Abstract
The use of digital media by young people in relation to intimate relationships and practices has received increasing attention, often framed in an alarming or sensationalized manner, which oversimplifies the debate on media usage by reducing it to its effects (Bragg and Buckingham 2009; Tiidenberg and van der Nagel 2020). Moving beyond a media effects approach, sociocultural digital research has examined gender and intimacy through a mutual shaping perspective to explore the interactions between digital media and gender (Van Zoonen 2002). This approach seeks to understand how the social meaning of digital media is shaped by prevailing gender conceptions (Wajcman 1991) and contributes to the co-construction of gender as “something that is done” and continuously re-created. Digital media can be understood as environments that offer young people agency and spaces where they can construct and perform their identity (boyd 2014) through bricolage practices (Willet, 2008) and experiment with their self-representation, particularly in relation to gender and intimacy (De Ridder 2017; Ferreira 2021; Metcalfe and Llewellyn 2020). Such experimentation can be linked to stereotypical/hegemonic ideas of masculinity and femininity by replicating them (van Oosten et al. 2017), emphasizing them (Doring et al. 2015) or subverting them (Cook & Hasmath 2014). Most of the literature on young people and digital intimacies has focused on single “hot-topic” issues, such as sexting and online gender-based violence, seemingly in response to public fear-based discourses. Our research takes a comprehensive approach to digital intimacies to examine how teenagers (re)negotiate their gender identities and intimate lives through their everyday use of digital media. Using a media practice paradigm to understand what young people do with and through digital media in specific contexts (Couldry 2012), this paper analyzes how Italian teenagers (aged 16–18) (re)define their understanding of gender and intimacy through their engagement with digital media and its integration into daily life. The research employs a multilevel, mixed-methods approach, consisting of three sequential steps involving teenagers from various Italian cities: (1) six creative, qualitative focus groups with 49 participants, (2) 70 individual qualitative semi-structured interviews, and (3) a nationally representative quantitative survey. Using a participatory design approach, each research instrument is co-constructed with a group of 10 teenagers (“Young Researchers Group”), who act as “epistemic partners” (Holmes and Marcus 2012) in devising content and structure that is suitable for research with other teenage participants. The analysis of the empirical material collected involves a twofold approach: qualitative thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006, 2023) applied to focus groups and interviews, which identifies patterns and meanings in participants’ narratives; and statistical analysis of the survey data, which highlights broader trends and frequencies across a nationally representative sample. The initial findings from focus groups (completed) and interviews (in progress) encompass a broad range of digital practices relating to three interrelated dimensions: gender, sexuality, and intimate relationships. The analysis explores the meanings that young people assign to their everyday digital practices, including the management of teenagers’ gendered representations on social media, “constant connection” and digital disconnection in intimate relationships, attitudes toward and experiences with digital dating abuse and image-based harassment, engagement with LGBTQIA+ online visibility and activism, and expectations and interactions with sexually explicit content (including sexting and pornography). Based on these exploratory results, the final survey will be designed to generalize the findings to the national population. By centering young people’s voices and combining qualitative and quantitative data, the research offers a nuanced and grounded understanding of digital intimacies in adolescence. It moves beyond fear-based and deterministic narratives to highlight how teenagers actively shape and reinterpret gender and intimacy through digital practices. The study also demonstrates the value of participatory and context-sensitive methods in capturing the complexity of young people’s digital lives, offering empirical evidence that can inform both academic debates and youth-centered policies.
