The Aesthetic Production and Distribution of Image/Subjects among Online Youth

Abstract

In this article the authors consider how youth engage in social practices of identity through their online practices with images. Although they build on social practice perspectives, informed by the new literacy studies, they question the extent to which such perspectives have created new autonomies and separations, including the separation of texts from sensation and from the body. An essential part of interpreting imaging identity practice, they argue, involves understanding how people relate to images aesthetically. Through affect, desire, and sensory immersion, we might begin to understand how images become both intensely personalized and broadly distributed. Data in the article are drawn from a larger ethnographic study of the offline and online literacies of youth across school and home contexts. Analyses focus on two cases: Sophia, who remixes, modifies, and trades images to build a website for a punk rock band, and Brian, who modifies and constructs images for online game-play. Analyses of these data are informed by social practice perspectives on identity, by the domains or ‘strada’ of media practices, and by postmodern perspectives on figural signification.