with their accounts of their online lives as well as identification of the interconnections between individual, interpersonal and community-ethical spheres of meaning and experience.