‘Raw talent in the making’

Abstract

In the digital age, it seems that participation has been conflated with literacy, content with engagement, novelty with innovation and ubiquity with meaning (e.g. see Thornham and McFarlane, 2014; Gillespie, 2010; Dean, 2008; Livingstone, 2009; van Dijck, 2013) and encapsulated in terms such as ‘digital native’, ‘digital divide’ or ‘born digital’. In turn, these conflations have done something to technology, which is constructed as malleable, a supportive facilitator, and the user, who is constructed as active agent. Neither of these account for mediations nor for – crucial for us – the notion of the imaginary, which emerges in our research as so central to expertise. Drawing on ethnographic work carried out in Studio12, a media production facility for young people with disadvantaged backgrounds in Leeds, United Kingdom, we propose that the concept of expertise emerges through a bigger array of social capital as well as traditional structures of power such as class, gender and race. Expertise is claimed, evidenced and generated. For us, however, expertise emerged not only as elusive but also because it was premised on a disjuncture between lived and everyday youth and the promises of becoming in a future orientated (technological, imaginary and creative) landscape.