Chapter 10: Views From Inside: Young Adults' Practices of Self-Governance on App-Based Platforms

This chapter focuses on the meanings that young adults ascribed to their practices on mobile app-based platforms, recurring to diary records. Combining their emic perspectives and etic knowledge, we sought to identify young adults' performances, emotions and beliefs to make sense of contemporary digital practices' social and cultural role. Research has shown that, along with ordering everyday experiences and providing convenience, ease and speed, digital technologies also establish asymmetrical relations between the different actors in the mediation process, with platform affordances enabling or constraining specific actions based on power relations. Adopting this critical standpoint, the conceptual frames they trigger, and the patterns of usages that young adult users regard as distinct and significant, we argue that normalising apps' daily practices should be seen as embedded in broader neoliberal governmentality.