A Summary of Siân Lincoln’s Youth Culture and Private Space

 ARTICLE SUMMARY 

Introduction

Siân Lincoln’s Youth Culture and Private is a valuable introduction that provides a fine understanding of the salience of the bedroom cultures of young individuals. Lincoln introduces the bedroom as the initial space upon which young people possess a kind of ownership. He says that the bedroom is a touch-point where they are accustomed and use it as escapism; a mask upon which they find identities and lose themselves meditating in their worlds (Lincoln, 2012). This paper is a summary of chapter 5 and chapter 6 of Siân Lincoln’s Youth Culture and Private Space.

Chapter 5, labelled ‘Mediating Young People’s Bedrooms: “Zoning”’ is focused on the relationship amid the private and public domains and the stratagems that young people employ to strengthen identities in a dynamic culture. Young people are growing as digital natives and immerse themselves in the normalized media culture in their daily lives. Lincoln views the bedroom as a space upon which media can be useful in shaping the lives of the young people.  Lincoln applies the theory of zoning to also scrutinize the usage of old and emerging media types by young folks (Lincoln, 2012). In addition, he examines how young people can open and close media zones in their media utilization in the constant relation of sociality and seclusion. 

Chapter 6 titled ‘Mediating Young People’s bedrooms: ‘The Virtual Bedroom”’ is the last chapter. In this chapter, Lincoln infers from Goffman (1995) presentation of personality to delve into the utilization of social media platforms and the alternation between accurate and deceptive personalities; as well as stratagems covering exposure and preservation. Photographic pictures are considered as a type of distinctiveness currency and figurative exchange, and there exists a push to showcase and update these personal images.

Conclusion

Nonetheless, the young folks in Lincoln’s research differentiate between the truest and most genuine self that they are within the confines of their bedrooms in comparison with the set standards of online personality (Lincoln, 2012). As such, Lincoln posits that in the current modern setting that the mediated world stands for, transformation and ambiguity make young folks to vehemently seek settings that provide them some kind of steadiness.