Social Media as Contact Zones: Young Londoners Remapping the Metropolis through Digital Media

Abstract

Social media use among urban, young Londoners of diverse cultural backgrounds constitutes a contemporary, postcolonial contact zone in Europe. By taking digital practices as an entry point to consider intercultural encounters in the postcolonial metropolis, I bring new media studies into a much needed dialogue with postcolonial theory. Two main questions guide my argument: (a) How can researchers bring postcolonial commitments to bear on datadriven research practices? Reflecting on my use of creative, participatory, and digital techniques during fieldwork with young Londoners, I suggest one way of doing postcolonial digital humanities; (b) How can we mobilize the explanatory power of postcolonial theory to account for everyday, intercultural encounters? In particular, I repurpose Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of the contact zone to give an account of how young, urban dwellers use social media as sites of intercultural encounter. The contact zone is used as a conceptual lens to acknowledge new conflicts and solidarities emerging from young Londoners’ everyday usage of digital technologies. The chapter considers both the ways in which young Londoners engage in digital practices to construct transnational networks, which connect them with their families across European borders, as well as the ways in which they engage digitally with the local context of the city, illustrating how young urbanites learn to live with difference.