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This article considers young people's identities and privacy on social network sites through reflection on the analogy of the teenage bedroom as a means to understand such spaces. The notion therein of intimate personal space may jar with the scope and complexity of social media and, particularly, with recent emphasis on the challenges to privacy posed by such environments. I suggest, however, that, through increased use of access controls and a range of informal strategies, young people's everyday digital communication may not be as out of control as is sometimes inferred. Recent adaptations of the bedroom analogy indicate that social network sites retain intimacy and that their individual-centred format continues to facilitate the exhibition and mapping of identities. Although an awkward fit, I suggest the bedroom may still help us think through how social network sites can function as vital personal home territories in the midst of multi-spatial patterns of sociability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the significance of experiences and understandings of targeted harassment to the identities of youth subcultural participants, through case study research on goths. It does so against a context of considerable recent public discussion about the victimization of alternative subcultures and a surprising scarcity of academic research on the subject. The analysis presented indicates that, although individual direct experiences are diverse, the spectre of harassment can form an ever-present accompaniment to subcultural life, even for those who have never been seriously targeted. As such, it forms part of what it is to be a subcultural participant and comprises significant common ground with other members. Drawing upon classic and more recent understandings of how subcultural groups respond to broader forms of outside hostility, we show how the shared experience of feeling targeted for harassment tied in with a broader subcultural discourse of being stigmatized by a perceived 'normal' society. The role of harassment as part of this, we argue, contributed to the strength with which subcultural identities were felt and to a positive embrace of otherness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Youth’ music and style cultures, such as the punk, goth, metal and club scenes, are often regarded as opposed to the institution of the family and the values it symbolises. Yet significant numbers of the participants of such groups are now remaining actively involved into their thirties and beyond alongside the taking on of permanent cohabitation, marriage and parenthood. This article explores the increasing importance of family life for ageing members of ‘youth’ cultures in relation to the case study of the goth scene, a dark-themed grouping whose average age is rising. I emphasise the collective nature of the embrace of family among older goths and the implications of this for the values and environment of the group itself and the trajectories of individual members. Amongst other things, I explore whether the drift towards family and parenthood amongst goths might be understood as a collective assimilation into dominant adulthood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines how much we can learn about youth music and style groupings from the detail of the spectacular content and practices which most obviously distinguish such groups. First, I consider an apparent revival in theoretically driven interpretations of subcultural style, music and content in recent work on the goth scene, arguing that, for all their sophistication, such studies seem liable to reproduce some of the difficulties of earlier studies of spectacular symbolic meanings unless their findings are connected with other kinds of evidence. The paper then examines recent calls for greater focus on the minutiae of participants' sensory experience of distinct subcultural practices. I discuss case studies of promising work in the area, while emphasising the need to avoid reducing subcultures to the specificities of selected spectacular experience. Drawing the two parts together, 1 suggest many elements of subcultures are neither imprinted in spectacular sounds and texts nor discernable from the immediate sensations spectacular practices give rise to. In order to enhance our overall understanding it is important, therefore, that our examination of the distinct and extra-ordinary features of subcultures is contextualised in relation to broader understandings of a range of other properties and patterns which may be less distinct, unique or extra-ordinary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the increasing importance of personal, individualized spaces in the lives and identities of young people through a comparative examination of the contemporary use of the physical space of the bedroom and the 'virtual' territory of the online journal. Particularly popular among those in their teens and early twenties, online journals constitute an interactive form of web log whose content tends to be dominated by reflections upon the everyday experiences, thought and emotions of their individual owner. We propose here that such online journals often take on for their users the symbolic and practical properties of individually owned and controlled space — something we illustrate through a comparison with young people's uses of the primary, individual-centred, physical space in their lives — the bedroom. This discussion is informed by research by each of the authors, on young people's bedrooms and on the use of online journals respectively. The article identifies and explores understandings and functions of these two spaces for young people, identifying a number of apparent similarities in their use. Through doing so, we illustrate the potential value of the bedroom as a prism through which to understand online journal use at the same time as helping to illuminate the general significance of personal space to the lives and identities of contemporary young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]