Uncommon biographies: how social media provides young people with an experiential realm

Young people have long been a focal point for how social scientists have sought to understand social change. In the 1960s and 1970s commentators came to reflect on the nature of youth cultures as a space within which young people constructed forms of symbolic resistance. More recently, around the turn of the century, youth scholars focused on the dilution of youth cultures and the role of consumer-driven lifestyles in the construction of apparently individualized identities. In this chapter we reflect on the role of the digital realm in an age of uncertainty and of ‘uncommon biographies’, arguing that social media provides young people with an experiential realm likely to intensify their fragile relationship with social change.