Abstract
This paper investigates young people living in a regional Australian town and explores the ways that they negotiate place-making using mobile media. Australia has been characterised as a country of vast distances, and young people living in rural and regional areas are at the centre of narratives that position digital technologies as enablers or disruptors. This paper puts such deterministic discourses aside to focus on the ways place is made by young people living outside the city according to their own perspectives and experiences. Focus groups with 62 participants aged 16–28 years pointed to many of those in-the-background place-making practices and signalled the near seamless way that making places was simultaneously done online as well as in material, face-to-face contexts. The forms of place made by the young people of this study comprised a range of elasticised neighbourhoods and public spaces that were materially anchored, though extended digitally through territorially embedded socialities and shared locational information. Regional geographies retained their meaning, though traditional constraints could be renegotiated to reflect youthful relationships with local place.
Introduction
Across Australia’s geographically dispersed rural and regional areas, digital media saturation is relatively high (Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS], 2014a), but research on digital media use in this context has focused on questions of access, such as problems of geography, infrastructure, and isolation (Knight, 2015; Park, 2017). This is consistent with a broader Australian discourse in which distance has been typified as a “tyranny,” 1 constraining and limiting people’s movement and connection beyond their immediate locales (Blainey, 2001).
With the rising ubiquity of the Internet and mobile media, and the taken-for-granted embeddedness of these technologies (Ling, 2012), old spatial constraints are under constant renegotiation (De Souza e Silva, 2013). Young people are of particular interest in this investigation because their perspectives and experiences provide insights into processes of contemporary social change (Furlong & Cartmel, 2007), particularly in regard to mobile media (Ling, 2004). Narratives of being “freed” from local place have special relevance for young people living in the country. For instance, the importance of local place has been found to diminish for young, rural mobile media users (Stern, 2008), and the long-term sustainability of rural places has been cast as under threat due to young people’s focus on digital media at the expense of their local communities (Ei Chew, LaRose, Steinfield, & Velasquez, 2011). Positive narratives centre on digital technologies providing access to the geographically isolated. Benefits include accessing education (Valentine & Holloway, 2001) or social inclusion (Lankester, Hughes, & Foth, 2018). Such approaches to young people in nonurban places are characterised by enduring themes that conceive digital technologies as disruptors or enablers that ultimately complicate relationships with local place.
Nuanced debates about the complicated relationship between people, technologies, and the places in which they live are growing. Urban locations (De Souza e Silva, 2013; Hjorth, 2013; Licoppe, 2013; Martin & Rizvi, 2014; Özkul & Humphreys, 2015) and mobile adult populations (Bork-Hüffer, 2016; Liao & Humphreys, 2015; Polson, 2015) arise as central areas of concern. These researchers respond to calls for investigations into the ways near-ubiquitous mobile media alter the “character” of place (De Souza e Silva, 2013; Leszczynski, 2015). Still, the meaning of space and place in the context of digital technology is “fuzzy and up for debate” (Campbell, 2018, p. 56).
In this paper, I reiterate the need to focus on how places are made and shaped through mobile media, but I extend the digital place-making body of research to clarify how young people in nonurban contexts construct place both with and through mobile media. This paper draws on focus group discussions with young people aged 16–28 years living in a regional Australian town and explores their in-the-background place-making practices (Moores, 2012) that demonstrate the near seamless way making places is simultaneously done online as well as in material contexts.
The question of place
The question of how places should be categorised emerges in discussions about regional towns. Structural definitions based on characteristics such as population size, distance to other places, or dominant industry are common (Heley & Jones, 2012), particularly in government classifications (e.g., ABS, 2014b). Answering sociologists’ call for research that accounts for the complexity of life outside of the city (Amin & Thrift, 2002), this paper will apply a more relational lens (Heley & Jones, 2012; Massey, 2005). While regional towns and cities are each unique, and those who live in such places share different experiences, relational accounts provide an interpretivist understanding of regionality in the context of already produced places.
One consistency across regional towns in Australia is that they are undergoing constant change. For instance, communities are negotiating the impacts of migration (Alston, 2004), economic restructure (Kraack & Kenway, 2002), and information technologies (Ei Chew et al., 2011; Stern, 2008). Discourses questioning the sustainability of nonurban places (Ei Chew et al., 2011; Jansen, Cuthill, & Hafner, 2012) speak to a discourse of anxiety regarding the impacts of change on local place. While such concerns are less pressing in larger, regional towns, uncertainty associated with change is still evident (see Jansen et al., 2012).
Making sense of how young people in their teens and 20s subjectively experience, conceive, and ultimately make local place, contributes to the discussion about regional place and how it is shaped within broader processes of social change. There has been a broadening of the concept of “youth,” and for the industrialised West, the term encompasses individuals in their teens as well as in their 20s (Cieslik & Simpson, 2013). Using White and Wyn’s contextual approach (2004), framed within societal structures and individual agency, “youth” can be conceived relationally instead of biologically (Aitken, 2001). While young people in their 20s may share greater spatial freedom than their younger counterparts, disrupted transitions associated with difficulty sourcing employment, access to education, or independent living arrangements can mean an extension of the youth phase (Valentine, 2003). In order to explore contemporary regional Australia, characterised by declining industrial economies and limited access to tertiary education, a deliberately expansive interpretation is applied in this study. Positioning mobile media as a key means for place-making reflects youthful experience, while also contributing to broader discussions on the embeddedness of digital media in everyday lives.
What is place-making?
Place research is multidisciplinary and underscored by a range of research traditions (Patterson & Williams, 2005). Place is given meaning and value over time as it becomes more familiar to those who reside within it and is not synonymous with the similar concept “space,” which tends to be conceptualised in more abstract terms (Cresswell, 2015). Place-making is a term with multiple meanings and is of interest to a range of disciplines as a key explanatory variable structuring people’s everyday lives. In the context of regional places, Jansen et al. (2012; Waite, 2018) traced shifts in place identity in a regional Australian town, finding that recent economic growth was reflected in positive conceptions of place.
Further, different forms of place-making are referred to in this literature. More deliberate, self-conscious constructions of place that look at the built environment as the primary locus of place-making (Freestone & Liu, 2016) are particularly common in stories of decline (Kullmann, 2013). This paper shifts focus to more non-self-conscious, in-the-background, processes in which place emerges as a mutual construction, simultaneously made by people residing in, and moving through it (Massey, 2005). This illuminates a “person–place bond” that links humans and the environment that they occupy in complex ways (Seamon, 1979, p. 9). Movement, habitual or otherwise, is demonstrated in the embodied experience of the relationship between people and the places traversed by them. The mutual shaping process serves to continuously reinscribe the meaning and collective understanding of places. Ultimately, place is produced because “human beings are always conjoined, enmeshed, and immersed in their world” (Seamon, 2012, p. 4).
Digital technologies
Following Licoppe’s (2013; see also Moores, 2012) caution against orientating research questions based on particular technologies, devices, or platforms, this paper adopts a broader, context-aware approach. Digital technologies cannot be analysed in a vacuum, removed from the “things and spaces around us” (Leszczynski, 2015, p. 18), because they are thoroughly embedded and contingent on the contexts in which they are produced. Technologies such as mobile media have been “domesticated,” and have engendered a reconsideration of accessibility and social coordination (Ling, 2004). In the context of place, and place-making, however, a relevant genre of technologies are “locative media” (Frith, 2015). The term refers to mobile media that are networked, and which allow users to know the location of themselves and others in “mutual proximity” (Licoppe, 2013, p. 123). While location awareness may not be the primary affordance for users, it emerges as an unintended outcome of spatially embedded usage.
The role of mobile media in place-making is demonstrated in their role as everyday mediators of intimate and regular social interactions (Anderson & Jiang, 2018; Ek, 2006). Such use has been linked with young people, who, in many ways, have been positioned at the forefront of technology usage (Green, 2007). Emerging within pervasive “digital native” discourses (Smith, Skrbis, & Western, 2013), some conceive a singular focus among young people directed towards mobile media and digital technologies. These articulate an implicitly disruptive “tethered dependency” (Mihailidis, 2014) in which young people are disconnected from local place (Espinoza & Juvonen, 2011). However, recent work (see Abeele, 2016) represents a move away from approaches conceiving youthful digital media use in terms of disruption.
Indeed, digital spaces represent opportunities for young people to perform self online, in an arena relatively free of external regulations and adult scrutiny (boyd, 2014). Online and mediated environments enable a certain amount of control and discretionary power for young people who can decide how, when, and in what way they connect with others (Abeele, 2016; Green, 2007). Of course, the nature of online audiences and the blurred boundaries between private and public in virtual locales are complicating features (boyd, 2014). Nonetheless, opportunities to socialise and express identities within online spaces is one of the reasons why young people have flocked to the medium (Abeele, 2016; boyd, 2014).
Digital place-making
Part of a broader smartphone turn (Campbell, 2018), growing research interest has sought to clarify the complex, changeable, and increasingly intimate relationship between people, mobile media, and place. Concepts like “net locality” (Gordon & de Souza e Silva, 2011, p. 118) seek to make sense of “hybrid spaces” “developed by the constant enfolding of digital information and networked connections into local spaces.” Putting aside notions of hybridity, the concept of “spatial media” highlights the complex merging of material and virtual, encompassing hardware, software, and informational objects in which spatiality is a “project” that is invariably never complete (Leszczynski, 2015, p. 18).
As part of this “project,” researchers have investigated the relationship between place, digital technologies, and users. Hjorth and Pink (2014) conceptualise a “digital wayfarer” who traverses material environments, mobile media in hand, constructing place as they go. Here, sensory embodiment, and the experience of place, is reimagined through the lens of digital technologies. “In-between” localities typified by places of transit, including the train, the bus, or while walking from one destination to another, were constructed via people’s mobile media. These were the places of “routine and rhythm” important in people’s locative media practices encompassing affective, material, social, and temporal dimensions. Respondents reported a sense of feeling free to relax and to “kill time” (Hjorth & Pink, 2014, p. 24; see also Hjorth, 2017), and “enact” place through the medium of digital play and gaming apps (Hjorth & Richardson, 2017).
Like Hjorth and Pink (2014), Martin and Rizvi (2014; see also Leszczynski, 2015; Moores, 2012) focus on the physical embodiment of individuals and their inevitable occupation of material locales while they engage in everyday place-making practices. Less concerned with their respondents’ movements as a form of place-making, the focus for Martin and Rizvi was on the melding of “bits and pieces”—comprised of distant, though intimately familiar places—with the immediacy of their current surroundings. Engaging in sociality both online and face-to-face, the young participants played a key role in constructing urban places and community relations (Martin & Rizvi, 2014).
Locational information uploaded and shared online represents another approach to investigating the ways that place is shaped and constructed. According to Lee (2010; see also Hjorth & Pink, 2014), those who take, edit, and post photographs record not only locational information, but their place-embedded perceptions. These serve to tell narratives about selves, locales, and sites of meaning for the consumption of others online. Opportunities to preserve and share memories, in the form of photos, check-ins, or geotags, mean that place also becomes a valuable “container” for memory (Cumiskey & Hjorth, 2017; Özkul & Humphreys, 2015). The “selfie,” a photograph taken using a smartphone by the user that depicts the user and/or others, is a common genre of locational information shared online. Taking and sharing a selfie while in a public space engenders a mediated form of copresence, a “digital overlay for understanding physicality” whereby physical spaces themselves become “filtered” through the photograph, and an interpretation of place can be constructed (Hess, 2015, p. 1642). “Media traces,” such as selfies, uploaded and displayed in digital environments contribute to experience of place, and augment a sense of attachment and familiarity (Özkul & Humphreys, 2015). Selfies and other forms of locational media traces shared online can help clarify digital place-making practices.
While urban places have overwhelmingly been the locus of studies on the relationship between digital media technologies and place-making (see De Souza e Silva, 2013; Hjorth & Arnold, 2013; Liccope, 2013; Martin & Rizvi, 2014; Özkul & Humphreys, 2015), Lundgren and Johansson (2017) focused their study outside the city. They identified a “co-construction of place” in the discursive reflection of offline events in a Facebook group. Online spaces represented sites for rural residents to gather, to share experiences, as well as to reconstitute and recognise rurality. Like others researching rural and regional communities (see Jansen et al., 2012), Lundgren and Johansson (2017) found contrasting constructions of decline and renewal, and their shaping influence on place-making.
In this paper, I apply place-making approaches emphasising the subjective, relational construction of place enacted by social actors mediated through their social relationships (Massey, 2005), as well as through experiences of material places associated with shared locational information and traversals of proximate locales (Seamon, 1979, 2012; Tuan, 1979). Place-making encompasses not just material, face-to-face contexts, but digitally mediated environments in a similar fashion. This paper extends a diverse body of work that explores the relationship between place and mobile media, and deploys it to clarify the process through which places are made in a regional town. By honing in on young people in a regional town, I am able to focus previous work that does not specify a geographic context to explore how place is made outside the city.
The study site
Shepparton is a regional Australian town, located 180 km north of the southern state capital of Melbourne. The population is just over 60,000 and the town serves as a regional centre to the surrounding rural area. Characteristic of Woods’s (2007) “global countryside,” the context of change in relation to industrial restructure, migration, and information technologies is a familiar backdrop. There is an established migrant community in the town, representing a range of cultural and religious backgrounds (ABS, 2016). Further, young people’s out-migration (Alston, 2004) and mobilities across regional and urban geographies (Wiborg, 2004) are a lived reality. While Shepparton is home to a manufacturing and agriculture-based economy, industrial restructure that has impacted regional Australia (Kraack & Kenway, 2002) is present. In spite of this, employment opportunities are available (National Institute of Economic and Industry Research, 2016), as are tertiary education opportunities. In terms of technology and telecommunications infrastructure, Shepparton has traditionally been a robust performer with Internet access available to most residents (see NBN, 2018); however, barriers to access are more likely related to socioeconomic dynamics in Shepparton (see van Deursen & van Dijk, 2014).
Methods
In order to gain nuanced, interpretivist insights into young people’s place-making processes, a focus group study was designed. The methodology facilitates young people’s discussions across a range of contexts and settings so that their experiences can be placed within a broader “system of meaning” (Schwandt, 2000). Focus groups provided an opportunity for participants to reflect on some of the broader dynamics of their regional lives, while sharing their perspectives and experiences in a nonthreatening, familiar context (Madriz, 2000).
Field work was carried out in April–July 2015 with young residents aged 16–28 years. Participants were recruited from a range of contexts within the town, including training institutions, local youth-orientated groups, as well as sporting and professional groups. Discussion invariably moved towards social media technologies, and prompts included “Tell me about using your mobile phone or other technologies to talk to people in Shepparton and other places,” and “Do you think social technologies are important?” These were designed to develop a group discussion wherein participants would feel comfortable and ready to share opinions and perspectives based on their own experiences.
Focus groups were invariably constituted by young people who already knew one another and represented friendship groups in many cases (Madriz, 2000). Because of this, groups were often relatively homogenous in terms of ethnicity, cultural background, and socioeconomic status, and most were comprised of both men and women (with the exception of three groups; see Table 1). Groups took place in the familiar, everyday meeting spaces in which they met up and hung out in, including cafés and pubs. During focus groups, I was able to observe respondents interact with each other, and with their environments, including their smartphones. As much as possible in a 1- to 2-hour focus group, I sought to draw out the rich, multidimensional, and complex experiences of place and digital technologies (see Seamon, 2000). Respondents also had opportunities to react to others in the group, and to offer unanticipated but valuable data on place-making dynamics (Madriz, 2000).
Participant age and gender.
Note. FG = focus group; m = male; f = female.
In all, 12 focus groups were conducted with a total of 62 participants. Groups consisted of 2–8 individuals. Some groups were smaller than anticipated due to unexpected withdrawals. Rather than cancel these groups, I decided to proceed even though the dynamics would be somewhat altered. I found that small groups (i.e., two participants) served as an effective hybrid of group discussions and in-depth interviews that elicited valuable information, particularly in instances when participants knew each other well (Ritchie, Lewis, Nicholls, & Ormston, 2013). Because only one of 12 focus groups was a “hybrid” group, I proceeded with a focus-group-style analysis that was sensitive to the altered dynamics in smaller and larger groups.
Just over half of respondents were female (51.6%), and slightly fewer young men took part (48.4%). The mean age of the respondent group was 21.5 years, most (71%) were born in Australia, and just under half (47.8%) were born in Shepparton. Focus groups were audio recorded and transcribed by the author. The analysis acknowledged that meanings and experiences shared during focus groups were diverse, but rather than focus on what any participant said individually, it was the collective “discourses which are constructed within the group context” (Smithson, 2000, p. 109) that informed the findings. Analysis of focus group transcripts followed a deductive approach to identify common themes. These, in turn, were informed by themes present in the relevant literature (Ritchie et al., 2013). NVivo (Version 10) was also used to organise codes and identify thematic divisions within the data (Ritchie et al., 2013).
The analysis presented in this paper reflects the broader discussion as accurately as possible, but excerpts included in what follows represent a smaller portion of participants. These were chosen based on participants’ ability to clearly articulate young people’s place-making and represent the collective discourses that emerged during focus groups.
Findings
The following sections outline the ways that digital media, in most cases smartphones, constitute a means for young people’s place-making in Shepparton. A systematic account of the forms of technology in regular use was not within the scope of the study, however, discussion revealed that the majority used smartphones. Laptops, desktops, and devices belonging to friends and family were also referred to. While these are not necessarily locative media, they formed part of a constellation of “polymedia” (Madianou & Miller, 2012) used by the young people to orientate themselves in place.
For many, phones were automatically removed from pockets and bags when focus groups began and placed close by. I observed that this was so notifications and messages received during the group could be expeditiously triaged with minimal disruption to the group discussion. It also meant that smartphones became part of the focus group insofar as they were constantly referred to, and used as prompts to clarify points in the discussion. Apps were opened and phones were passed around to compare with others in the group, which in turn prompted others to do the same. Keeping smartphones nearby and navigating through familiar apps or relevant information when necessary was an automatic part of social gatherings. Indeed, the “doubly digital” nature of their mobile media was demonstrated in their familiar at-homeness in online spaces like Facebook, Snapchat, and Viber (Moores, 2014). The intimate nestling of smartphones within focus group discussion was a common backdrop during many of the conversations reported in the following paragraphs.
Material socialities online
The notion that smartphones were a tool that would ostensibly improve access to opportunities or conversely, contribute to the demise of local community, was not a key concern among participants. Putting aside disruptor/enabler narratives (e.g., Ei Chew et al., 2011; Stern, 2008) regarding digital media technologies, participants across all focus groups explained that digital technologies were important and constituted a key means for interacting with close friends and family. Ultimately, while the spatio-temporal malleability available in online contexts could be taken advantage of, online interlocutors tended to be embedded in respondents’ everyday, material lives (see boyd, 2014; Pathak-Shelat & DeShano, 2014).
Across focus groups, respondents reported “probably talking to people” (Connor, 2 Focus Group [FG] 5) as a key motivation to go online. Jayden and Sophie, tertiary students in FG 2 conducted in a meeting room at their education institution, discussed the mundane sociality they engaged in online:
But also, a lot of the time, it might just be a phone call, come around. Something like that and they’ll come over.
I think, I use social media mostly to contact my friends that are in Shepparton, mainly. Or just texting, you know how you tag people in videos and stuff like that. Probably people you hang around with the most, and you see the most, and you have bonds with and stuff. Probably, yeah.
Jayden and Sophie explain a strongly territorialised online sociality. Mundane interactions, sharing “expressive messages” (Abeele, 2016), and arranging meet-ups served to collapse proximate geographic boundaries within the town (Waite & Bourke, 2015). Speaking and interacting with friends who lived nearby in Shepparton was a key affordance, and was how mobile media were often conceptualised among the respondents. While this has been established elsewhere (boyd, 2014; Pathak-Shelat & DeShano, 2014), there was an intimate enmeshing of digital and spatial connections emerging from mundane socialites such as those described by Jayden and Sophie (see Gordon & de Souza e Silva, 2011).
An example of the collective place-making capacity of one peer group emerged among FG 7, comprised of young men from Shepparton’s Iraqi migrant community. They talked at length about engaging in group chats on the instant messaging platform Viber, which was described as a key means to hang out:
So I guess whoever starts it [a group chat] on the day, so if someone starts texting on Viber, and everyone just going to text back and it’s going to drag along all day, and you’ve just gotta keep updating.
It is convenient though, and it is easy, um. . .
. . . like the most thing I think we use is that group chat.
Yeah.
Yeah, pretty much, like, at 4 o’clock in the morning if you text, I think someone would reply [laughs].
I wake up having about 240 messages between. . .
. . . and that’s only between like six people?
Yeah, six people.
Like others, the young men described a pleasure in the ease and familiarity of perpetual, though nondisruptive, group chats among their spatially embedded group (Abeele, 2016). There was a discernible sense of exclusivity and security in the anyplace anytime connectivity as well as in knowing that this was a place just for them that others could not access (Abeele, 2016).
The group members collectively constructed a form of digital-material place that encompassed home neighbourhoods, living rooms at home, and other hang out spaces in Shepparton. These were interspersed with group chats on Viber, sharing memes and online articles on Facebook, and sharing locational “media traces” to record place-embedded narratives about themselves, their community, and sites of meaning for the consumption of others in their online community at any time of the day or night (Hjorth & Pink, 2014; Lee, 2010; Özkul & Humphreys, 2015). Here, a relatively embedded form of regional place was constructed via frequent and regular digitally mediated social action interspersed with more irregular contact with extended family beyond Australia.
Other respondents described their own online sociality in terms of a melding of virtual and material, whereby proximate interlocutors could be readily available, and the activities of mutually confirmed contacts on social media could be discerned in a passive way: Ava: Oh, Facebook or text message . . . it’s kind of like constant . . . just, for example, if they were next to you and you were talking to them, it’s like that, but over a text message and they’re at their house and you’re here. I don’t know, that’s what I do . . . scroll onto your Facebook and see what everyone else is doing without having to ask what they’re doing [laughs]. (FG 5)
In this excerpt from a discussion in a focus group, recruited from a larger group of young community volunteers, Ava demonstrates the intersections melding digitally mediated and material places. Ava imagines her friends “[as] if they were next to you,” when they are actually in their own homes. Like the young men in FG 7, the territorially embedded nature of her use is evident (Waite & Bourke, 2015). But Ava describes a particularly intimate connection when she imagines physical copresence in lieu of digital mediated copresence. This is reflective of the more experiential dimensions of place (Tuan, 1979) in which there is an instantaneous exchange as in a material setting, however, it was achieved without direct contact.
Respondents took advantage of opportunities to maintain connections with others online in geographically distant places. For instance, in a discussion in FG 3 about Facebook held in the local pub with participants recruited from a young professional association, Liz and Caleb explained:
Yeah, all over, Facebook’s become the communication tool for people our age, because everyone has moved away, some have family, some are single, some have people overseas, so, it’s the tool we now have so we can keep in contact with everyone that we otherwise would have lost contact with altogether.
I suppose you go local first, and then, it’s a good way to keep in touch with people who aren’t close by.
Caleb and Liz’s explanation of dynamic and changing social groups was reflective of young people’s changing lives, their expanding peer groups, as well as their transition through life stages (Cieslik & Simpson, 2013). While the convenience of connecting with distant others was characterised by some as an abstract “benefit” of online spaces, enabling them to “keep in touch,” it was those intimate, spatially embedded networks that tended to be at the forefront. Still, the material embeddedness of the young people’s online socialities was evident even when the relationships extended across geography (Waite & Bourke, 2015). Here, elements of the “enabler” narrative were demonstrated; however, they were part of a broader, complex, spatially embedded experience.
Images and selfies
Locational information—such as photos, check-ins, or geotags—represents a key mode for co-constituting places of meaning (Özkul & Humphreys, 2015). For the young participants, photos and selfies emerged as a key form of locational information and represented an extension of the embedded socialities explored in the previous paragraphs. Less of a hurdle than personally being in a place, in many ways, this constituted an extension of the mediatory role of the body in the experience of place (Duffy, 2013).
According to respondents in FG 3, images punctuated their social media consumption across different platforms and sites:
It’s [Facebook] full of images, you don’t see things unless they have an image attached.
Someone’s gone on holiday and then you flick through, someone’s married, and then you find out, oh she’s there, she’s there, she’s there. It’s just, I guess to see what everyone’s up to . . . sharing images.
For Penny and Ellie, the inclusion of an image was a key component in any item received or shared. Penny alludes to one of the motivations and reasons why uploading accompanying images is meaningful and so pervasive: without images “you don’t see [emphasis added] things.” Engaging the visual sense here reflects the experiential dimensions of a broader, more embodied interaction online (Moores, 2014; Pink, Sinanan, Hjorth, & Horst, 2016). Further, the online traces of “what everyone’s up to” (i.e., holidays, life events) constitute a “wider geographic and experiential space” that comes together to co-constitute a sense of meaning attached to Shepparton (Martin & Rizvi, 2014, p. 3). Images also represented valued opportunities to remember and preserve these emplaced experiences (Özkul & Humphreys, 2015).
Discussions about sharing locational photos online often centred on the social media application Snapchat. A form of “digital wayfarer” emerged in respondents’ discussions about manoeuvring through space while rendering their quotidian traversals in shared digital spaces. They did this using quickly snapped images during moments of pause in busy lives (Hjorth & Pink, 2014). Hannah explained: “Like sometimes it could just be someone sitting in a car, or just little snippets, like it’s not worth saving [for later], just funny little moments” (FG 3).
Similarly, Zoe and Jade in FG 8 (young community volunteers) discussed photos and selfies that tended to depict the “everydayness” of regional life and sociality embedded in places that were meaningful and familiar to them (Hess, 2015):
Just, whatever, yeah, like me and my friends at the lake, me and my friends before we go out, that kind of stuff.
It’s like, just selfies, family, like that sort of thing, not really, sometimes you’re just doing something, like you’re watching a cool movie, or you buy a new record, that sort of thing, like, yes! Look what I’ve got, this is awesome, you sorta show off, like. . .
Zoe and Jade’s everyday lives were afforded virtual representation as the “here and now” (Hess, 2015, p. 1631), while affective connections to others, as well as to place, were articulated by taking and distributing locational snaps online (Pink et al., 2016). Jade was a laid-back digital wayfarer (Hjorth & Pink, 2014), yet at each point, they were both making places of meaning with one another, “showing off” and imparting their own interpretation of familiar regional spaces.
Selfies were also a key form of territorial sociality among participants of FG 4. Made up of a group of friends, the focus group took place in a local pub one Friday after work:
What types of images do you share?
Terribly embarrassing selfies [laughs].
Yeah.
Yeah, generally people aren’t watching you taking, snapping, then you draw stuff [on the photo].
Generally, I’ll be at work and I’ll do the whole awkward, “Is anyone watching me?” Quick, got it, send . . . you sorta require in context, or something. Like “Hey, what’s up?” and you’re like “work,” but if you’re bored you’re like. . .
Yeah . . . just take a photo, and say what you’re doin’.
Yeah, it’s pretty much, it’s literally a visual text.
The gendered nature of selfie practice described by Hess is eschewed here (Hess, 2015). Instead, Johnno expressed a sense of pleasure after having snapped and then shared a selfie when he was at work. The act was quick and forbidden, which seemed to contribute to his sense of satisfaction. Many dimensions of selfie practice (Frosh, 2015; Hess, 2015) are alluded to among the group of friends, including the transient nature of the shared images. The notion of a mobile self, traversing everyday, material settings and filtering affective conceptions of place (Pink et al., 2016) is demonstrated in Hannah’s image of herself in a car and Johnno’s selfie taken “in-between” places of “routine and rhythm” (Hjorth & Pink, 2014, p. 53). Johnno’s place of employment, an everyday territory experienced and given meaning by him alongside his colleagues, was rendered online in this instance and shared with his materially embedded social group in various parts of Shepparton.
Discussion
This paper argues that pervasive narratives positing young regional people’s usage in terms of advantage and opportunity, or conversely in terms of negative impacts on local community, do not represent the experiences of those in their teens and 20s living in the country. It is overly simplistic to phrase questions of youthful interaction online in dichotomous terms of disruption or enablement. A more complex reality underscores young people’s relationships with their peers, local place, and digital media technologies. This is one in which geography retains a strong relevance (Waite & Bourke, 2015) and has importance in everyday lives beyond the city. The strictures of geography do become “softened” online, however (Campbell, 2018), and the young participants spoke about taking advantage of this. They did so by renegotiating the proximate spaces of the town and by engaging “social logics” demonstrated in perpetual, ongoing, and expansive interactions that spanned across time and location (Abeele, 2016). “Bits and pieces” from more distant as well as nearby places, and relationships maintained over a range of distances also served to reterritorialise and stretch digital places beyond the traditional confines of geography (Martin & Rizvi, 2014). Using locative media (Licoppe, 2013), the young participants were able to renegotiate relationships with regional place, while remaining territorially embedded in places made by them to reflect their own youthful needs as residents of a regional town. While opportunities and/or risks were reported or alluded to, the scope of use and experience was greater, and pervasive narratives that attempt to define regional lives were not necessarily subscribed to.
In a similar vein to boyd’s (2014) findings, social gatherings from material settings could be transferred to online localities by the young people in a range of ways, using a diversity of digital affordances. Yet, for the young people in this study, the relationship was more multidirectional than articulated in boyd’s (2014) work. Digitally mediated and nonmediated interactions fluidly intersected virtual and material environments, each mutually impacting and co-constituting the other. Several participants were keen to profess that they were not “experts” and alluded to a certain standard or level of use that they felt they did not adhere to. Still, unsurprisingly, and consistent with the findings of others (Smith et al., 2013), most of the participants made use of the technologically saturated environment in which they had grown up, choosing an ecology of affordances designed to meet their own socially and culturally embedded requirements (Madianou & Miller, 2012).
In many ways, mobile media enmesh local and global, near and far, in an uncritical way. At the same time, digital affordances serve as a way to embed and reterritorialise users under a unique set of digitally mediated parameters in which the local and near was invariably most prominent. Local places could be made, and the discreteness of localities previously anchored in material place could be reconstituted (see Gordon & de Souza e Silva, 2011; Leszczynski, 2015; Martin & Rizvi, 2014) and stretched to the proximate localities of friends and peers, neighbourhoods, workplaces, and sites of leisure, for example. Rather than being immediately transported to the “global” web (see Kraut et al., 2002), Shepparton was constructed by its youthful residents as a regional town and as a series of person-based, elasticised localities reflective of youthful regional experience.
The forms of place made in Shepparton are, in many ways, not radically different to other places—suburban, regional, or rural—insofar as places were constructed that reflected the spatially embedded, everyday socialites of the young people themselves. For the young people in Shepparton, that included a close peer group residing in adjacent neighbourhoods; for others, particularly those living on the outskirts of town, place was made in more expansive terms.
Still, the uniqueness of regional lives was reflected in the forms of place constructed by them. Geography endured as a shaping mechanism that underscored everyday lives in a way not shared by their urban counterparts with greater access to public transport and other opportunities to move about their locale. The enabler/disruptor narrative underscoring youthful uses of mobile media beyond the city is particularly strong for rural and regional young people. Concerns about community decline or about lack of opportunities that can be remedied by going online have less resonance in urban spaces. When barriers to access are less predicated on physical proximity, and discussion about community decline is diminished in light of robust population and well-performing local economies, city dwellers experience a different set of expectations. The young people in their teens and 20s of this study demonstrated that they could shrug off the yoke of expectations with regard to their use of mobile media and other devices to meet their own, self-determined needs.
It is difficult to make statements about the special uses of mobile media among young people in the country without a comparative element. In order to properly address the question of how geography, mobile media, and young lives intersect, it would be beneficial to reflect on a range of geographic circumstances; for instance, peri-urban, rural, or remote. Further, the experiences of more mobile populations living in these areas, for instance, young people from migrant communities, could add nuance to understandings of digital place-making beyond the city. Potential future research could be directed to addressing these gaps.
Conclusion
Narratives characterising nonurban towns as places of inevitable decline fail to account for forms of place-making occurring in the background (see Moores, 2012) via those very social technologies accused of negatively impacting young people outside of the city (Ei Chew et al., 2011). Instead, the forms of place made by the young people of this study were those blurry edged, elastic regional neighbourhoods extended digitally through territorially embedded socialities and shared locational information. Digitally mediated place is a regional town constructed of scattered friends living in Shepparton’s distal neighbourhoods, surrounding rural hamlets, urban places like Melbourne and Sydney, and less frequently, places abroad—expanding and contracting according to the social action of the young place-makers themselves. Regional place-making conducted online by young people is therefore an exercise in taking advantage of flexible, though nonetheless constrained, opportunities to cross geography while being embedded in territorial places both physically and digitally. The participants responded to a set of mundane, everyday circumstances and drew on what tools they could to construct place in a way that reflected the unique needs of their lives lived in a contemporary, regional town.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
