Chapter 2: Young Adulthood Digital Cultures and Practices: An Overview

Digital technologies have impacted our culture by expanding into every interstice of everyday life. Mobile gadgets for communications, work and leisure, social media, apps and platforms – the diverse array of items that we usually refer to as digital media and that keep people permanently connected – are at the core of a wider change that goes beyond the use of technology. These technologies provide the material structure for the complex and constant fluxes of information that permeate people's lives, originating new dynamics that impact people's relations, beliefs, practices, representations and identities, bodies or creative and political expressions. Understanding technology as a producer of meanings, subjectivities and agency that are shaped by power relations is central to the MyGender project. Hence, technology is not seen as neutral but as a place of political power. This chapter places young adults at the centre of the changing environment as main cultural and media producers and traces their practices, discourses and representations. By integrating diverse theoretical and empirical contributions that focus on the most relevant aspects of this changing environment, analysing significances, practices and negotiations related to digital cultures and young adults, this chapter proposes a narrative critical literature review that aims to provide a solid framework for the remaining chapters, within the theoretical horizon of the MyGender project.