Bedrooms, Youth & Digital Cultures
The Shifting Boundaries of Teenage Space
Text by Siân Lincoln | 09.09.2022
The teenage bedroom has long been thought of as one of the first spaces a young person calls their own, a space in which emerging teenage identities are formed and a space in which to spend time alone, to experiment and to explore. For me, a teenager growing up in the late 1980s and early 1990s, my bedroom was a “sanctuary” away from school and family life, albeit not always a happy sanctuary. It was the space in which I would spend hours agonising over my changing body when I should have been studying, the space in which I would make out with my boyfriend (the best looking boy at school) and in which I would cry endlessly and fall into what I now understand was a fairly deep depression when he broke up with me. It was the space in which I tried to deal with my incapacity to understand how to be a young adult and in which I had to try to figure out how to deal with the impacts of family illness, affairs and alcohol on me and my sister. Yet, with all of this going on, I thought of my room as “my space” and I was always lucky enough to have my own room. In there, I would listen to music, read magazines, mess around with clothes and make up and I did love to decorate my room with posters, photos, postcards, gig tickets and so on. It was a stable, reliable space, even when life was not.
As an academic, I have spent a number of years exploring what bedrooms mean to young people. At university in the early 1990s, I took a module on youth cultures in which it was clear that the dominant history of youth was told through the activities young people do in public spaces, out in the streets, in school, youth clubs, bars, pubs, clubs - places in which young people were visible. But I wondered what happened at home, before entering the public domain? How do youth cultures play out in private space? What were the rituals of, say, a young punk getting ready to go out and where did those rituals take place? Likely in their bedrooms. What did their parents say as they emerged from their rooms into the living room provocatively dressed and styled ready for a night out? How do young people manage those private and public boundaries as they move through them from one space to another: from bedroom to living room to a bus or train to a pub or club? How are their teenage identities compromised, challenged or affirmed? The experiences of youth culture and the boundaries of youth cultural spaces are fluid, porous and liminal and as we examine what youth culture is today, this has never been more the case.
In March 2020, the world changed drastically as we found ourselves dealing with a global pandemic. Within a space of weeks, “normal” life was thrown into chaos as we were told to “Stay at Home” as the Covid-19 virus rapidly spread across the country. For many young people, this meant not being able to go to school and switching to home-learning. Initially, the UK government led us to believe this would be for a matter of weeks, but alas, the weeks turned into months and then into years with learning intermittently moving from school to home. This will have undoubtedly impacted significantly on the ways in which young people related to their bedroom space as all of a sudden, a space that was considered private and a place to be away from the ups and downs of school life, became school! For many families trying to utilise their homes to accommodate working from home and home-schooling, using a child’s bedroom as their classroom was the only option. In many cases, this would have been for multiple children. Many young people found themselves in a position where they had to “allow” their teachers and peers “into” their bedrooms via the virtual classroom set up on Zoom. They were placed in a position where the “collapsing” of public and private space was essential in order for them to maintain some sort of school life and to continue their learning. While it is perhaps still too early to reflect on the effects this had on young people more broadly, those experiences of being forced into a position where one has to “open up” their private space to teachers and peers will undoubtedly have impacted teenagers who were at a crucial point in their lives in terms of self identity, confidence, control and independence. I can’t help but think that those experiences will have repercussions on how they relate to their own bedroom space now: perhaps the idea of “switching off” the phone or turning off the iPad and disconnecting from all social media and virtual interaction while in their rooms has become more appealing? More treasured? Maybe not. Perhaps the boundaries of public and private were already so blurred for young people that the additional virtual connections of home-schooling didn’t faze them too much: they could still manage and control the extent to which these virtual interactions “invaded” their lives (for example, through turning off screens or muting) and they were still able to connect with friends via a whole host of apps as they had done so before the pandemic. Social media is so engrained in their everyday lives.
I can’t imagine what living through a pandemic might have been like when I was a teenager. We only had one landline (as most families did) so it would have been incredibly difficult to home-school. That landline would have been the only way for me and my sister to talk to our friends (an activity in itself that would have clogged the line all day!) and undoubtedly my father would have had to use it as he worked from home so we would have limited chances to talk to friends anyway. My mother was an NHS nurse, so she wouldn’t have been at home. Moreover, the boundaries between public life and private life were clearly defined as either inside or outside the home. Youth cultures played out in both domains of course, crossing from one to another through image, style, attitude, music, magazines, film, posters on bedroom walls, decoration. While youth cultures could be composed of global influences, they tended to be lived out on a local level. So, how did we get to a point whereby youth culture seamlessly crosses and collapses multiple boundaries between public, private, virtual and global life?
“Like a lot of other British pop cultural success stories, from punk to acid house, the currently booming games industry was built in teens bedrooms, as obsessed eighties adolescents monkeyed around on the Sinclair ZX81 and Spectrum, the Commodore 64, the Atari and the Amiga. Now a new generation has a chance to mess around…” (The Face, March 1998, Vol.3, No.14, p.121.)
Initially considered an ‘underground’ youth cultural activity, the computer gaming phenomenon had become mainstream in popular youth culture by the 1990s. The increasing affordability and availability of home computers and consoles up against a changing socio-political landscape in which access to public spaces for young people (such as youth clubs) was becoming more difficult and less safe, signalled a new type of leisure activity that could be easily accommodated within the confines of the home. By 1999, the home computer market was worth £2.2 billion as ownership surged (The Guardian, 20/01/99) and such was the sophistication of the technology, that gaming companies were able to claim that multiple leisure pursuits - from playing football to building your own theme park - could be undertaken through a screen. Nintendo, for example, used the ultra-enticing “Feel Everything’ as its slogan, capturing the extent to which gamers would be immersed in their gaming worlds. The notion of immersing into one world (virtual) from another (physical) was indeed novel as was the idea that this immersion could be deep that you could almost feel yourself ‘in the game’. Consequently, this shift into a virtual world meant that players felt that they had literally lost hours of the day, having almost completely disconnected from ‘real’ notions of time and space. In this respect, we see some of the first ways in which the boundaries of a teenage bedroom ‘opened up’ beyond the confines of the physical, only to be ‘closed down’ when game play ended. A space beyond the four walls now existed. Scholars such as Sonia Livingstone, OBE have described how bedrooms from the 1990s onwards were becoming more “media-rich” spaces. By this point, it was common for children to have a stereo in their rooms to play music, while, increasingly, televisions would also be found in bedrooms when previously they would have most likely been only in a living room for shared family viewing. Now games consoles were becoming more popular too. Young people increasingly had leisure at their finger tips and they didn’t even need to leave the home. This meant that, up to a point, young people had more control over the different cultural “zones” that they could access, be it through playing music, watching favourite TV shows or playing computer games, maybe even all three would be done at the same time! All of these different types of media enabled a young person to open up and close off different spaces of youth culture that existed beyond their bedroom, depending on things like their mood, what they were doing and who they were spending time with.
The late 1990s marked the beginning of an online social network revolution and within a decade, social media had become part and parcel of everyday life for many young people. In 1997, the first social network site SixDegrees.com came online, followed in quick succession with messaging services such as AOL, yahoo! And MSN (1997, 1999, 1999), LiveJournal, the journal-writing blog (1999), Habbo (2000), Friendster (2002), MySpace (2003), Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), Twitter (2006), Tumblr (2007) and Instagram (2010).
The social network site that really began to draw attention in the world of teenagers was Bebo, created in 2005. Via the Internet, young users could access the site and create their own personal profile page. The profile page was referred to as a “skin” and could be customised according to the users’ tastes and interests. The Bebo profile page contained a place to blog and to leave messages for friends, it had a visible friends list and, through the profile, users could share music, videos and photos. One of its most popular features was the questionnaires that could be shared with other users. The ability to customise the page to represent cultural tastes and interests was akin to - and an extension of - the teenage bedroom. On Bebo, young people could communicate with their friends in a number of fun ways and this could be done from their bedrooms as well as mimicking some of the practices that took place within it. For example, Bebo provided a space to hang out with friends, gossip, listen to music and mess around doing things like quizzes - all things that could be done in the bedroom. In 2003, just 2 years before Bebo, MySpace was launched. Just 4 years later, it was the most visited site in the US. Scholar Brady Robards talks in his work on social media about the hierarchical nature of social network sites that saw young people “move up the ranks” as they got older. MySpace quickly became the “cool” space for teenagers to be, with Bebo soon being regarded as the younger sibling, a kind of “rehearsal space” a pre-teen would engage in before progressing to the more teenage MySpace. As scholar danah boyd observed “by early 2006, many considered participation on the key social network site MySpace essential to being seen as cool in school’ (emphasis original, 2007, p.1).
MySpace gained its cool status in a variety of ways: its “glossy” interface allowed users to personalise their profile pages with features such as wallpaper and emojis as well as offering the capacity to play songs inter-changeably to reflect mood, feeling or occasion. They could take up a pseudonym. There was a chat facility and “wall” interface that enabled young people to document their day. Most significantly, the site enabled you to display a “friends list”, a list that was not only made up of people you knew, but by anyone who took an interest in your page. A large number of friends equalled an incredibly popular person. Music made this site significantly cooler than Bebo. Not only was music curated into its interface in more sophisticated ways becoming a key marker of identity, tastes, interests and style, but the site also opened up new ways of connecting with fans and with artists themselves: you could actually communicate with your favourite band or singer!
MySpace was also a significant platform for young aspiring musicians and “bedroom DJs” as via the site they could share their music for free, be anonymous if they wanted to be and not have to perform live. A MySpace profile could be used to share information on the music-making process, to advertise gigs and to promote new material. Famously, the singer Lily Allen became one of the first artists to use the site to make some of her songs public. The exposure she received via the site resulted in airplay on BBC Radio 1 and a record contract shortly followed. Allen had tens of thousands of friends on the site. She went on to sell over 4 million records.
The boundaries between public and private spaces were beginning to shrink. Not only could MySpace users connect with their friends and peers, they could also make global connections, building up a truly international friends list. In addition, MySpace users could connect in more immediate, real ways with their favourite musicians and bands. No longer did they have to rely solely on magazines or television to find out about them, they could connect with them quickly and regularly just by checking out their page. The immediacy of these interactions made the “distance” between star and fan feel much less and the personal connection much more intense.
MySpace could also be described as a more dynamic form of the teenage bedroom, a virtual extension of young people’s personal space in which their ever-changing tastes and interests could be represented by the styling of their profiles and where they could exercise control over what their space looked like and who could enter.
MySpace didn’t hold its cache as “the cool space to be” for long. In 2004, the social network site Facebook was created and soon young MySpace users began “graduating” to the site, deserting what now looked like embarrassingly young-looking teenage MySpace pages for a more sophisticated and slick interface. Facebook promoted ‘connection’ at the heart of its community and, moreover, connecting with existing networks of people. This was a move away from making social connections visible and “performing” social capital that had been the essence of MySpace. This was particularly significant for young people in their later teens who were embarking on new life stages: leaving school and gaining employment or going to university. Facebook meant that they could still be connected even as they moved into this new phase of their lives. The Facebook interface was pretty slick and represented a shift away from the teenage bedroom-like aesthetic of MySpace to a more mature confident image of self. Users were required to use their real names and thus use the site as a place to nurture an “authentic self” and to document their growing up. The phenomenal uptake of the site meant, that its novelty waned quickly and it became the assumed form of communication. As the saying went, “If you don’t have Facebook, you don’t exist”. Facebook didn’t see a drop in their number of daily active users until 2022 and while young people are using many other social network sites now, Facebook still has immense significance as an archive of growing up, of memory, nostalgia and “looking back” as I argued with Brady Robards in our book Growing up on Facebook (2020). It is also the social network site that took online communication from being novel to the becoming engrained in everyday life.
Since Facebook, there has been a whole host of other social network platforms that not only capitalise on the type of communication that Facebook pioneered, but accommodate users whose social media use is now multiple, as they seamlessly cross the boundaries between public, private, virtual and physical spaces. Young people are not loyal to one site; they want multiple platforms through which to engage in diverse types of communication. And they have a lot of choice: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, TikTok, to name a few. This means that they can chat, send messages, update their status, post a photo, video call, watch a video, make a video, subscribe to a channel, be a channel! Different sites offer different types of permanency, from the Facebook archive to the ephemeral Snapchat message, and audiences can be managed from a private chat with a mate to going live and going viral across the globe.
TikTok is currently the “app of choice for the hyper-influential Gen Z” according to Hootsuite. With over 2 million downloads worldwide, the site is the world’s 7th most popular social media platform. The international version of the Chinese short-form video app Douyin, TikTok was launched in 2016 and as of 2022, 42% of its audience were aged 18-24 years. It describes itself as “the leading destination for short-form mobile video” with a mission to “inspire creativity and bring joy”. On TikTok, young people can express themselves through dancing, singing, lip-syncing- things that have long happened in the teenage bedroom. According to Hootsuite, the videos are like “bite-size versions of YouTube at 5-120 second videos”. The content is constantly changing and evolving. It streams instantly, as soon as the app is opened, is a “a bottomless buffet of content” that can users can simply tuck into or select more discerningly, according to their tastes and interests. The novelty of the app lies in its ease of use which enables users to create their own short-form videos. Additionally, users have access to a huge library of filters, effects, emojis, green screens, transitions, stickers, GIFs and importantly, music- new and old. Quoted in RollingStone magazine, Danny Gillick, TikTok’s senior manager of music content and label partnerships said “there’s so much opportunity out there for all these legacy labels, even for songs that are out of cycle to have another life. There’s a whole treasure chest of these earworms that I grew up with that you can see now are having a second life.” Such is the influence of Gen Z who are using samples from songs like Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams”, only for it to chart at number two on the Rolling Stone 100 40 years after first appearing in the charts. Likewise, the use of new music in videos gives such massive exposure that they can become instant hits (Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” is now a classic example).
And not only are creators capable of bringing past & present together in new, novel ways through music but the quick, easy-to-use and diverse editing features also enable users to take the personal and private to a new level in highly creative ways beyond what we’ve seen on any previous social media platform. In essence, the old-fashioned hand-written teenage diary has been elevated into a sophisticated vlog-style version. Take the artist PinkPantheress. With 1.2 million followers, the artist primarily uses TikTok to share the music she writes and records, while at the same time her videos are often shot in her bedroom or reveal aspects of her private life. For example, in one video in which she shares her new song “I Must Apologise” she includes the text “i like to listen to it when my parents fight in the next room”. In the video she is seen running down a street, perhaps demonstrating what she feels like doing when her parents argue but how music can help to drown the sound out as she stays in her bedroom and sits it out. Demonstrating how influential the platform can be and the extent to public and private boundaries can become collapsed down by using the platform, some university students have taken to using TikTok to “air their housing grievances” in a very public way. An article on dazeddigital.com talks of how some students are so fed up with their living conditions that they have, through a series of videos, documented all the problems with their student house, sometimes using the popular ‘things in my house that just make sense’ format. Presumably this somewhat ironic choice reinforces the less-than-ideal situation, and the fact that they have taken to using the app to shame landlords demonstrates the power of the platform to influence and expose beyond more traditional forms of complaint that would most likely fail to incite any change.
TikTok also allows users to live steam giving followers a “real” in-the-moment experience, an “anything could happen” feeling that gives momentary excitement and something to talk about with your mates. An elevated form of gossip in the school playground, perhaps? An ideal way to update followers on a situation asap?
This constant shifting through such a complex social media landscape seems a far cry from the teenage bedroom. However, what young people do in and through social media is what young people have always wanted to do in their bedrooms (be in contact with friends, have access to culture, use media and regulate space) and therefore through social network platforms, the teenage space of the bedroom is enhanced and expanded while it also maintains its traditional role as it was defined in the pre-digital age.
Sian Lincoln is an independent scholar who has published widely in journals and anthologies on aspects of youth culture. Her monograph Youth Culture and Private Space (Palgrave Macmillan) was published in 2012 and her book co-written with Brady Robards Growing up on Facebook (Peter Lang) was published in 2020. She is co-editor of 2 book series: Cinema and Youth Cultures (Routledge) and Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures & Popular Music. Sian is on the management group of the Interdisciplinary Network for the Study of Music, Subcultures and Social Change.
This article was published as part of Amplified Voices: Turning Up the Volume on Regional Youth Culture. With thanks to National Lottery Players and the ongoing support of the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
