Designing the Social

This book uses data collected from in-depth interviews with young people over the course of a year to explore the complex role of social media in their lives, and the part it plays in shaping how they understand and present their identity to a broad public on a wide array of platforms. Using this data, the book proposes and develops a new theoretical framework for understanding identity performances. Comic Theory, detailed in this book, centres on a consideration of the role of social media design in shaping identity, and explores the ways in which socio-culturally grounded users engage in acts of compromise, novelty, and negotiation with social media designs and digital technologies to produce unique identity performances.

Positioned within the field of educational research, this book overtly challenges assumptions and myths about the internet as a neutral source of knowledge, instead exploring the way in which designs and technologies shape who we interact with and how we understand what it is to be social. Moving beyond the over-used ‘digital natives’ paradigm, this book makes a clear case that educators and education researchers need to move beyond a focus on coding and digital skills alone, highlighting the pressing need to take explicit account of the overlaps between digital technology, culture, and education.