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Critical Ethnography of Global Youth Reveals Mediated Identities

Review by
Shayla Thiel-Stern, Ph. D., University of Minnesota

Mediated Identities: Youth, Agency, & Globalization, Divya C. McMillin New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. ISBN 978-1-4331-0097-0. 211pp.

 

Critical Ethnography of Global Youth Reveals Mediated Identities

In making the choice to conduct ethnography on youth in vastly different cultural, geopolitical and economic spaces in Germany, South Africa, India, and the United States. McMillin demonstrates from the beginning of her book, Mediated Identities, that identity construction is more complicated than ever in this era of media hybridization, and studying the process is a complex undertaking. Culture among her young informants is so dynamic that the identity negotiation is constant and layered.  Still, the author provides compelling argument about what it means for youth globally to enact “mediated identity” in this ambitious, excellent work.  Her investigation moves from the young people’s bedrooms to Internet cafes to school grounds, bringing with it a nuanced, detailed narrative about what it means to make sense of mass media in the context of their own lives.

Careful to “pull away from the trend in theoretical critique, particularly in global media studies, to denounce Eurocentric Western theory and privilege non-Western experiences,” McMillin is still careful to avoid essentialism and truly embrace postcolonial theory in the context of youth, identity, and globalization (p. 16). Although this task can be messy with so many perspectives and frameworks at play, the author’s narrative-driven writing, carefully placed analysis, and avoidance of dense cultural studies jargon builds a strong, cohesive chapter on theory as it has been applied to the issue of youth, global hybridity, and identity.  Youth studies scholars can truly benefit from her thorough accounting of the interdisciplinarity of the field and her explanation of each of the fields that “claim” childhood and adolescence – from psychology to education to sociology to cultural studies. They should also take note of her commitment to resisting the normalization of childhood and adolescence as a Western bourgeois construct.

In looking specifically at television – which globally provides more access and interest for youth than some other media – McMillin seeks to “understand the mediating presence of television in the teen’s life” and demonstrate “how context bears in on the experience” (p. 74). Ultimately, these two aspects of the scholarship should produce agency, particularly for marginalized teens whose lives might be transformed through basic media access.

In fact, one of the more groundbreaking aspects of this research is the fact that it is a study of teens’ media use that includes several teens that live in what the author describes as “stark poverty.” Often, scholars simply do not have access to such research participants because they live so far out of their own sphere of influence, but McMillin’s research looks to adolescents’ in Bangalore and South Africa whose lives are very much shaped by the worlds that surround them – from poor water conditions and erratic electricity of the teens in Bangalore to the prevalence of people with HIV-AIDS surrounding the youth in South Africa. In the research, McMillin is able to ask some pointed questions about their television watching habits based on the teens’ living conditions and learns quite a bit about how these habits influence not only their media habits, but also their identity and worldview. The example, Kgomotso, a teen girl from Johannesburg who shared a household with 10 other family members and cared for her siblings, had to be targeted and purposeful because of both her lack of leisure time and the unreliable battery-operated generator that powered the family’s television. She viewed the programming of SABC1’s youth channel (YoTV) as aspirational and informing of her life strategies, particularly topics about overcoming challenges and traveling across the country (p. 44 and 45). 

The rich detail in her investigation is engaging and provides ongoing narratives about the teens she studied. One of the many strengths of Mediated Identities is McMillin’s ability to be reflexive about the rich data that she has collected – particularly with how her fieldwork observations “came together and pulled apart” (p. 33) throughout the book. This self-reflexivity becomes important when discerning differences between East and West, urban and rural, and navigating the various mediated experiences adolescents negotiated every day. Furthermore, global cultural differences with regard to race, gender, class and caste, religion, birth order, and family hierarchies in general add further nuance to the data and her understanding of identity construction within those lines of distinction.

Ultimately, Mediated Identities becomes a strong analysis for any scholar interested in critical media studies as it relates to globalization and not just scholars of youth studies. One of the more interesting findings among interviews and observations with all of the adolescents is the revealing of a “strong egocentrism” within the majority of the study participants: “National or even global memberships were nebulous and abstract,” she writes (p. 96). Perhaps it is unsurprising (given stereotypes of disaffected Western youth, at least) that urban teens in Munich and New York demonstrated “bewilderment, even disinterest, in questions of global citizenship” (p. 98). However, this disconnectedness did not come just from the Western teens, which might be expected among readers who are sensitive to overly Eurocentric constructions of childhood. This is quite a significant contrast with scholars and pundits who contend we live in an increasingly interconnected world with youth who are heavy users of social media (even the very poor teens in this study use social networking sites and mobile technology to varying degrees). It becomes easy to assume interconnectedness among youth can lead to a global village metaphor of sorts that applies explicitly to teens, but McMillin uses strong examples to prove otherwise, specifically teens’ own descriptions of themselves as simply “residents of” their city (p. 96).

However, the research exposes some important revelations about how youth are able to internalize and make sense of global positionality despite a tendency toward localism. She notes, “[t]he complex packaging of historical memory and current global possibility has stark relevance” especially for the teens in nations with developing economies (p. 96). They notice transformation in their own tenement-filled neighborhoods that signals the growing immigrant labor market employed by multinational corporations – “hot spots of outsourced production venues.” She cites both patriotism and frustration at bureaucracy among them (p. 96). This point is an important one to McMillin because it demonstrates not only the transformative potential of television but also the need for critical ethnography to demonstrate the ethical dilemmas at work when providing an analysis of countries with developing economies. Whether such work truly allows for transformation or simply imposes scholarly interpretation that sees agency where it might not necessarily be able to exist is an underlying question here, and it largely remains unanswered. This is the nature of critical inquiry, though.

Although television is the primary focus in this research, the author draws attention to the role social media might play in further mediating (albeit interactively mediating) and further complicating teens’ identity negotiation on a global scale toward the end of this book, hinting that despite the existence of this masterful analysis of youth and identity in the early 21st century, more work is needed.