Young Adulthood Across Digital Platforms

The influence of digital media and mobile technologies on the interpersonal dynamics of young individuals across various aspects of their daily lives underscores the significant role of digital media in shaping their experiences. Research exploring how individuals engage with mobile applications (m-apps) has revealed the constraining effects of platform norms and politics on users' expressive identities. This chapter examines the evolving landscape of media consumption, engagement and civic participation amidst the proliferation of new media modalities, focussing on m-apps. The authors highlight the pervasive adoption of mobile apps across diverse categories and the escalating temporal investment individuals allocate to these platforms for fostering interpersonal connections. Drawing from a feminist and intersectional perspective, the authors explore how young adults navigate the technicity and imaginaries of m-apps, incorporating them into their daily routines and (re)negotiating their gender and sexual identities. Through the MyGender project, the authors investigate the relationship between m-apps and power dynamics, examining the construction and reconstruction of gender and sexuality across platforms. The findings underscore the need for critical engagement with digital technologies as sociocultural products actively reshaping gender relations and sexual practices. The text ends with an overview of the book, briefly presenting the remaining nine chapters.

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.

As younger generations navigate a blended reality, their interaction with digital content and apps is marked by multitasking. Gender intersects with media and individual preferences, shaping how people navigate digital realms. This chapter investigates how young adults perceive personal digital experiences, analysing them based on various socio-demographic factors. Using a quantitative approach, a survey was conducted with 1,500 young adults in Portugal in October 2021. The sample was representative of the population distribution by sex, age and region. Statistical analysis revealed correlations between digital behaviours and socio-demographic factors such as gender, sexual orientation and parenthood status. Results indicated significant differences in agreement levels among different groups, highlighting areas such as online harassment, content creation, social interaction and digital intimacy. The findings challenge assumptions of homogeneity in generational technology usage and underscore the importance of considering diverse demographic perspectives in digital research. This chapter sheds light on the interplay between technology, identity and social connections, emphasising the relevance of gender in digital platform studies.

Notions of gender and sexuality are much more complex than the traditional heteronormative system suggests in most Western societies. From a perspective that approaches gender as a social construction, the chapter focuses on how gender is constituted in the offer of Android apps in the Portuguese Google PlayStore. The authors propose two research questions: (RQ1) How do app icons and descriptions visually and textually express the gender spectra based on the search results for the terms mulher (woman), homem (man), agénero (agender), transgénero (transgender) and não-binário (non-binary)? (RQ2): Which apps are recommended across genders? Adopting an exploratory digital methods approach, the authors address these questions by combining different data points, ranging from the app publication date, rating, number of downloads, price, gender-based options, etc. The query design attends to different app typologies for everyday practices such as games, self-tracking, dating, fitness and social media. The analysis focuses on the app market in Portugal, allowing us to explore how collective narrative processes on app-based platforms enhance power relations by perpetuating hegemonic masculinities and femininities anchored upon heteronormativity. Employing a multi-modal approach, the authors’ goal is to assess whether the app market challenges or replicates the standard heteronormative social behaviour. The results show a significant difference between the predominant genres, especially regarding the application's colour palettes, description and proposed uses.

Stemming from a critical approach towards technology (understood as a producer of meanings, subjectivity and agency, and, thus, shaped by power relations) and taking into account the role of broader societal norms and structures in technological uses and gratifications, this chapter explores the (re)negotiations of gender and sexual identities among Portuguese young adult app users. It focuses on if app usage allows these users to break heterocisnormativity and hegemonic notions of masculinity. For that purpose, the study conducted six focus groups involving 31 participants and 25 semi-structured interviews with young adults (18–30 years old). The scripts were designed to collect data about mobile app usage practices and what meanings interviewees attribute to used platforms, navigating through imaginaries, meanings, appropriations, incorporations and mostly negotiations. Analytically, this study contributes to an enhanced understanding of how apps might change young adult lives concerning gender and sexual identities and to challenging uses and gratifications theory, which, after almost 80 years since its first formulations, has gained new impetus with the ongoing digitisation process and the so-called interactive technologies that integrate it.

This chapter provides a mapping of the so-called couple apps, i.e. apps that generically promise to promote connectivity in several areas among the members of a romantic relationship. We focus on Apple's App Store offering and analyse all the available relevant apps: their year of release, the different categories, the apps' developers, the apps' presentation through its icon and description and the profile creation process. If couples' communication and behaviours have an impact on romantic relationship satisfaction and users' well-being, we question how such apps are characterised. We reveal that these apps try to respond to couples' needs related to several romantic relationship topics through a variety of approaches and methods. Nevertheless, such apps are governed by private companies with a commercial objective and through their design and affordances promote behaviours of a one-size-fits-all approach. As such, they seem not to promote diversity or spontaneity. Among these apps, heteronormativity regarding gender, roles, sexual orientation and romantic relationship format is to be assumed as the norm. As an effect, traditional views of what a couple is and related behaviours are transmitted, impacting how apps are understood and appropriated by users and having consequences on practices.

This chapter discusses the control of women's bodies and minds through the daily practices of menstrual control apps. Based on Michel Foucault's concepts (2003, 2006, 2013), the research is based on women's relationship with their own bodies. Still, it is wider than the body per se since the central theme is the construction of subjectivities. This paper embraces power modalities and explores disciplinary and discursive practices and regimes of truth, biopower, biopolitics and governance. The paper frames the fundamental points of Michel Foucault's analysis of power and how they are associated with strategies used for menstrual tracking apps. It looks at how apps act on the subjectivity of being a woman, shaping ways of thinking and acting. It looks at how disciplinary practices, knowledge–power and surveillance, as Foucault tells us, relate to themselves and medicine. The text highlights that monitoring data and corporate surveillance by menstrual apps poses unprecedented challenges to feminist politics. Therefore, we argue that the technology of menstrual tracking apps acts subtly and uninterruptedly to docilise female bodies and make them useful. Trying to find new paths and solutions from a feminist and critical perspective, we offer suggestions for further research on the topic, disregarding liberal approaches which rely on media literacy exclusively rather than a holistic comprehension of technology and women's rights.

Digital media and mobile apps are constantly used concerning social interaction and maintaining social bonds. The most popular platform used for these practices is WhatsApp (Statista, 2022) a cross-platform instant messaging service for mobile devices. Like other instant messaging services, WhatsApp permits its users to create groups to have an interaction between (usually) a restricted number of people. This chapter will focus on young adults' everyday life and their mediated interactions using WhatsApp groups composed exclusively of people of the same gender. Considering these groups as communities of practices (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and gender as something that is doing with interaction (Butler, 2004; Connell, 2005; Mac an Ghaill, 1994), this chapter will concentrate on how young adults perform and (re)shape masculinities and femininities using mobile apps. Starting from the analysis of 46 online interviews with young adults living in Italy, this chapter will focus on homosocial practices in WhatsApp groups underling how gender identities are performed in these specific digital spaces, to what extent uses intertwine with WhatsApp's affordances and which kind of (the idea of) masculinities and femininities are reproduced by users practices. The interviews show how digital homosocial groups are usually carried out as a humourous act between friends, as a form of social consolidation, as an attempt to gain or maintain peer status or preserve hegemonic/dominant ideas of femininity or masculinity and as a safe space where performing what for some interviewees is the real essence of being men or women.

How do young members of disadvantaged communities in countries like the United States, which has been affected by political polarisation and attacks from far-right populist politicians on women's rights, make sense of messages on reproductive health in the misinformation age? Following from the conclusion of a Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF)-funded project which examined how 52 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from across the world are making use of communications tools for advocacy on sexuality and reproductive health (SRHR), this study engaged with communities in Florida, US, in partnership with the NGO Open Arms, to assess how they consume media content on reproductive health, particularly on social media, within a context of proliferation of ‘fake news’. ^{3 , 4} Applying a feminist methodological epistemology and a participatory approach which aims to ‘empower’ participants, two focus groups with males and females from diverse ethnicities, between 18 and 40 years of age, were conducted with Open Arms in July and August 2023. Findings revealed how groups are exposed to a lot of inaccurate news, misinformation and ‘myths’ around fertility treatments on the web, and how they feel there is a need for better scientific information on reproductive health in the media and on the internet, one which is also more ‘entertaining’ and which speaks directly to their experiences. This study concludes in favour of improving health literacy approaches as well as communications on reproduction health.

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.