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“On Behalf of a Shared World”: Arendtian Politics in a Culture of Youth

Media Participation
Stuart R. Poyntz

To cite this Article Poyntz, Stuart R.(2009) '“On Behalf of a Shared World”: Arendtian Politics in a Culture of Youth Media
Participation', Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 31: 4, 365 — 386
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 The Review of Education, Pedagogy,
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DOI: 10.1080/10714410903133004

‘‘On Behalf of a Shared World’’:

Arendtian Politics in a Culture
of Youth Media Participation
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Stuart R. Poyntz

More than thirty years since Hannah Arendt’s death in 1975 at the
age of sixty-nine, her novel theory of the public realm continues to
attract attention and debate. In this article, I contribute to this dis-
cussion by drawing on Arendt’s theory of public life to investigate
the space of youth media production in relation to questions of
democratic habituation. Arendt is not typically thought of in rela-
tion to youth or media, but her concern for the nature of public acts,
and for the way such acts expand our lives by producing worldli-
ness, offers a powerful framework for thinking about teenagers’
media production work.
In what follows, I introduce Arendt’s thinking on the public
realm and then use her framework to examine the complex experi-
ences of youth video production mentors involved in a summer
digital media program located in Vancouver, Canada. I situate
my review of the youths’ experiences in Summer Stories1 in relation
to the development of what Henry Jenkins (2006a, 2006b) calls a
culture of participation in contemporary Western societies. I note
that while such a culture would appear to offer youth more oppor-
tunities than ever to produce their own cultural expressions, this
does not mean such expressions are free of disciplinary practices
that regulate and limit youth conduct. In fact, in a culture of parti-
cipation we are seeing the development of new regimes of visibility
that shape youth experience and agency to fit with the demands of
365
 366 S. R. Poyntz

a global consumer economy. I provide examples to support this

argument and then turn to the experiences of youth mentors in
Summer Stories. Through these experiences I indicate how and
when production work nurtures democratic habits by fostering
what Arendt contends is central to public life, that is, a form of
thinking that is responsive to others, to the fact that we are all part
of a shared world.

HANNAH ARENDT—PHILOSOPHER OF WORLDLINESS

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Writing her most significant work in the shadow of the Holocaust

and Europe’s fascist nightmare, Arendt’s concern for the
public-political realm arose against a backdrop of fear. More than
anything else, what concerned Arendt is the threat posed by mod-
ern life to our capacity to act in concert with each other, to contest
the impersonal and alien quality of contemporary experience.
At the most general level, Arendt linked this threat to the fact
that private, internal life is privileged in Western culture. She recog-
nized this tendency in liberalism, which privileges individualized
rights and private persons as the ‘‘proper site of humanity’’
(Warner 2002, 39; see also Arendt 1958). She drew on Nietzsche’s
critique of subjectivity to show that this focus on the individual is
the result of still larger historical ruptures: in particular, ‘‘the rise
of the social’’ (Arendt 1958, esp. 38–50). This refers to the develop-
ment of those practices and institutions in modern society—includ-
ing schooling in its industrialized, mass forms (Levinson 1997,
2002)—that discipline human relations in terms of behavior and
regulation, rather than mutual understanding (Villa 1997; Curtis
1999, 75–85).
In the twentieth century, Arendt traced the profound danger
posed by a denuded public world to the figure of Adolph Eich-
mann, the Nazi architect of the Holocaust, whose trial for crimes
against humanity she famously covered in Israel in 1963. What
Arendt (1963a) observed in Eichmann was an acute ‘‘remoteness
from reality’’ (288), an unwillingness to see others. He was
protected by ‘‘clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional,
standardized codes of expression and conduct . . . against [the real],
that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events
and facts make by virtue of their existence’’ (Arendt 1978, 4). In
the face of this kind of thoughtlessness, Arendt tells us public action
 Arendtian Politics in a Culture of Youth Media 367

is a form of engagement that forces us to experience the undeniable

presence of others. Public acts speak of ‘‘involvement and commit-
ment, . . . the hope, not of solving any problems, but of making it
possible to live with them without becoming, as Sartre once put
it, a salaud, a hypocrite’’ (Arendt 1968, 8).
Unlike liberal traditions within democratic theory, Arendt (1958,
1963b, 1968) does not frame public action in relation to a set of
inherent rights one possesses or in regard to institutions thought
to be at the center of representational democracies (Isaac 1994).
Belonging to a political community is important in her framework
but in a manner that prefigures Bruno Latour’s (2005) recent think-
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ing about democracy, Arendt contends it is not institutions that sus-

tain public life. It is speech and action in the presence of others that
enables ‘‘freedom [to] appear’’ (Arendt 1968, 4). Democracy is not a
thing, like a parliament that can be parachuted into communities to
be ‘‘unfold[ed] and . . . inflated just like your rescue dingy is sup-
posed to do when you fall in the water’’ (Latour 2005, 17–18). Public
action is ‘‘an intertwined form of cohabitation’’ (Latour 2005, 40); a
way of living that is fostered by thoughtful and vigilant resistance
to the power of ideology, bureaucracy, and artificiality; acts, in
other words, that contest ‘‘the impersonality and routine character
of mass society’’ (Isaac 1994, 159). In this sense, Arendt alerts us to a
more primordial description of democratic practice, one that I think
can be especially helpful for thinking about youth media work and
how it fosters habits that deepen public culture.
For Arendt, at root, democratic acts are about a struggle over
meaning that works to support plurality. Arendt means by this that
democracy is a form of associational political action where we initi-
ate meaning through agonistic encounters with others. Democratic
practice is about action undertaken with others that disrupts dis-
courses of force and violence or processes of control that limit
our sense of reality. Such acts counteract thoughtlessness by produ-
cing a space of communicative plurality that reveals the contingen-
cies that affect our ability to act with others. Democratic habituation
is not about a specific form of social activism, then, nor is it limited
to a specific political project. Rather, democratic habits of mind are
a form of thinking and doing, the practice of being attentive to the
ways all meaning has a social and historical context, a form of con-
tingency that itself is susceptible to change.
For Arendt, plurality is at the center of public life because
plurality is ‘‘the basic condition of both speech and action’’
 368 S. R. Poyntz

(Arendt 1958, 176). She means to signal by this ‘‘the importance of

others in both making our lives and understanding ourselves’’
(Coulter and Wiens 2002, 17). Whatever forms of specificity each
one of us represents, Arendt contends we depend on the presence
of others for this difference to manifest itself. Charles Taylor (1991)
makes a similar point when he says: ‘‘My discovering my own
identity doesn’t mean that I work it out in isolation but that I
negotiate it through dialogue . . . . My own identity crucially
depends on my dialogical relations with others’’ (47–48). In a very
real sense, others pull us out of a state of being into a state of
becoming. New people and new situations bring different parts
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of our selves into view and so public action operates as ‘‘the scene
of world-making and self disclosure, . . . a political scene . . . [where]
the self and the shared world . . . emerge in interaction with
others’’ (Warner 2002, 59). In this sense, ‘‘plurality is a blessing in
that the perspective of . . . others not only defines and stabilizes
one’s own perspective, . . . [it] also puts it in relation with the
world’’ (Gambetti 2005, 433). Plurality thus acts as a bulwark
against thoughtlessness because it counters a kind of oblivion that
can blind us to the reality of others. As such, it is essential for
developing a common world, a public culture in which we are all
involved.
Given Arendt’s concern for the precariousness of public life, she
is aware that no one momentous public expression can produce
autonomy or sovereignty. In fact, Arendt (1968) argues: ‘‘If men
[sic] wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce’’
(163). She means by this that freedom cannot be equated with
autonomy because in a very significant way freedom is relational.
It is a function of the way we learn to see ourselves and our becom-
ing in the world through our interaction with others. Democratic
habituation is thus about learning what Emanuel Levinas (1985)
has called responsiveness or ‘‘responsibility’’ to the world. It is
about becoming aware of the social nature of meaning, its contin-
gency and its susceptibility to change. Democratic practice is about
learning to see oneself as a plural self, one always operating
through the sedimented meanings, the social, cultural and political
resources that organize our lives; and yet at the same time, it is a
self working to produce relationships that enable a fuller and richer
world, a ‘‘thickness to human ethical life’’ (Nealon 1998, 34). A
plural self is thus a self that is involved in the world, a self con-
ceived relationally, ‘‘in a space in-between, with others and among
 Arendtian Politics in a Culture of Youth Media 369

others’’ (Gambetti 2005, 435). In short, a self habituated to Arendt’s

(1968) injunction that we act ‘‘on behalf of a shared world.’’
Arendt of course is well aware that many forces, institutions, and
practices can prevent public acts and the fullness of reality from
coming into view. This concern is noteworthy in relation to youth
media production because while there is now increasing opportu-
nity for young people in advanced industrialized countries—
although certainly not only here—to cut, mix, and distribute their
own media texts, young people’s participation in contemporary
consumer-media culture is also filtered through practices that act
to discipline and limit their expressions.
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GLOBAL MEDIA AND PARTICIPATORY CULTURES

Beginning in infancy, young people now grow up learning the lan-

guage of mass media through a constant diet of screen images,
audio messages, and text-based communication that compete with
schools and families as primary storytellers and teachers in youths’
lives (Goodman 2003). Many lament this situation (Postman 1994)
and yet Appadurai (1996) reminds us that the impact of a globa-
lized consumer culture is complex. Contemporary mediascapes
offer ‘‘a series of elements (such as characters, plots and textual
forms)’’ out of which young people (and others) produce scripts
of ‘‘imagined lives’’ (Appadurai 1996, 35–36). The development of
these scripts, however, is not about a passive audience that repli-
cates dominant ideologies from consumer culture. Rather, what
we’re learning is that audiences’ use of consumer-mediated
resources is always linked to local concerns and forms of cultural
expression, patterns and protocols of technological use and integra-
tion among different groups, as well as national concerns and
regulatory frameworks (Appadurai 1996).
In various national settings, including Canada, the contingencies
of media use are being shaped by the fact that young people are
growing up in semiotic environments marked by a new kind of cul-
ture of participation (Buckingham 2000; Buckingham and
Sefton-Green 2003; Benkler 2006; Ito 2006; Jenkins 2006a, 2006b;
Jenkins et al. 2006). Such a culture is one where there are more
opportunities for youth (and others) to express themselves through
digital media, ‘‘to transform personal reaction[s]’’ to the images,
sounds, and narratives of consumer-media culture into forms of
 370 S. R. Poyntz

‘‘social interaction’’ (Jenkins 2006a, 41). This situation is the result of

what Henry Jenkins (2006b) has called a culture of convergence that
is developing as part of the way ever more young people are using
media texts. What Jenkins is getting at here is that while the process
of media concentration has advanced significantly in various coun-
tries over the past two decades, a cultural shift made possible by the
development of new media technologies and the transformation of
global communication networks has also been underway.
Convergence is often assumed to refer to the development of glo-
bal media giants like Disney, Viacom, or Rupert Murdoch’s Fox
empire, and so forth. But as regulatory policies and technological
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affordances have changed, allowing older medium-specific compa-

nies to integrate their brands and corporate properties into new,
highly concentrated global media forces, another shift has been
underway. In the 1990s this shift was most often associated with
rhetorical expressions about new digital kids, an ‘‘N-generation’’
(Tapscott 1998) who were thought capable of causing the downfall
of older media companies and conglomerates (also see Negroponte
1995). Although this did not happen, the convergence of media
companies through and alongside the development of new digital
media did coincide with a change in the use of media resources.
At the center of this transformation is the fact that young people
(and others) now expect to utilize, manipulate, discuss, and become
more involved with media resources than in the past.
In many ways this change extends older, active relationships
audiences have always had with movies, TV, or music, and so forth.
And yet, convergence also marks something new. What seems clear
is that there is much more interactivity between people, media texts
and environments today, more ways for interventionist fans, acti-
vists, local noncommercial producers, and others to use screen
resources to produce meaning in their lives. Convergence is not
only an economic and technological change, then, it also ‘‘repre-
sents a cultural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out
new information and make connections among dispersed media
content’’ (Jenkins 2006b, 3).

REGIMES OF VISIBILITY

Given these changes, there are surely reasons for cautious optimism
about the increasing ‘‘capacity individuals and noncommercial
 Arendtian Politics in a Culture of Youth Media 371

actors have to use and manipulate cultural artifacts’’ (Benkler 2006,

276). Yet Arendt’s concerns that we never lose sight of those institu-
tions and practices that foster impersonality and routinizaton in
contemporary life is a sobering reminder that bears on the develop-
ment of participatory media cultures. This is so because such cul-
tures produce their own regimes of visibility that act to discipline
and limit youthful experiences, thereby preventing the fullness of
reality from coming into view. By regimes of visibility I mean to
draw attention to those practices and protocols that serve to pro-
duce youth as subjects whose sense of worldliness is truncated or
managed. Arendt might say these are practices that prevent one
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from seeing the social and political nature of our lives, the diffuse
ways our selves are dependent on and inevitably intertwined with
the lives of others. Regimes of visibility bring young people or
young people’s expressions into view, in other words, but they
do so in ways that limit or constrain youths’ sense of reality. As
such, regimes of visibility are related to Foucault’s (1991) idea of
governmentality.
For Foucault, as Sara Bragg (2007) has noted, ‘‘government’’
draws attention to those strategies, programs, and techniques that
‘‘regulate the conduct of conduct, including the relation of the self
to the self’’ in order to produce subjects ideally suited to life in
advanced liberal western democracies (345; but also see Rose
1999). Regimes of visibility thus refer to the practices and protocols
within a culture of participation that discipline and organize youth-
ful expressions. One consequence is that youth experiences and
agency are managed such that they better fit the demands of a glo-
bal consumer economy. In the following I note one such practice
that seems to be having this effect on youth today.
This example comes from the remarkable expansion of online
resources that allow children and youth to mix and remix their
own visual and audio representations. In this regard, I am espe-
cially interested in the development of video mash-up sites, which
have developed as part of the commercial Web sites of both public
and private children’s and youth’s broadcasters. As I am using the
term here, mash-ups are short videos produced by editing together
video and audio resources that were made for another purpose.
Mash-ups are remixes or digital collages. They are made from short
clips and audio tracks extracted from TV shows or cartoons that are
made available to online users who are then given the opportunity
to reimagine or remix a sequence of scenes or even a whole episode
 372 S. R. Poyntz

of a program. Users do not require their own editing software

because mash-up technologies are made possible through Web
applications that let young people work with and recut commercial
texts. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada’s national
public broadcaster, offers a number of mash-up opportunities for
young audiences, including The Outlet (www.cbc.ca/theoutlet),
which is targeted at children on the CBC Kids Web site, and Hockey
Night Mash-Up (http://www.cbc.ca/sports/hockey, which is
targeted at youth on CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada Web site. A more
diverse range of mash-up opportunities are to be found on
Viacom’s Nickelodeon Jr. Web site (www.nickjr.com), as well as
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on many other sites targeted at young people.

Mash-ups are only one example of the many techniques com-
mercial broadcasters use today to attract and hold adolescents’
attention. Others include free video and audio downloads, online
games designed around branded characters, contests, product
extensions, behind-the-scenes access to celebrities and writers,
and opportunities for fans to directly influence programming deci-
sions (see also Zwick, Bonsu, and Darmody 2008). What makes
mash-ups especially interesting, however, is that they are enacting
a particular regime of visibility fit to the new opportunities made
available within a culture of participation.
Mash-ups can be understood in relation to a strategy of
‘‘affective economics’’ that is increasingly central to marketing
discourses about young people (Jenkins 2006b). At the center of
affective economics is the idea that in today’s fragmented and over-
saturated media culture it is increasingly difficult to hold the atten-
tion of young audiences. This makes it difficult for broadcasters or
media content providers to sell audiences to advertisers because
advertisers are skeptical about how attentive youth are to commer-
cials on TV shows or Web sites. As a result, entertainment provi-
ders and advertisers are working together to find new ways to
develop viewer loyalty and brand identity. In particular, they are
learning what ad content customers will seek out and spend time
with on their own (Jenkins 2006b). Mash-ups are part of this strat-
egy. They are a form of immersive advertising, a way of allowing
young people to express themselves through commercial media
environments that simultaneously build brand investment. In this
sense, participation is linked to a strategy for organizing and mana-
ging youth identity. Like all advertising, mash-ups are meant to
foster a subjective identity intertwined with brand content.
 Arendtian Politics in a Culture of Youth Media 373

Participation is not so much about developing youth agency then; it

is about constructing a regime of visibility, a form of youth expres-
sion intricately connected to the development of commercially
oriented subjectivities.
There are other ways youth media participation is linked to
regimes of visibility that truncate or limit the worldliness of youth
experience (e.g., see Grimes and Shade 2005; Wasko 2008). The
more immediate and pressing questions, however, are where and
when do young people’s democratic habits of mind develop
through participation in contemporary media culture? In Arendtian
terms, we might ask: Where and when do young people develop a
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responsiveness to the world, a sense of the social nature of mean-

ing, its contingency, and its susceptibility to change?

MENTORING AND DEMOCRATIC LIFE

Any answer to these questions is complex. Here, however, I high-

light one example of youth experiences with media production that
does appear to contribute to young people’s democratic habitua-
tion. Specifically, I analyze the results of an ethnographic study of
a peer-to-peer youth mentoring program where young people
assist fellow youth in developing and producing their own media.
Peer-to-peer mentoring has been a feature of informal, community-
based youth media production programs since the 1970s (Goldfarb
2002). Surprisingly, there has been little written about how peer
mentorship in production settings impacts mentors themselves
(Goldfarb 2002; Charmaraman 2006; Poyntz 2008). What we do
know tends to focus on the psychological or vocational changes that
result from mentoring experiences.2 But peer mentoring of less
experienced media makers can also have a profoundly democratic
influence on how youth see themselves and their social futures.
This was evident in a yearlong critical ethnographic study I
carried out during 2006–2007, which examined youths’ experiences
in a Canadian summer digital media program. The study focused
on Summer Stories, a program that, like many such projects
(Charmaraman 2006), is intended to expand young people’s oppor-
tunities to become more fully involved in contemporary digital
media ecologies. Developing creative voices while simultaneously
fostering young people’s sense of competency, belonging, and
power are crucial parts of this process. So too is promoting media
 374 S. R. Poyntz

literacy, which is done in Summer Stories by nurturing youths’

critical viewing and production habits. Alongside these broader
objectives, the role of youth mentors in the program is to support,
challenge and guide novice participants over the course of a
two-week production cycle. Mentors are typically former students
of the program, ranging from sixteen to twenty years of age.
Symptomatic of the global influences shaping all major Canadian
cities today, the mentors also represent a cross-section of educa-
tional levels, socioeconomic backgrounds, and cultural and ethnic
diversity.
In studying Summer Stories, I examined how the program nur-
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tures an Arendtian sense of democratic practice by helping young

people to think with an enlarged mentalité, ‘‘to care about matters
of common concern and to act on this concern with others’’ (Isaac
1994, 158). I worked collaboratively3 with more than twenty youth
participants, educators, and community members involved in the
program and employed various methods, including a question-
naire, semistructured interviews, short informal conversations,
and e-mail communication to gather research data. I also took
extensive field notes throughout the study and reviewed my find-
ings with participating youth and program instructors as my ideas
evolved. In addition, I looked at the Summer Stories Web site and
program brochures and evaluated all videos and related materi-
als—including scripts, treatments, editing notes, and so forth—
produced or used (as part of mentor training) during the 2006
program. It should be noted that I was also involved in the early
development of Summer Stories between 2000 and 2002.
In Summer Stories, small groups of two to five youth, aged four-
teen to nineteen, produce a short digital video over two weeks.
Each summer, there are three distinct two-week production
sessions. As noted by one of the program’s directors, the role of
mentors is to be involved in the production cycle throughout each
session. Mentors are

The first line of instructional staff . . . [T]hey have the most involvement
with student producers, ensuring there’s never a point at which a produc-
tion group is without support (interview).

Zac, a senior mentor with Summer Stories added

The mentors . . . act as advisors=producers for their groups, imparting their
knowledge about all aspects of video production (interview).
 Arendtian Politics in a Culture of Youth Media 375

In preparing for their roles, youth mentors participated in train-

ing workshops designed to introduce the social nature of imagery,
including how visual and audio conventions operate as productive
affordances in media production. They also learned how these con-
ventions are open to change. To highlight this, mentors watched
youth-made videos that do something that seems different, even
challenging, to the aesthetic, social, and cultural practices common
in mainstream media. They took part in sessions looking at the
representation of gender and considered how dominant storylines
about youth in popular culture can shape youth expressions.
Finally, mentors took part in workshops that explained how they
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might open themselves up to the diverse experiences and voices

of others throughout the summer.
As with all such educational endeavors, there were gaps and pro-
blems in Summer Stories’ training (see Poyntz 2008, for details).
However, of particular interest for the purposes of this article are
the ways that working in the program shaped youths’ lives and
self-conceptions, how the program built young people’s production
skills while fostering an investment in and responsibility to plurality
and the social construction of meaning. As evidenced in the
following, this outcome was more apparent for some youth than
others. The lessons learned from Summer Stories are still important,
however, if only because they suggest how youth mentoring can
nurture a form of thinking that is responsive to others, to the fact that
we are all part of a shared world. Let me illustrate this by discussing
the experiences of two of the eight mentors involved in the study.4

MACIE—DISCOVERING THE SOCIAL LIFE OF IDEAS AND

EXPERIENCE

The first mentor was an eighteen-year-old Italian-Canadian woman

named Macie who was involved with Summer Stories as a student
and mentor over four years. Reflecting on her own development
during this time, Macie noted that as a young high school student,
prior to her work as a mentor, she had no idea that
what we’re constantly being bombarded with . . . [through commercial]
media could become part of my own work and ideas (interview).

While helping more than forty novice video makers to create new
work at Summer Stories, however, she found her views changing.
 376 S. R. Poyntz

She felt that this was largely because she saw first-hand how stu-
dents’ ideas
often reflect . . . what they’ve seen in the media . . . While trying to come
from a really honest, natural place, [students’] first stories often just end
up [being] reflections about what they’ve seen in the media (interview).

Drawing from this, Macie began to develop a kind of social or plural

conception of her self and others. She remarked Programs like Sum-
mer Stories teach you to stop for a second. [They teach you to] just be
aware of what you’re being influenced by and maybe, hopefully,
you’re able to separate yourself from that and remember,
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‘‘Wait a second. My name’s Macie . . .’’ This media world isn’t real. My
world in East Vancouver as a student is real and what am I actually feeling,
not what do I think I’m feeling because I’m told that this is how I should
feel and what I should buy (interview).

In Arendtian terms, mentoring appears to have contributed to

Macie thinking of herself relationally, as a self whose real and
imaginary scripts are formed in relation to the larger media culture
in which we live.
At the same time, supporting student video-makers to creatively
reconstruct and respond to media messages taught Macie that our
inherited scripts are not final. Rather, like our selves, they are
contingent and susceptible to change. Macie said she came to this
conclusion as she learned the language and conventions of media
production, including the fact that media representations have a
history. She said
By being more aware of how images work, it’s made it easier to see how me
and other youth can respond to the influx of media messages and imagery
today . . . I think it’s very important that youth know [they can] express
their side, their reaction to the environment they live in (interview).

Through mentoring, Macie seems to have learned to operate in

what Arendtian scholar Rolando Vàzquez calls the ‘‘realm for
thinking,’’ a place that is ‘‘dynamic and open to question[ing]’’
the nature of the world and our role in it (Vàzquez 2006, 44).
Although fostering change remains difficult, mentoring helped
Macie to develop what Arendt would call an enlarged mentalité, an
awareness of how our lives are enabled and enriched when spaces
of communicative plurality are created. As a concrete example of
what this might look like, Macie and other peer educators from
 Arendtian Politics in a Culture of Youth Media 377

Summer Stories developed a pirate youth television station that for

a time became a space for youth to produce, distribute, and circu-
late their work to local teen audiences. East Vancouver TV (EVTV)
eventually hosted seven broadcasts. More important than this num-
ber, it represented an instance where a new youthscape took form,
one meant to facilitate a new realm of expression and togetherness
for young people.
Of course, tensions were still evident in the way Macie’s experi-
ence in Summer Stories fostered democratic sensibilities. EVTV is
important, but Macie’s thinking about her work with less experi-
enced youth producers was also filtered through a sense of cultural
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exclusiveness, a sense that she and other mentors were part of a van-
guard, a group that had managed to escape a kind of false conscious-
ness seen to afflict other young people’s relationships with media
culture. This was evidenced when Macie talked about students’
early video work. Some of Macie’s comments about other youths’
work reflected a sense of how our media culture operates as a form
of public pedagogy. Other remarks, however, indicated disdain
toward the perceived naiveté of other youth. This became evident
when Macie commented that so many new video-makers produce

copy-cat spew [based on what] . . . we’re taught . . . we’re supposed to be

and feel by the media . . . I feel like a lot of students . . . end up spewing that
out without being fully aware of what they’re doing (interview).

When they do this, Macie says, she was frustrated largely because
she’s not altogether interested in

people talking about things they have no authority or knowledge to talk

about. That bothers me (interview).

In addition to these remarks, a sense of cultural exceptionalism

vis-à-vis other youth was also evident in Macie’s understanding
of the future of Summer Stories. Julia, a project director, noted this
in recounting a conversation she had with Macie about the pro-
gram. According to Julia, Macie said she was worried about the
program because
some of the older mentors, including herself, were thinking of leaving the
following year (interview).

Other, younger mentors were developing through the ranks, but as

the conversation continued, Julia said it became evident that from
 378 S. R. Poyntz

Macie’s perspective, Summer Stories’ future was cast in doubt

because some senior mentors were leaving the program. Optimisti-
cally, of course, I think these concerns are a sign of Macie’s attach-
ment to Summer Stories. On the other hand, however, they indicate
her difficulty in imagining how other young people could engage in
the same kind of critical practices she has learned over her four
years in the program. This disconnect suggested a tension in the
way Macie’s mentoring experience impacted her openness to
others. While apparently more capable and even willing to engage
the plurality of others, Macie also appeared suspicious and even
disdainful of other youths’ abilities to operate in the ‘‘realm of
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thinking’’ that she identified with herself.

In this sense, mentoring shaped Macie’s democratic habituation
in complicated ways. From an Arendtian perspective, she became a
kind of public actor, aware of the contingent and contestable nature
of meaning across a variety of contexts and practices. She began to
conceive of herself and others relationally and to engage in ques-
tioning the nature of the world and her place in it. Macie seemed
to imagine that she and her colleagues were exceptional and
uniquely positioned to understand the plural and belated condi-
tions that shape hers and others’ experiences, but her observations
also revealed an awareness of how our lives are enabled and
enriched through our dependence on others. Macie’s sense of
exceptionalism contains the potential to undermine her commit-
ment to foster difference and entertain the plurality of others. At
the same time, her work with the EVTV project was symptomatic
of her willingness to initiate new programs and new possibilities
intended to empower youth. This is indicative of the way demo-
cratic habits were fostered through Macie’s experience as a youth
media production mentor. To be sure, this outcome was not the
same for all mentors. In fact, if Macie’s story exemplified certain
democratic possibilities that can arise through mentoring, another
mentor’s experience highlighted some of the challenges that can
undermine how young people become oriented to democratic life
through media production work.

DOMINIC—STRUGGLING TO KEEP UP

Dominic was a seventeen-year-old African-Canadian youth who

was involved with Summer Stories as a peer mentor for the first
 Arendtian Politics in a Culture of Youth Media 379

time during this study. He came to the program with some back-
ground in video-making, but with no prior experience in the pro-
gram. The challenge this posed was acute. Not only did Dominic
face skill deficits he also faced difficulties becoming a part of the
community of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991) among Summer
Stories’ mentors.
Dominic arrived at Summer Stories with only a modest back-
ground as a video-maker. He noted as much when he talked about
his experience with his first student group. In particular he had a
very difficult time challenging his group in ways that would help
them produce better work. As a result, he said
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I was really stumbling all over the place . . . [Especially with the first film,] I
was trying to figure out my whole mentor role . . . I didn’t really know what
a mentor does, what a mentor doesn’t do, so . . . [the first] film didn’t come
out so great . . . I was like, ‘‘yeah we should do this’’ and [the students]
were all like ‘‘no, we should do this,’’ and so I was conflicting with them
when I should have been flowing with their ideas. [In the end,] we just
ended up kind of going back and forth and I think that sort of [hurt] the
film (interview).

During a critical review, following the first two-week session, a pro-

gram director met with Dominic and gave him specific objectives to
work on for the next session. These included developing a produc-
tion plan for his group, helping his students develop a shot list, and
using his critical viewing skills to help challenge students’ decisions
throughout the production cycle (field notes). If useful, taking up
these directives was difficult because, while learning to mentor,
Dominic was also trying to improve his technical production skills
and his own abilities as a storyteller.
In response, in the second two-week session, he says
I just tried to watch everybody else, I just sort of tried [to do] what the other
mentors were doing (interview).

Macie used a similar strategy in her first two summers as a mentor.

In Dominic’s case, this helped, but with the second production he
said he really struggled around knowing how much to intervene
with the students’ script and how much of the story to leave open
for them to develop and clarify while shooting the video. He also
had difficulty keeping the group on task. All of this had a noticeable
impact on the final project. In fact, Dominic felt the video wasn’t as
successful as the first project he mentored. In the second video,
 380 S. R. Poyntz

there ended up being plot holes in the story and ultimately the stu-
dents had to return for two extra days of shooting and editing to
complete the project (field notes).
Skill deficits were a problem, then, but more importantly
Dominic faced a challenge that was central to how the program
nurtured his democratic habituation. Arendt reminds us that being
recognized for one’s own uniqueness by one’s community is central
to public life. Recognition by others is in fact a basic condition for
democratic experience, that which saves us from an oblivion
marked by thoughtlessness and a sense of ‘‘impotence’’ (Arendt
1958, 201). Recognition by others enables a space of appearance to
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develop, a space which comes into being ‘‘wherever men [sic] are
together in the manner of speech and action’’ (Arendt 1958, 199).
The problem for Dominic was that precisely this element of public
life eluded him in his experience with Summer Stories.
Not unlike other youth media programs, the community of prac-
tice or local culture among Summer Stories’ mentors was somewhat
hermetic. Senior mentors and program directors admitted as much,
noting that it can be difficult to absorb new people into the program.
The short production time frame during each production session
exacerbated this problem, as did the short training schedule. But
Kira, a senior mentor, noted another issue related to Dominic’s case
I don’t know exactly how to explain it. There were the core original men-
tors who are ‘‘eastside,’’ not hippies, but [with] hippy-type parents in some
cases. The kids aren’t hipsters but hipster-types. And Dominic is kind of
hip-hop, a more mainstream guy. [Because of this,] he was just one step
behind everybody else . . . [H]e had to learn more . . . I guess more training
would have helped . . . (interview).

Because Dominic did not arrive in the mentoring program with the
same kind of youthful cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984) as some of
the older mentors, in other words, he faced challenges fitting in
with his peers. In the end, this made his job much more difficult.
In a very real way, in fact, the hermetic culture within Summer
Stories left Dominic on the outside, unrecognized as a colleague
by more senior mentors. Dominic did not possess any of the
obvious cultural competencies that would stand him apart from
the mainstream of youth culture. In fact, Dominic was only inter-
ested in hip hop music because it ‘‘sounds cool’’ and the videos
‘‘look awesome’’ (field notes). He also demonstrated little concern
for other media that might be considered alternative to mainstream
 Arendtian Politics in a Culture of Youth Media 381

fare. In this sense, within a sociology of taste cultures (see Bourdieu

1984), Dominic did not carry nor express the kinds of cultural capi-
tal that would imply ‘‘‘‘subcultural’ experiences and identifica-
tions’’ (Buckingham, Niesyto, and Fisherkeller 2003, 468). Instead,
at least as evidenced in this study, his tastes and interests were
more conventional.
This stood him apart from older mentors where a sociology of
taste framed around alternative or subcultural experiences and
knowledge seemed to be privileged. The upshot of this was that
the evolving mentor culture within Summer Stories left Dominic
little room to negotiate his own role in the program. Instead he
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was positioned as an outsider, in Arendt’s (1958) words, made to

feel ‘‘impotent’’ (201).
In the face of this, it is perhaps surprising that Dominic gained par-
ticular perspectives as a peer educator that contributed to his sense of
being a democratic actor. Beyond developing better ‘‘people skills,’’
mentoring affected Dominic’s conception of the contingency and con-
testability of meaning, fostering what Arendt might understand as a
sense of the social and ethical conditions underlying our selves and
our experiences. This was evident in his remarks about the signifi-
cance of creative production work in the lives of young people.
Although Dominic took three video classes prior to his work as a
mentor, he noted he had never really considered the relationship
between youth media work and more commercial, mainstream
media experiences before Summer Stories. He said
I didn’t think there was much of a relationship there (interview).

Watching kids try to shape their own stories and thinking about
how and why they chose certain characters and storylines, how-
ever, revealed a new dynamic for Dominic. He said he began to
evolve a distinction between creative youth work and the larger
media environment in which we live. He said he began to see youth
video making as
like your freedom to speak, your freedom to be who you want to be and to
talk about whatever the hell you want to talk about (interview).

He went on
It’s kind of weird that only a certain amount of people know how to do it
[i.e., make videos] . . . Because if everyone who knows how to use a camera
thinks a certain way, we’re all screwed right, because we’re just going to
 382 S. R. Poyntz

see the same damn thing over and over again. And then there’s this media
that’s going to get stuck in our heads, then we’re all screwed . . . So I guess it
does sort of make sense then that it is democratic to teach people how to
operate a camera (interview).

These remarks are hardly conclusive, but they do suggest a bur-

geoning distinction for Dominic, one which differentiates between
and signals the inequality symptomatic of specific media practices.
It is a distinction that seems to acknowledge that commercial media
can shape how young people understand themselves and their
worlds by constituting ideas and conceptions that ‘‘get stuck in
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our heads.’’ In response to this, creative youth media work is posed

as a resource that fosters plurality, one which allows youth to contest
‘‘your freedom to be who you want to be’’ (interview). In this way, it
appeared as though Dominic’s experience in Summer Stories led to
the development of an enlarged mentalité, a sense that he and other
youth are public actors whose lives are intertwined in a set of con-
testable relationships with the media environments in which we live.
If this is so, it remains true that the challenges and difficulties
Dominic encountered in his first summer as a mentor undermined
the degree to which this experience fostered democratic habits of
mind. So much of his time was spent learning his role and attempting
to find a place for himself in the program that the potential impact of
this experience was lessened. This is unfortunate and also indicative
of a shortfall in Summer Stories that mitigated the extent to which the
program nurtured young people’s democratic experience.
The examples of Macie and Dominic are instructive in an age of
participatory culture where, among other developments, there is a
sense of hope about the role young people can and will have in
shaping the cultural practices that organize their lives. Not only
do their stories indicate how peer mentoring can foster the demo-
cratic habits of mind that deepen and enrich public life but their
experiences also highlight the difficulties and challenges to be faced
in nurturing such possibilities.
Arendt (1968) understood that public life is a ‘‘lost treasure,’’ a
potential that ‘‘appears abruptly, unexpectedly, and disappears
again, . . . as though it were a fata morgana’’ (4). ‘‘What first under-
mines and then kills [public action] is loss of power and finally
impotence; and power cannot be stored up and kept in reserve
for emergencies, like the instruments of violence, but exists only
in its actualization’’ (Arendt 1958, 200). In complicated ways, youth
 Arendtian Politics in a Culture of Youth Media 383

mentoring in Summer Stories enabled such actualization, fostering

democratic habits, if not always equitable experiences.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Over the past two decades, young people’s media ecologies have
changed. Global consumer cultures continue to have a formative
role in youth mediascapes even as the kind of involvement youth
have in such mediascapes has changed. New media production
opportunities are developing both inside and outside formal and
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informal learning environments. To take advantage of the agentic

potential these opportunities provide, however, requires more than
loose rhetorics about digital generations who are native to and thus
knowingly aware of the possibilities afforded by new media. What
is required is a clear understanding of when youth participation
works to expand and enrich public life and when, on the other
hand, it does not.
I believe Hannah Arendt’s public realm theory is helpful here. The
model she provides for thinking about youths’ democratic habitua-
tion is less about aligning this habituation to specific political posi-
tions and more about imagining how creative youth work feeds a
form of thinking and doing that is attentive to the ways all meaning
has a social and historical context, a form of contingency that itself is
susceptible to change. Of course, youth do not develop this way of
thinking easily or naturally. It is the result of provocations and chal-
lenges that are meant to suggest how our creative interventions and
our selves take shape under specific mediated relations with the
world. Macie and Dominic learned this through the media literacy
training they received as mentors as well as through their work with
novice video makers in Summer Stories. This in turn changed how
they imagine themselves and the way they conceive of their work
with others. What matters today, then, is knowing where and
how this kind of thoughtfulness in action develops through youth
media participation and how it might be helped to flourish.

NOTES
1. This, like the names of the mentors referred to later, is a pseudonym.
2. So, for instance, it appears that mentors develop emotional self-awareness, asser-
tiveness, and self-reliance as well as new technical skills (Miller 2002). They also
tend to develop ‘‘empathy for the feelings of others, [an] ability to establish
 384 S. R. Poyntz

mutually beneficial personal relationship(s) . . . [and an] abilit[y] to maintain hope

in adverse situations’’ (Miller 2002, 38–39). They typically discover latent abilities,
gain self-confidence, and also a sense of self-actualization (Roberts 2000).
3. By this I mean I invited study participants to act as codesigners of semistructured
interviews. I also took an active part in the Summer Stories program, helping
youth to produce their videos, while also offering feedback (when asked) on story
ideas, and so forth.
4. I have chosen these youth because they offer instructive examples of how mentor-
ing impacted the larger group of young people involved in the project.

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