Producing Queer Youth ― The Paradox of Digital Media Empowerment

This book examines the rise and impact of digital media projects, such as the widely-celebrated It Gets Better Project viral video campaign, designed to support LGBTQ youth at risk. Such media has been commended for enabling everyday makers the opportunity to circumnavigate the formal barriers of institutional spaces and the constraints of mass communication, giving way to a mode of expression, empowerment and voice not available through other means. Based on over three years of participant action research with LGBTQ teen media makers and textual analysis of hundreds of youth-produced videos, Berliner challenges the assumption that having a voice, visibility and recognition is necessarily equivalent to gaining rights and resources. She looks directly at youth media practice within broader communication history to complicate the idea that youth are digital natives who are naturally driven to use media to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" to overcome experiences of risk and vulnerability.

Lauren S. Berliner is Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington-Bothell, USA