Digital Youth Assemblages: Affective En...

Following up on current discussions of digital youth culture, this article examines theconcept of assemblage and its potential for understanding the ambiguous forces thatshape young people’s everyday media practices. In the first part of the article, we ar-gue for approaching these forces in their affective materiality. To provide a situatedexample, in the second part of the article, we explore the distribution of relations bet-ween hashtags #selfie and #antiselfie attached to 200 photos that were publicly sharedon Instagram between August 1st and 30th of November 2019. By focusing on the net-work of tagging, liking and sharing selfies, we consider the resulting hybrid assembla-ge of Instagram youth in its multiplicity – from the digital affordances of connectivi-ty and relations of identity performance to the attention economy of Instagram and itsmanifold affective dynamics that are at play.