Digital Inequalities in Financialised Late Capitalism: How can young people build a future?

We were delighted to joint-host this seminar with The Centre for Research on Families, Life Course and Generations. We welcomed Dr Steven Threadgold (University Newcastle, Australia), Dr Julia Coffey (University of Newcastle, Australia), and Professor Roger Burrows (University of Bristol) who discussed their important, ongoing work on digital inequalities.

The seminar discussed how digital practices such as rentier capitalism and the asset economy further entrench class domination. Key to this are processes of digitalisation and financialisation that lubricate means to extract value out of more and more aspects of daily life, reinforcing traditional inequalities while creating new ones. Digital technology has changed the way young people go about their day-to-day practices, transforming relations to social structures, to each other, and to themselves. Financialisation processes have seen the emergence of fintech dovetail with rises in costs of living, educational expenses and increasingly insecure work.

Drawing on an array of research projects about young people’s financial practices, digital self-presentation practices, and big data and algorithmic power, the speakers interrogated aspects of these burgeoning concerns that impinge on young people’s capacities to create a liveable future. They discussed aspects of the changing nature of subjectivity towards speculative and gambling orientations; the role that digital platforms and data driven predictive categorisations play automating inequality in domains such as housing and rental markets; and young people’s digital selfie editing practices and how that relates to gendered and racialised power dynamics. The seminar also touched on methodological approaches to critically explore this time of digital proliferation, widening inequalities, and increasingly hostile socio-political environment. It addressed the methodological challenges and possibilities for doing inventive feminist-oriented youth research to understand and intervene in emerging digital trends, including creative digital participatory workshop methods, affective and visual analysis of audio-visual data, which can be overwhelming in its volume and complexity.

Together, Threadgold, Coffey and Burrows presented a powerful argument for the need to position social science research at the forefront of the intersection between the frontstage everyday digital practices and the backstage data-fied processes of evaluation, sorting and excluding to understand how inequality will be shaped in the future and who can access the means central for young people to create a future.