Youth Health and Wellbeing in Digital Cultures

As the global spread of digital technologies and media continues, so too has research responding to the question of whether these digital technologies are helpful or harmful, or have a positive or negative influence on wellbeing and health. While these questions may be useful for considering the effects of specific actions or patterns of digital media use at a particular time, when considering wellbeing, it is important to consider the broader sociocultural and technical conditions that influence how and why young people and their communities interact with digital media. A focus on digital cultures, or the ordinary, everyday cultural practices, norms, and knowledge facilitated by digital media, may provide a better way to consider youth wellbeing than a focus on specific health outcomes. As social, cultural, and critical media research highlights, this permits attending to the things that digital media enable young people to do in relation to wellbeing via participation in digital cultures and the associated sociotechnical processes that influence these cultures such as platformization, affordances, and datafication. This chapter discusses how these digital cultures and processes can function to shape youth health and wellbeing in diverse ways and, in turn, how young people influence and create their own digital worlds where wellbeing is experienced as a relationship between people, platforms, practices, and contexts.