Roger Martínez, Francesc Nuñez
Estudis d’Humanitats
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

Young people and the cultural production of common culture around digital video

The notion of ‘cultural production’ can be understood in many ways. In this paper, we use its wide definition, that is, as ‘our struggle to survive making sense of the world and our place in it’ (Willis 2000: xiv), to investigate how digital video is being used by young people to survive making sense of the world and the place they occupy in it. This implies that we will look not only at the cultural production of video artefacts, but of ‘common culture’, and more precisely, of meanings and practices around the consumption, production and dissemination of video artefacts. We will focus in different ways through which young people not only use video to make sense of their world and their place in it, but also make sense of the place video and practices around video have in their world. We are talking about young people’s us of video in their search of social recognition, that is, about the way they learn and culturally produce how to use digital tools and video artefacts both to locate themselves in the webs of recognition and to have sensuous experiences – individual and collective, in consumption and production.