'Getting Real': Lessons from RidgiDidge

Abstract

The RidgiDidge Study is a qualitative research project that addresses the question of how new media technology figures in the lives of High School students in South Eastern Queensland. Criticism of young people’s media consumption highlights a preoccupation with effects and behaviour, displaying a failure to acknowledge young people as social agents in their own right. The theoretical framework outlined here imbricates Sociology and Cultural Studies in the service of appropriately describing young people’s position in society and foregrounding agency in relation to media consumption. This might reasonably result in a non-judgemental and inter-generational understanding of young people’s media consumption at both political and community levels. With this in mind, the implementation of this framework in the RidgiDidge Study suggests that the domestication of media technologies is a more useful approach to understanding young people’s media consumption than affordance, social determinism, or technical determinism might allow for. This approach is supported at the micro-level by the responses of M8, a Year 10 male participant in the RidgiDidge Study whose media consumption follows the adoption cycle indicated by a domestication perspective.